The Libraries was an early CONTENTdm adopter, when the software was licensed from the Center for Information Systems Optimization (CISO), a research unit at the University of Washington that spun off into DiMeMa. CONTENTdm enabled us to break out of the MARC record model for collection building and, as demonstrated by the Early Washington Maps example, enables a digital collection to be built from multiple geographic locations. The same architecture has been used for university projects such as WSU Photos Online (note: this resource is limited to the university domain). The product has matured and improved significantly over the years. DiMeMa released the first product API, based upon the PHP programming language, with the release of CONTENTdm4.
The importance of digital content management packages like CONTENTdm is underscored by changes in information technology, particularly the creation of massive book digitization projects. As Donald Waters said in a October 2005 speech:
A final attribute of CONTENTdm is the OAI-PMH data provider support built into the server product. This enables information on the unique content described by Waters to be harvested by research institutions throughout the world, thus expanding access to the Libraries' digital collections.If large quantities of published materials are available online through some common interface, it will be increasingly hard to distinguish libraries based on their holdings of these materials. Instead, libraries and their institutions will increasingly be distinguished by the special collections of rare and unique materials that they hold and by the scholarly services they provide for these materials, especially in conjunction with similar collections at museums and archives locally and around the world.
