Managing Digital Collections: A Presentation to Students

Last night I had the pleasure of speaking to students at the School of Library, Archival and Information studies (aka iSchool) at the University of British Columbia. These students are taking LIBR 582: Digital Images and Text Collections and learning all the fundamentals of how to digitize materals, manage them, and provide online access. In particular, they are using Inmagic DB/TextWorks to build a database of digitized materials, and manage the metadata associated with them, as well as CONTENTdm from OCLC for web presentation.

In last night's class, I presented Andornot's common solutions for managing digital images and text. For those who missed the presentation, here's a recap.

Inmagic DB/TextWorks and an Andornot Starter Kit

We always recommend Inmagic DB/TextWorks as an easy to use database system for managing metadata about digitized objects, whether they are textual, photographic or audio-visual, and no matter whether born digitial or scanned from an analogue source. Paired with one of our starter kits, any library, archive, museum or other organization can be up and running in just a few hours. Information can be entered in simple data entry screens, by staff or volunteers, or imported from other sources.

Inmagic WebPublisher PRO

Inmagic's original web publishing platform, combined with an Andornot kit, can provide simple search access to a DB/TextWorks database. A modern web design can be applied so that the site can be used on tablets and phones. Features such as spelling corrections and facets are not available however.

• More info: http://www.andornot.com/products/inmagic-products/webpublisher-pro.aspx
• Example site: http://inmagic.elgin-county.on.ca/ask/

Andornot Discovery Interface (AnDI)

The Andornot Discovery Interface (AnDI) uses the popular Apache Solr search engine to provide relevancy-ranked results, spelling corrections, and facets for search refinement. Websites built with AnDI include features for displaying images in various sizes, in list or gallery format, for embedding playback of audio and video files, and for viewing and browsing individual pages of digitized documents, with highlighting of search terms on the pages.

• More info: http://www.andornot.com/products/search-and-discovery-tools/andornot-discovery-interface.aspx
• Examples sites with extensive digital content:
  https://archives1.crnbc.ca
  http://archives.ufa.com
  http://search.ontariojewisharchives.org

VuFind

The open-source VuFind discovery interface is very popular with academic and public libraries, and a growing number of special ones.

• More info: http://www.andornot.com/products/search-and-discovery-tools/vufind.aspx
• Example sites with extensive digital content:
  http://discover.odai.yale.edu/ydc/
  http://catalogue.nli.ie

Inmagic Presto

Inmagic's current generation web publishing platform offers users the ability to configure their own screens and displays with no programming required, and now includes facets for search refinement.

• More info: http://www.andornot.com/products/inmagic-products/presto.aspx
• Example site: https://dec.usaid.gov/dec/home/Default.aspx

Omeka

The open-source Omeka content management system can be used for metadata management as well as searching. It doesn't offer spelling corrections or facets for search refinement, but does provide a very easy to use web interface and an Exhibit Builder plug-in to develop exhibits of aspects of a collection.

• More info: http://www.andornot.com/products/omeka-content-management-system.aspx
• Example site: http://bridgesnyc.com/postcards/
• Showcase of other sites: http://omeka.org/showcase/
• Video overview: http://omeka.org/files/movies/touromeka.mov
• Video of building an exhibit: https://vimeo.com/18534307