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Hi Harish, We use CONTENTdm to manage many of our Digital Library collections. You can see them at http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/ The collections we have using CONTENTdm are mostly digitized books/monographs, but we also have illuminated manuscripts, hand written letters, and other ephemeral. We are nearly complete in archiving the entire student newspaper collection, which we hope to release late fall. We used Greenstone, which is open source, for our first digital project called Digital Bridges. But we just re-released the project by converting it to CONTENTdm. Greenstone required much too much customization and no sustainability, as we wanted to add more to this collection. The University of Utah and the Claremont Colleges both recently developed their institution digital repositories with CONTENTdm. I plan to follow their lead with our IR on CONTENTdm this upcoming academic year. I believe it was the presenter at Utah that said <paraphrase>Why create a technological hurdle trying to learn and shape Fedora or DSpace to our needs when we already know CONTENTdm and have an open API that we are comfortable with using.</paraphrase> Though CONTENTdm is proprietary, the cost is well worth it. The API is very open, the community is among the best user communities out there, and the vendor (DiMeMa via OCLC) is very receptive and responsive to user concerns and enhancement suggestions. It has a very intuitive metadata interface, and is easy to administer on the server side. I never have to worry about it. I would HIGHLY recommend CONTENTdm. Well worth the price! Cheers, Tim Tim McGeary Senior Systems Specialist Lehigh University 610-758-4998 [log in to unmask] Google Talk: timmcgeary Yahoo IM: timmcgeary Harish Maringanti wrote: > Hi all, > > I've heard of Contentdm from OCLC that many institutions are using to manage > their digital collections. If you are using Contentdm would you mind sharing > some of the pros & cons of using it (either to the group or off the list). > > Are there any other viable products either commercial or open source that > can be considered to manage digital collections. Particularly in the open > source domain are there any good applications to manage image collections? > > Thanks in advance, > Harish > > > Harish Maringanti > Systems Analyst > K-State Libraries > (785)532-3261 >