Open Forum

I work for a mid-sized historical society with a varied collection, including physical objects, archives, photos, and born digital content. We have been receiving more and more digital material and are looking for ways to better manage that content. We are currently using PastPerfect, but it does not work very well with born digital material or types of born digital collections we are receiving.
I would love any advice from anyone who has dealt with a similar situation. I am currently looking into a wide range of open source and paid software options and would love to hear what people think of products like Preservica, Lucidea Suite, Dspace direct, ArchivesDirect, or any others. I would also be interested in hearing how people are dealing with born digital documents in small accessions that are not large enough to warrant a finding aid.
Thanks for any help or advice you can provide.

On a side note, is anyone working on digitizing 16mm or 8mm film reels in house?

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Aaron Pahl
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We work with a lot of digital exhibition content (digitized and born digital) and use Keepthinking's Qi as our CMS-DAMS for all objects. Due to the ability to customize parts of the system it is very suitable for digital and physical objects.  Our version is also bilingual (English & Arabic), and powers our entire website, so it does a lot for us. Info at: https://www.keepthinking.it

Regarding the aspect of 16 or 8mm film digitization, this is the one area we don't do in-house.  We do not hold any ourselves but do borrow for exhibitions so get the digitization done as close to the lending institution/person as possible.

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Pamela Erskine-Loftus, PhD
Director
The Media Majlis at Northwestern University in Qatar

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Original Message:
Sent: 11-07-2019 06:32 PM
From: Aaron Pahl
Subject: Digital Collections

I work for a mid-sized historical society with a varied collection, including physical objects, archives, photos, and born digital content. We have been receiving more and more digital material and are looking for ways to better manage that content. We are currently using PastPerfect, but it does not work very well with born digital material or types of born digital collections we are receiving.
I would love any advice from anyone who has dealt with a similar situation. I am currently looking into a wide range of open source and paid software options and would love to hear what people think of products like Preservica, Lucidea Suite, Dspace direct, ArchivesDirect, or any others. I would also be interested in hearing how people are dealing with born digital documents in small accessions that are not large enough to warrant a finding aid.
Thanks for any help or advice you can provide.

On a side note, is anyone working on digitizing 16mm or 8mm film reels in house?

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Aaron Pahl
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