Maryland Digital Cultural Heritage
Encyclopedia
Maryland Digital Cultural Heritage (MDCH) is a collaborative, statewide digitization program. Headquartered at the Enoch Pratt Free Library
/State Library Resource Center in Baltimore, the program partners with Maryland libraries, archives, historical societies, museums, and other institutions to digitize and provide free online access to materials relating to the state's history and culture. Materials in MDCH's online digital collections include maps, manuscripts, photographs, artwork, books, and other media.
Digital Collection Management software. CONTENTdm and its JPEG 2000
extension also enable the viewing of large format images, including zooming and panning features.
Enoch Pratt Free Library
The Enoch Pratt Free Library, located in Baltimore, Maryland, is one of the oldest free public libraries in the United States. Established in 1882 after a grant from philanthropist Enoch Pratt, the library now includes twenty-two branches in Baltimore, plus the Central Library...
/State Library Resource Center in Baltimore, the program partners with Maryland libraries, archives, historical societies, museums, and other institutions to digitize and provide free online access to materials relating to the state's history and culture. Materials in MDCH's online digital collections include maps, manuscripts, photographs, artwork, books, and other media.
History
The program began in 2002 with a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grant administered by the Maryland State Department of Education's Division of Library Development and Services (DLDS). The grant funded an initial survey of institutions, the goal of which was to learn about collections relevant to any aspect of Maryland's state, regional, and local culture and history. The survey gathered information on each collection regarding: content; age; condition; quantity of items; relationships to other collections; copyright issues; existing catalogs and indexes; and items of particular interest and/or value. The LSTA grant also provided the basis for the purchase of digitization equipment and the creation of a union catalog. Early on in the program, MDCH established digitization standards and metadata guidelines for its collections.Collections and Access
The MDCH website currently has over 30 collections of items pertaining to a variety of subjects, people, events, and geographic locations in Maryland. New collections are added on a regular basis. Collection descriptions provide the location of the original items, the contributor(s), the inclusive dates, an overview, and a list of related materials (books, articles, websites, etc.). Visitors to the site are able to view digitized items and data about each item by browsing within a collection, or by searching the MDCH Union Catalog. The searching of MDCH collections is powered by CONTENTdmCONTENTdm
CONTENTdm is digital collection management software that allows for the upload, description, management and access of digital collections. It is Unicode and Z39.50 compatible. CONTENTdm can handle documents, PDFs, finding aids , images, videos, and audio files...
Digital Collection Management software. CONTENTdm and its JPEG 2000
JPEG 2000
JPEG 2000 is an image compression standard and coding system. It was created by the Joint Photographic Experts Group committee in 2000 with the intention of superseding their original discrete cosine transform-based JPEG standard with a newly designed, wavelet-based method...
extension also enable the viewing of large format images, including zooming and panning features.