CONTENTdm → Omeka
Grand Valley State University
Grand Valley State University in Michigan hit the item ceiling of its CONTENTdm licence — nearly 50,000 items — and needed an affordable, scalable platform that could also stream multimedia. With a hard vendor deadline looming, a small team spent five months cleaning Dublin Core metadata in Excel, normalising dates to ISO 8601, and staging high-resolution access files in Amazon S3. Using Omeka's CSV bulk-ingest workflow to fetch objects from the S3 buckets and generate derivatives locally, they migrated roughly 80% of their collections before the proprietary subscription expired. A widely cited, practical account of escaping CONTENTdm's volume-based licensing.
Original source
Onward to Omeka: A Migration Tale
Butler University Libraries (Digital Commons)
The archived copy opens a snapshot on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, preserved for when the original moves or disappears.
The Archive Migration Review summarises this story in its own words and links to the original source for verification. We are editorially independent and not affiliated with the institution or software project named above. Summaries are compiled in good faith from publicly available accounts; corrections are welcome.