Global library cooperative Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC), US, has released CONTENTdm 5, a new version of CONTENTdm Digital Collection Management software. In direct response to input provided by more than 1,000 CONTENTdm users, OCLC development staff designed new features and improved existing features as part of CONTENTdm 5. The new release fully supports Unicode, the industry standard used to recognise text in most of the world's non-Western languages, and includes fundamental changes for both end users and libraries.
For end users, CONTENTdm 5 provides a new experience with powerful search improvements, including the integration of Find - the search engine behind OCLC's WorldCat.org. Offering capabilities beyond full Unicode searching, CONTENTdm 5 also features faceted browsing to help refine search results, as well as relevancy ranking similar to what end users experience when searching WorldCat.org and other popular search engines.
For libraries, the new CONTENTdm includes a totally redesigned Project Client, offering more streamlined collection-building workflows that will reduce the time needed to create a digital collection, reducing project costs and maximising results.
Other CONTENTdm 5 enhancements include a new reports module designed to better track and assess collection usage; nine integrated thesauri, which will improve efficiency by providing controlled vocabularies; and increased capacity that supports more collections, items and metadata fields as well as larger volumes for batch processing. In addition, CONTENTdm 5 offers improvements for handling Encoded Archival Description (EAD) files, including how finding aids are imported, displayed and searched.
The opportunity to curate digital collections is seen to be of great value to libraries and is a rapidly growing field. With millions of digital assets managed via CONTENTdm and hundreds of thousands of digital assets available through WorldCat, OCLC will continue to enhance CONTENTdm and its related products and services to support the library community in these important efforts.
