Collection Homepage Customization Opportunities

Each collection in CARLI Digital Collections has its own Home Page that provides a textual description about the contents of the collection. Libraries may also customize the page in a number of other ways, if desired. Customizations can be used to provide additional searching and browsing functionality, or to make the "look and feel" of a collection match more closely with the parent institution's web presence.

Customizations may be requested at any point after CARLI has provided the library with the home page URL for a collection. Any of this additional information, such as CQR code, can be provided in the Collection Customization Form.

The simple customizations described in numbers 1 and 2 below can be accomplished without much technical skill required on the part of the library.

1. CONTENTdm Custom Queries and Results

The Custom Queries and Results (CQR) wizard provides HTML code that can embed CONTENTdm search boxes and menus into the collection home page or into an external Web page. The CQR wizard was written under earlier versions of CONTENTdm software, but there are still some types of CQRs that can be created and used in version 6. There are six query options listed:

• A simple hyperlink which invokes a single predefined query - CQRs generated by this option will work, but a more expedient way to craft a URL to use is to perform the search you want in CARLI Digital Collections, then copy the URL of the search results. You can do this with simple searches in a single collection using the search box in the collection, and with cross-collection searches or Advanced searches.
• A drop-down list containing a number of selectable queries
• An index box for selecting a search term
• A text box for entering search words
• A page to browse all items in the collection - This option will still work, but a better way in version 6 to link to a "browse" page is this URL: http://collections.carli.illinois.edu/cdm/search/collection/xxx_yyyyy (where xxx_yyyyy is the collection's alias)
• Generate the default view parameters for the browse or results page - OBSOLETE, DO NOT USE

Please Note: The "Define Results View" step in the CQR wizard references results templates, and asks you to choose a "default viewing mode", fields to be displayed, and sort order. You can fill out these choices, but all of these options have become obsolete because the results displays and field details are controlled by other aspects of the software in version 6. Despite these changes, we can still use the CQR code generated by the wizard on collection home pages.

CQR start page for CARLI Digital Collections

OCLC's CQR Documentation (This documentation was written for CONTENTdm version 5)

Examples of CQRs on collection home pages:
Swedish-American Historical Quarterly (North Park University)
The Decaturian (Millikin University)
John Wesley Powell Collection of Pueblo Pottery (Illinois Wesleyan University)

CQR code can also be embedded on other Web sites outside of CONTENTdm by editing the first line of the code that is produced by the wizard to add the full server name for CARLI’s CONTENTdm server:

<form method="get" action="/cdm4/results.php">
changes to
<form method="get" action="http://collections.carli.illinois.edu/cdm4/results.php">

Example of CQR on outside website: Chicago State University’s library website uses a CQR to select images in their Steve Balkin Photographs of Maxwell Street, Chicago collection.

2. Images

Images can be included on the collection home page. The images can either be provided to CARLI for upload on your collection home page, or you may supply CARLI with a URL of an image within a collection or an image hosted on your own webserver.

Example: Adele Fay Williams Collection of Drawings and Prints (Lewis University)

Revised: 11/19/2020