Here's an excerpt:

This document is intended as a guide to data entry and descriptive cataloging for University of Louisville (UofL) digital projects using CONTENTdm software. It will be updated as modifications in the software and/or metadata schema necessitate. CONTENTdm’s metadata is based on the Dublin Core Metadata Schema. A UofL Metadata Working Group drafted initial guidelines based on The Collaborative Digitization Program (CDP)’s Dublin Core Metadata Best Practices, which was further refined by the CONTENTdm Metadata Working Group’s Best Practices for CONTENTdm and other OAI-PMH compliant repositories creating shareable metadata (http://www.oclc.org/gateway/support/best_practices.pdf).

As we began to work with CONTENTdm, we felt it necessary to adjust CDP’s recommendations to accommodate the capabilities, limitations, and additional field properties presented by the software. We also modified some of the field labels to make more sense to the end-user, and put the fields in an order that highlighted the descriptive metadata at the top of the record and relegated the more administrative and technical information at the bottom.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography |

Here's an excerpt from the download page

Omeka version 1.2 includes following features and plug-ins:

• Four themes that are easy to adapt with simple CSS changes and theme configuration
• Exhibit Builder plugin with 12 page layouts and 5 exhibit themes
• Tagging for items and exhibits
• RSS feeds for items
• COinS plug-in making items readable by Zotero
• SimplePages plugin for easily making static pages

Here's a brief description of Omeka from Omeka: Serious Web Publishing.

Omeka is a free, flexible, and open source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions. Its "five-minute setup" makes launching an online exhibition as easy as launching a blog. Omeka is designed with non-IT specialists in mind, allowing users to focus on content and interpretation rather than programming. It brings Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to academic and cultural websites to foster user interaction and participation. It makes top-shelf design easy with a simple and flexible templating system. Its robust open-source developer and user communities underwrite Omeka’s stability and sustainability.

Read more about it at "Configurable Themes in 1.2."

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

With the new release, the CONTENTdm Project Client now supports auto updates, enabling users to get updates as quickly as they are available. It automatically checks for software updates in the background, so work is not interrupted. If updates are available, they are downloaded but not installed until the organization is ready.

To better support text-based collections, PDF print quality can now be specified in the Project Client, enabling users to select a quality level when generating optional print versions of their compound objects. For users with large, full-text collections, several enhancements improve performance and reduce indexing times. Other enhancements include the addition of a new thesaurus, Canadian Subject Headings (CSH), and configuration options to filter hits in Usage Reports.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

In 1.1., users will have more control over their installation through the admin interface, such as:

• Toggling more easily between the public site and the item and collection pages by clicking on a new "View on Public Site" link;
• Browsing through more than 10 collections;
• Managing and upgrading plugins;
• Displaying only item fields containing metadata on the public site with a new setting in the theme panel (without needing to edit on the server).

Read more about it at "Release Notes for 1.1."

Here's an excerpt from the project page:

dmMonocle is a stand-alone image viewer for CONTENTdm® collections, intended as a replacement for the default image viewer provided with CONTENTdm® 4.x and 5.x. The goal of the project is to make CONTENTdm® images, such as photos, maps, and scanned documents, easier to view and navigate. dmMonocle is written in JavaScript using jQuery, and provides patrons with the ability to zoom, pan, and rotate images on the fly without reloading the entire page. dmMonocle slices up large images into smaller square tiles, loading only the tiles in the visible area, much like Google Maps. In addition to the improved main viewing area, dmMonocle provides a thumbnail-sized navigator, showing patrons which part of the larger image they are viewing. The navigator may also be used to quickly move around an image

Here's an excerpt :

Everyone's collection and context is unique, so your choice of a system (or systems) for managing your media will require a careful assessment of your needs and resources and an evaluation of the available options. This paper provides an overview of a number of different approaches to digital media management: from some very cheap and 'low-tech' approaches to much more complex and specialised solutions. Another paper in this series discusses some of the commonly available functionality in more detail and raises some key questions to consider when choosing a system . . .

We have given more than thirty examples of systems below, with links to further descriptions on JISC Digital Media's website or to external sites. These examples are not meant to be exhaustive or to imply any sort of endorsement or criticism: they are offered for information purposes only. This is a competitive and fast-changing environment, in which new versions are pushed out, new systems emerge, and last year's cutting-edge features become standard issue.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway is available to all users of OCLC CONTENTdm Digital Collection Management software at no additional charge.

The WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway offers libraries a self-service tool to easily upload metadata from their unique digital content to WorldCat, the world's largest online resource for finding items held in libraries. Once the metadata is in WorldCat, libraries' digital collections are more visible and discoverable by Web searchers through WorldCat.org, WorldCat Local (including the ‘quick start’ version), Google, Yahoo! and other popular search engines.

"Libraries, museums and archives should do whatever they can to get their materials available online and expose their collections to users—wherever they are—on the Web,” said Roy Tennant, Senior Program Officer, OCLC Research. "The WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway is an easy and effective way to do this."

The Gateway has been piloted in 12 institutions. Since May, the pilot participants used the Gateway self-service tools to upload thousands of records from their CONTENTdm collections into WorldCat. Because they have used the Gateway to set up profiles for their collections, the pilot users' metadata will be regularly uploaded to WorldCat as they add to their digital collections over time.

Here's an excerpt from the project home page:

We are aiming to solve several key weaknesses of the stock front-end:

• Greenstone's cryptic URLs of unusual size are a fail for user comprehensibility, search engine crawlers, bookmarking, etc. . .
• Though extensive customization of the display is possible, there are some stopping points where modification of the C++ source is required.
• The customization that is supported is via a system of micro-templates referred to as macros. This system is so heavily nested and cross-referenced that it is very difficult to conceptualize how any given page is generated.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This production-grade release marks the completion of Omeka’s basic requirement set. Maintaining our commitment to serious web publishing for scholarship and cultural heritage, Omeka 1.0 incorporates unqualified Dublin Core metadata for organizing and displaying collections; support for extensible element sets; robust, flexible theme and plugin APIs; and plugins for Zotero compatibility, static page creation, and building sophisticated online exhibitions.

Here's an excerpt from the project home page:

After more than twelve developer years of design and engineering and over two million USD of investment, the Specify Software Team is delighted to release today, April 10, 2009, Specify 6 for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux desktops.

Specify is a client-server database platform for museums and herbaria which processes specimen information for computerizing holdings, managing collection management transactions, and for mobilizing species occurrence data to the web. Specify is free and open source software licensed under the GNU GPL2. Downloadable installation packages for all three desktop flavors as well as Specify's Java source code are linked to this site. . . .

Non-profit U.S. research collections are eligible for our helpdesk and data conversion services thanks to our financial support from the U.S. National Science Foundation, Division of Biological Infrastructure. We look forward to working with you to increase the research impact of your institution's investment in biodiversity collection curation and specimen data management.

Here's an excerpt:

This self-instructional Manual describes:

1. the method of creation of digital archive with WINISIS software,
2. the creation of a web front-end for the above archives to make it easily usable and accessible over a local area network with GenIsisWeb software,
3. the creation of a CD-ROM library with WINISIS and GenIsisCD software,
4. the creation of a digital library of audio documents with Greenstone digital library software. . . .

The mechanisms described in this Manual can be used for managing not only audio documents, but also other types of digital documents such as text, PDF, HTML and video.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

OCLC has released CONTENTdm 5, a new version of the popular CONTENTdm Digital Collection Management software that fully supports Unicode, the industry standard used to recognize text in most of the world's non-Western languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Greek and Hebrew, among others. . . .

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. These improvements ensure a library achieves its ultimate goal for its digital collection—to help end users find, get and use the digital items they need.

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 maximizing 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.

CONTENTdm 5 offers improvements for handling EAD (Encoded Archival Description) files, including how finding aids are imported, displayed and searched.

Here's an excerpt from the home page that describes Greenstone:

Greenstone is a suite of software for building and distributing digital library collections. It provides a new way of organizing information and publishing it on the Internet or on CD-ROM. Greenstone is produced by the New Zealand Digital Library Project at the University of Waikato, and developed and distributed in cooperation with UNESCO and the Human Info NGO. It is open-source, multilingual software, issued under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

See the Greenstone Fact Sheet for a more detailed description of the system.

Here's an excerpt from the Overview page:

OpenCollection is a full-featured collections management and online access application for museums, archives and digital collections. It is designed to handle large, heterogeneous collections that have complex cataloguing requirements and require support for a variety of metadata standards and media formats. Unlike most other collections management applications, OpenCollection is completely web-based. All cataloging, search and administrative functions are accessed using common web-browser software, untying users from specific operating systems and making cataloguing by distributed teams and online access to collections information simple, efficient and inexpensive.

See the Features page for more details about this open source software.