The First Upper Midwest CONTENT dm User Group Meeting

The first Upper Midwest CONTENT dm User Group Meeting was held at Macalester College in St. Paul Minnesota on Oct. 16-17, 2008. It was a success! I was a member of the planning committee and worked with Sara Ring (She was the meeting organizer) and other 6 fellows from the area on meeting planning for two months, and I felt rewarded since the meeting went very well. The topic for pre-conference was working with text collections in CONTENT dm, presented by Sara Ring, Coordinator of Bibliographic and Technical Services from MINITEX Library Information Network. The hands-on practice on building documents, postcards and monographs using CONTENT dm 4.3 was a good introduction especially for new users. There were a couple of good presentations during the conference such as: Editing web templates in CONTENT dm (Carroll University, St. Cathrine); Working with Audio( Marquette University) And Advanced data wrangling: tips and software for creating perfect tab-delimited metadata files for batch loading into CONTENT dm by Wayne Toborg from St. John's University, which was impressive. He introduced a couple of locally designed tools for working with legacy data and tricks using excel to manipulate data to create tab-delimited files for batch loading into CONTENT dm. Other sessions I missed (had to because there were two sessions at the same time) sounded pretty good too. The presentations will be posted online later after get permissions from the presenters. I did an informal talk on our CONTENT dm user experience on the afternoon's session on Thursday, to exchange with peoples from other institutions. Most of attendees from academic libraries, a few from museums (none from public libraries, maybe next time should invite public libraries too? ) The last session was the CONTENT dm version 5 update from OCLC by Ron Gardner. the improvements focus on search, other languages, and EADs. For search improvements, include Unicode searching, faceted searching, relevancy ranking, and spelling checking. For Acquisition Station, add scheduled approval, scheduled indexing, and approve and index one click, index history etc. Other enhancements mentioned include: reports enhancements, upload manager-no more FTP, metadata fields increase from 100 to 125; designate required metadata fields-you can mark whatever metadata fields as required for students to fill in.
The weather was beautiful, and the Fall scene was absolutely gorgeous. Macalester College did a good job on site organization and provided good food too. The attendees were mainly from Minnesota, Wisconsin, North and South Dakota, and Iowa, a few from Illinois and even Las Vegas! It was fun!