I had never previously used CONTENTdm but became intimately familiar with it over the course of the next several months.
Our pilot digital collection was the KMOX sheet music digitization project.
Lovejoy Library’s Music Special Collections includes a gift from KMOX of over 48,000 music titles compiled by the St. Louis-area radio station: the live studio orchestra’s complete performing music library.
My second digital collection experience, the digitized presentation of a Civil War diary, was achieved in collaboration with the Social Sciences Librarian and a temporary staff worker under her supervision who had transcribed the entire diary.
Organizational change has provided a source of external pressure concurrent with and affecting the progress of our digital initiatives and priorities. Lovejoy Library’s dean left near the end of 2007 after a long tenure as both Dean of Library and Information Services and Associate Vice Chancellor for Information Technology.
I reached the end of my digital collection backlog with the completion of Lovejoy’s fourth CONTENTdm-based collection in September 2009. I subsequently met with some of my colleagues to brainstorm ideas for additional digital collections. The result was a fantastic array of proposals employing audio and video files, featuring collaboration with other local institutions, and creating scholarly research products on a digital platform.