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ContentDM

Fri, 2006-08-18 23:22 — v1nce

Has anybody had any experience with a product called ContentDM offered by DiMema which just got bought out by OCLC earlier this week?

It seems Drupal could provide some serious competition especially at the price ContentDM is being sold for! I actually think Drupal can provide much more flexibility and customization in the hands of a creative php/mysql developer than ConentDM is able to.

I would really enjoy hearing from someone who is knowledgeable about the end user experience of ContentDM and it's Acquisition Stations. It seems the only additions ContentDM has is the JPEG2000 and OCR license addons, but I know there are open source OCR projects and would imagine similar for a JPEG2000 equivalent.

Any thoughts???

Comments

Sun, 2006-08-20 13:21 — mark

CONTENTdm is just a collection-oriented CMS

Drupal does have the potential to offer a lot of what CONTENTdm and other collection-oriented CMSs do. My posting on the page turner is an example of how Drupal could do that using the CCK module and a small amount of PHP code. Here are some things that would need to be developed for Drupal in order to compete with dedicated digital library CMSs:

  • Creation/editing of structured metadata (my example shows how this is currently possible)
  • "Advanced" searching of this metadata
  • What I call document handlers -- ways of displying/navigating various types of described documents, such as simple media files like PDFs, sound, audio; simple page turners; and XML document handlers that can take advantage of the structure of these documents
  • Bulk importing of documents/objects (there are already several CCK import/export tools)

The Acquisition station is a Windows client for creating and managing metadata and objects. Greenstone also has the same thing in its Librarians Interface, so this functionality is not specific to CONTENTdm. It would certainly be possible to create a similar tool for Drupal.

Drupal already has some features that blow a lot of commercial products out of the water, like its access controls, taxonomy support, and commenting system. And, the number of Drupal modules that you could add to a digital collection is mind blowing compared to the options that other products provide.

As far as I'm concerned, the only functionality that is missing from Drupal that would prevent you from using it as a digital collection managment CMS right now is the advanced searching of fielde metadata created with CCK. If your users can live without that (as Roy Tennant says, "librarian like to search, users like to find"), you can use Drupal today to make your collection available.

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