CONTENTdm Cookbook: Introduction

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 (DC) 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.

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—reflected in the order of this document—that highlighted the descriptive metadata at the top of the record and relegated the more administrative and technical information to the bottom. DC qualifiers are interspersed with the elements they qualify, but are only to be used as applicable.

#. Field Name [the UofL preferred order and label for the field]

A statement about whether the field is mandatory, mandatory if applicable, recommended, or optional.

sample of elements that show on each field page

Repeatable	Information about whether or not you can have more than one value in the field, and if so, how to go about entering multiple values.
Field Name	Our preferred label for the name in CONTENTdm Field Properties. Type this term into the text box.
DC Mapping	Select this term from the pull-down menu in the CONTENTdm Field Properties.
Search	Select either “Yes” or “No” from the pull-down menu in CONTENTdm Field Properties. Searchable fields will appear as hypertext in the CONTENTdm display.
Hide	Select either “Yes” or “No” from the pull-down menu in CONTENTdm Field Properties. Hidden fields will not appear in the CONTENTdm record.
Vocabulary	Select the “Yes” radio button to link to a controlled vocabulary, and then choose either to create a new controlled vocabulary (use one of the nine pre-loaded thesauri; use the contents of the field; or import a file from the server) or use a controlled vocabulary from another field or collection.
Definition	A combination of Dublin Core’s official definition with CDP and UofL modifications as appropriate. Please note that the terms “resource,” “object,” “item,” and “image” have been used interchangeably.
Usage	Tips for entering data into this field.
Examples	Sample data that would be acceptable in this field.
Template	Advice about whether or not this field would be better suited to one-time entry using the Metadata Template in the CONTENTdm Project Client.
Nickname	CONTENTdm field nickname, the consistent application of which will enable cross-collection querying.