North Country Digital History Is Under Way

The Northern New York Library Network has initiated a regional digital project that will provide libraries, museums, and archives the opportunity to post photographs, postcards, maps, sound files and other collections on the web. The project, which began last year with a small working group, is called North Country Digital History.

The software chosen for the project is CONTENTdm, an OCLC product. A pilot demo of the project can be seen at http://history.nnyln.org.

Organizations interested in this initiative are invited to contact John Hammond, NNYLN Executive Director, for more information on the project and how to participate.

There will be a training session concerning the use of CONTENTdm software on Tuesday, Feb. 15 to which current and potential participants are invited. Although there is no fee to attend, registration is required.

Participants can register by calling the Network office or through the Network’s web site at www.nnyln.org, and click on "Workshops and Training."

CONTENTdm training will be held Feb. 15, 2005 at the Northern New York Library Network, Potsdam. Sign-in will be 9:30-10:00 a.m., and class time will be 10:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. There is no fee to attend; lunch is included.

CONTENTdm software allows libraries and other cultural institutions to create and manage digital collections. CONTENTdm captures, indexes, stores, displays and allows queries of on-line collections. Through a series of hands-on exercises, participants will learn how to enter cataloging information to build an index of search terms; to create a two-sided view of a document; to create monographs and six- sided compound objects, to import data from another database and to structure pre- formed search queries.