The Lowcountry Digital Library started in 2008 as a hosted CONTENTdm website and quickly evolved, with the assistance of the talented staff of the College of Charleston and the support of the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, into a licensed CONTENTdm custom website with close to 50,000 items. However in early 2011 it was apparent that the LCDL had outgrown CONTENTdm. After much discussion and analysis, this current incarnation was decided upon.
LCDL is now built in Drupal 7 with Fedora Commons as the DAMS (digital asset management system) and Blacklight as the discovery interface.
Drupal is a PHP-based open-source platform and content management system for building dynamic web sites offering a broad range of features and services including user administration, publishing workflow, discussion capabilities, news aggregation, metadata functionalities using controlled vocabularies and XML publishing for content sharing purposes.
Fedora Commons Repository Software is an open source technology used to manage, preserve and link digital content. Fedora is built on flexible, extensible, modular architecture and scales to millions of objects. The Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture (FEDORA) is a conceptual framework that uses a set of abstractions about digital information to provide the basis for software systems that can manage digital information. It provides the basis for ensuring long-term durability of the information, while making it directly available to be used in a variety of ways.
Blacklight is a free and open source Ruby on Rails based discovery interface (a.k.a. “next-generation catalog”) especially optimized for heterogeneous collections. You can use it as a library catalog, as a front end for a digital repository, or as a single-search interface to aggregate digital content that would otherwise be siloed.
This site is currently still being developed and we welcome your questions and suggestions. Let us know what you think using our contact form.