LIB 121: Week 14 (November 26, 2013)

I had used Content DM while working on the Sacks Collection at Arizona Historical Foundation in Tempe, but my responsibilities were mainly data entry. As we learned about all of the capabilities of the content management system, I began to understand how many decisions were made before I was even hired to input text. Linda instructed us in how Content DM can be incorporated in digital preservation workflows, and its functionality as a tool for collection searching and display. The trick is to set it up in such a way that meets the needs of the repository as well as the potential users. All of the lectures prior to this one gave us a blueprint for how we could configure Content DM for our final project. 

We talked about the importance of field names, Dublin Core mappings, and various data types. Other field properties included whether the text should wrap or go in a straight line, if the field was required, should it be full text searchable, or if it should adhere to a controlled vocabulary. Content DM comes with nine controlled vocabularies pre-loaded: Art and Architecture, Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Type Vocabulary, Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names, Guidelines on Subject Access to Individual Works of Fiction, Drama, etc., Maori Subject Headings, Medical Subject Headings, Newspaper Genre List, Thesaurus for Graphic Materials, and Union List of Artist Names. Linda went over so many details about the capabilities of Content DM, and showed us many examples such as Claremont College, in our three hour lecture, I stopped taking notes. Toward the end of class, she explained that she did not expect us to remember every detail, just the capability, this way we would be encouraged to do the research to figure out how to make the software work for us.