Baylor University Libraries: Finding and implementing a flexible, futureproof digital collections platform
Darryl Stuhr, Director for Digitization and Digital Preservation Services in the Library and Academic Technology Services Group at Baylor University, discusses the process of migrating from CONTENTdm to Quartex.
Migrating 2TB of digital collections data
Baylor University was seeking an effective upgrade to their existing digital collections management system, CONTENTdm, which no longer supported the University’s evolving needs, due to inadequate ongoing development and limited front-end configuration options.
Baylor University Libraries held approximately 2 terabytes of digital collections data, containing nearly 500,000 media files.
Migrating this amount of content to a new platform requires a lot of time, training, and technical expertise.
"Therefore," said Stuhr, "any platform replacing CONTENTdm, needed to justify the investment of time; it would have to be sufficiently robust to manage Baylor’s diverse collections, utilise modern technological architecture and provide significant improvements over the current system."
After being introduced to Quartex and having received a full demonstration of its extensive functionalities, the team at Baylor University were confident the platform would meet their requirements moving forward. Their existing relationship with AM, through its online collections, meant they were already familiar with the functionality and styling of its in-house platforms.
A strong working relationship to meet evolving requirements
As part of the migration, the Quartex team worked closely with Baylor University to anticipate and understand their requirements and ensure a smooth workflow. The carefully managed migration process resulted in the creation of a site offering intuitive routes into the Libraries’ diverse collections.
The Quartex team was able to enhance the functionality to meet some specific requirements around two of the Libraries' audio collections. The Black Gospel Music Preservation Project and Oral History Interviews included complex compound objects, the internal navigation of which required a slightly different interface from the one initially developed by Quartex.
Quartex developers worked on an interface update that allowed the University to directly link to specific audio files within an asset and released this functionality prior to Baylor’s live launch.
A successful launch and further collections in development
The Digitization and Digital Preservation team at Baylor University successfully migrated over a terabyte of data from CONTENTdm to Quartex, made up of 125,000 assets, comprising over 2 million files, and 280,000 minutes of audio.
Following the University's launch, the Library team has continued to add further collections and extensively tested Quartex's HTR functionality on assets from the Armstrong Browning Library.
Home page of Baylor University Libraries Digital Collections
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