Doing It Differently: The Making of "Uptight & Laid-back: Iowa City in the 1960s"

The University of Iowa Libraries recently launched Uptight & Laid-back, a digital exhibit documenting the student experience in the 1960s. The exhibit features an interactive map, which visualizes the campus environment of the time, and highlights objects from digitized archival collections in the Iowa Digital Library, a locally hosted instance of CONTENTdm. The exhibit – and the map in particular – provides a new layer of access to our digitized collections. The map uses advanced searching to display images from CONTENTdm within the map and allows users to search across our collections in two clicks. This presentation will discuss technical issues related to dynamic searching from an application external to CONTENTdm. We will explore the challenges of digitizing collections for this project and accessing collections through the CONTENTdm API