About Us
CONTENTdm team
The CONTENTdm staff includes a group of senior-level programmers and user interface and web designers who have been working in the fields of digital asset management and image and web technologies for over ten years. Led by Greg Zick, Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington, this team began its efforts at the Center for Information Systems Optimization (CISO) at the University. DiMeMa (Digital Media Management) Inc. was formed in early 2001 to support the growing CONTENTdm user community and to focus on accelerated research and product development.
Professor Zick's research group has a long record of accomplishment in developing and implementing innovative technologies. They began working on inter-organization resource sharing in the mid-80s with funding from a large multinational corporation. This led to cutting-edge software offerings that took advantage of the emerging Internet and also resulted in a pioneering site on the World Wide Web. The research focus evolved to the storing and sharing of more complex media types and digital objects. Secure servers were also investigated and implemented as well as the associated eCommerce applications. This led to the development of the sophisticated technology required for the sharing of media collections on the Web, as implemented in CONTENTdm.
Background
While conducting research into optimal digital image database technologies, the CISO Lab began collaborating with the University of Washington Libraries. The special collections of the Libraries were stored in a multitude of forms and formats, and demand was building to provide flexible online access to these resources. The Libraries began to use the CISO Lab software for fast, full-featured access and management of the collections. The Libraries now have more than 75 collections with 90,000 media items either online or in development under CONTENTdm.
After extensive field testing, the products resulting from these research and development activities - predecessors to CONTENTdm were made available to organizations outside the University. Because of its collaborative origins and ongoing enhancements based on feedback from users, CONTENTdm is now a powerful digital collection management solution.
The full name of the software is CONTENTdm® Digital Collection Management Software. CONTENTdm is not an acronym. CONTENT was capitalized to distinguish the software from items in a digital collection. The letters dm stand for digital management, which explains the intent behind DiMeMa’s software solution.
CONTENTdm technology
CONTENTdm offers scalable tools for archiving collections of any size. These tools are designed with minimal support requirements and maximum flexibility.
Design goals for CONTENTdm include:
- Search efficiency: CONTENTdm can search databases of several million objects in less than one second.
- Scalability: CONTENTdm allows users to start small and grow. CONTENTdm has been implemented by a variety organizations - from a public library using volunteer support staff - to large universities supporting geographically distributed collections and multinational commercial organizations.
- State-of-the-art features: CONTENTdm evolves continually to provide the features required by collection managers to better manage and administer collections and also offer varied search options and interfaces to users, while focusing on minimal (if any) disruption to current CONTENTdm collections.
- Web compatibility: CONTENTdm is 100% Web compatible to provide maximum collection access options.
- Interoperability: CONTENTdm is intended to provide the digital media management module within the context of other installed systems. A host of input options are provided to leverage existing collection formats and the search results from CONTENTdm may be imported to other programs to provided an integrated user interface.
DiMeMa Inc.
DiMeMa Inc. (Digital Media Management) was formed in early 2001 to provide support for the rapidly
growing community of CONTENTdm users. In August 2006, DiMeMa was acquired by OCLC Online Computer
Library Center.
Contact information
OCLC
100 W. Harrison, N480
Seattle, WA 98119
phone: (206) 281-1632
fax: (206) 691-3861
dimemainfo@oclc.org
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