University Libraries’ Personnel Contribute to the Midwest CONTENTdm Users Group Meeting

Personnel from the University Libraries contributed to the success of the Third Annual Midwest CONTENTdm Users Group Meeting held April 29-30, 2008, in Indianapolis, Indiana. CONTENTdm serves as the platform for the Ball State University Libraries’ Digital Media Repository (DMR). The Users Group meeting drew over 100 attendees from all over the Midwest.

The ] Libraries team responsible for building the Middletown Oral History Collections, funded in part by a LSTA digitization grant, conducted the pre-conference workshop, “From Spoken Word to Digital File: Making Oral Histories Available in CONTENTdm.” The presenters demonstrated how to plan, digitize, create metadata, and publish an oral history collection using CONTENTdm. Ball State presenters included James A. Bradley, Head of Metadata and Digital Initiatives, Amanda A. Hurford, Metadata and Multimedia Developer, Maren L. Read, Archivist for Manuscript Collections, and Jonathan M. Brinley, Metadata and Digital Initiatives Developer.

The workshop earned overwhelmingly positive feedback from the capacity crowd of participants. “[The workshop] gave us good ideas about the next steps for our oral histories” said Jane Kokotkiewicz of Indianapolis’ prestigious Park Tudor School. “The pace was very good. Just what I needed.”

Brad Faust, Assistant Dean for Library Information Technology Services, served as co-chair of the Users Group Meeting Program Planning Committee. His responsibilities included hosting the program proposal Web form, collecting program proposals from speakers, and communicating with speakers and other program committee members about session schedules, acceptance, and registration details. Brad also served as moderator for two of the presentations at the Users Group meeting.

Speakers in several sessions referred to CONTENTdm successes at the University Libraries. The 3-D rotating image process used at Ball State, which can be seen in the Doll Collection in the DMR, is being used as a model at IUPUI.

Technical advice and direction provided by Budi Wibowo, University Libraries’ Head of Digital Libraries and Web Services, was mentioned as very useful by the Keynote Speaker. The Architecture Image End User Copyright Agreement page, presented to DMR users before access to the Architecture Image collection is granted, was also hailed as a great example of digital rights management.

For more information, contact Bradley D. Faust, Assistant Dean for Library Information Technology Services, BFaust@bsu.edu, 765-285-8032