Recently I had occasion to visit the University of Florida Library’s digital collections. In poking around, I was reminded that they had developed their own content management system called SobekCM. Since it has been under development for a decade, it is a full-featured open source system grounded in library standards such as METS, MODS, Dublin Core, and MARCXML. The software comes with a METS Editor.
For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, the software was named after an Egyptian deity. Perhaps the biggest drawback is that it only runs on MS Windows currently, although other options may be available in the future.
Some of its features include:
- All collections are:
- Full text searchable
- Browseable – with browse views by title and thumbnail, and by new items
- Serve text, image, multimedia, audio, video files, data sets, and more within the same collection
- Support for multiple file types (text, image, oversized images, video, audio)
- Powered by rich metadata support, with automatic transformations for maximum interoperability
- Google-map based searching or map browsing
- Custom views for items
- Full-screen page turner view
- Sanborn maps
- Image zoom and pan viewing capabilities
- Customization of collections
- Customized collection pages and supplemental pages
- Customized interfaces (e.g.; dLOC and Matheson Historical Museum)
- Internationalized/localized interfaces in English, Spanish, and French
- Integrated support for OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative or OAI)
- Records for all collections and items:
- available as METS/MODS, MARCXML, and qualified Dublin Core
- all formats are accessible online
- a batch record feed in MARCXML is available
- all records and feeds include thumbnail icons. Catalogs can show the thumbnails along with records to greatly assist patrons in browsing and reviewing materials
- RSS feeds for all items and all new items
More than 100 institutions around the world are using SobekCM. You may wish to as well.
About Roy Tennant