by Sara Ring
Quick Summary
Jolie Graybill, Sara Ring, and Greta Bahnemann traveled to Indianapolis, Indiana to attend the 2019 CONTENTdm User Group Meeting, where they had the opportunity to attend numerous sessions and updates regarding CONTENTdm. Craig MacDonald (School of Information at Pratt Institute) kicked things off with a keynote address on User Experience (UX), in which he introduced the concept of capacity-building and the steps needed to intitiate and susatain effective UX practices.
Jolie Graybill, Sara Ring, and Greta Bahnemann traveled to Indianapolis, Indiana to attend the 2019 CONTENTdm User Group Meeting, where they had the opportunity to attend numerous sessions and updates regarding CONTENTdm. Craig MacDonald (School of Information at Pratt Institute) kicked things off with a keynote address on User Experience (UX), in which he introduced the concept of capacity-building and the steps needed to intitiate and susatain effective UX practices. Following the keynote Taylor Surface (OCLC) presented an update on CONTENTdm developments to the new responsive website over the past year, but also talked about what's ahead. Some themes for the coming year and beyond include: more recipes for exhibits and galleries (custom code to add to CONTENTdm websites), looking at workflows for linked data (the pilot project referenced below), and workflows for best practice collection building.
We attended an update regarding the CONTENTdm Linked Data Project, an intiative to test the application of Wikibase to create and enhance metadata for CONTENTdm objects. The Minnesota Digital Library is one of the pilot project's participants, and watch for future updates on this important project and its progression.
The theme of the user group meeting was the user experience, so there were quite a few sessions on customizing the end user side of CONTENTdm and leveraging IIIF from CONTENTdm. IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) is a web standard for sharing digital collections. The Huntington Digital Library, for example, discussed how they used Mirador, which is a multi-window image veiwing platform that allows one to compare content, and this is possible because CONTENTdm is IIIF compliant. At another session, staff from Indianapolis Public Library and FromThePage (crowdsourcing transcription platform) demonstrated how FromThePage can interact directly with CONTENTdm because it is IIIF compliant. Once transcriptions are done, they can be seamlessly pushed back to CONTENTdm and replace the transcription field.
All in all, a great user group meeting in Indianapolis!
