Breaking Up With CONTENTdm: Why and How One Institution Took the Leap to Open Source

In 2011, College of Charleston found itself at a digital asset management crossroads. The Lowcountry Digital Library (LCDL), a multi-institution cooperative founded less than three years prior, was rapidly approaching its CONTENTdm license limit of 50,000 items. Understaffed and without a programmer, the College assessed their options and ultimately began construction on a Fedora Commons repository with a Blacklight discovery layer, an installation of Rutgers’ OpenWMS for Fedora ingestion and a Drupal front end as a replacement for their existing digital library. The system has been built and over 20,000 items have been migrated. The project was a success but a lot of hard lessons were learned.