Big changes this week for the Iowa Digital Library. A major redesign (completed with the help of Scott Fiddelke, Linda Roth and DLS student assistant Julia Bleeker) has been applied to CONTENTdm templates. This means no more navy blue headers for local collections, and a more uniform look and feel when using The University of Iowa Libraries digital collections.

On the system side, CONTENTdm has moved to a new server, so the URLs of IDL’s CONTENTdm collections now have the domain name digital.lib instead of the previous cdm.lib, which ties the site together in a better way. Additionally, we’ve taken this opportunity to upgrade to the most recent version of CONTENTdm: 4.2. Among the list of enhancements are a couple that stand out in their impact on using the system.

First, hyperlinked metadata is not constrained to searching just within a collection.One of the great properties of digital collections is that similar materials from multiple collections can be pulled together to facilitate new learning, and this enhancement allows for results to come from all CONTENTdm collections when navigating using hyperlinked metadata.

Secondly, we have more control over how compound objects (postcards, scrapbooks, documents, just to name a few) display in results sets. Previously items within compound objects showed following a search creating large, unwieldy results (think of every page of a book showing as a separate result rather than just the book itself). By suppressing pages of compound objects, result sets show just the compound objects themselves, all of which makes using the system more manageable and understandable to the user.Although we’ve gone live with these enhancements and redesigns, we still anticipate to fix things in the coming weeks and months.

–Mark F. Anderson
Digital Initiatives Librarian