Files in a collection directory

From CONTENTdm Users Wiki

CONTENTdm collections are made up of lots of files in a directory. Here is what they do.

The directory containing a collection is specified in catalog.txt

The following is the collection structure for CONTENTdm 4.1 and 4.2

• full - default location to put full resolution images
• image - The file (display image, pdf, whatever you uploaded as the asset) and thumbnail for each item in the collection
• import - items in the pending queue
• index - metadata, etc
  • description
    • add
    • conv4.txt - unknown purpose. it is empty for all of my collections.
    • count.id - stores an integer to be used as the next pointer value
    • del
    • desc.all - metadata for every item in the collection, in a pseudo xml format
    • offset.ind - a magical binary file containing offsets into desc.all at which every item starts. Part of CONTENTdm magical searching algorithms.
    • old - contains copies of desc.all, offset.ind, and time.all. Somehow involved in how CONTENTdm modifies these files?
    • report.txt
    • time.all - text file. Each line stores a day on which the collection was indexed in the format YYYYMMDD. One line per index. I have no idea why this is stored.
    • time.txt - text file. Stores the day on which the collection was last indexed in the format YYYYMMDD
    • up - involved in modifying items using the web interface. For each item that you edit there will be a file created. The file will be named as a number, corresponding to the pointer value of the item you edit. The file will contain the pseudo xml of the metadata for that single item. (You can manually edit this file as much as you want before indexing the collection.)
    • update - involved in modifying items using the web interface. For each item you edit a lock file will be created. The name of the file will be the pointer value followed by .lck
  • etc
    • about.txt - a description of the collection. Only used in the CONTENTdm administrative interface.
    • config.old - previous version of config.txt
    • config.txt - metadata field configuration for the collection
    • fullconf.old - previous version of fullconf.txt
    • fullconf.txt - full resolution configuration for the collection. Text file, format unknown.
    • full.txt - full resolution configuration for the collection. Text file, format unknown.
    • fullvol.txt
    • priv.txt - access controls on the entire collection. A semi-colon separated list of users who have access. Can also be based on IP address.
  • text_search
  • thesaurus
  • usefor
  • vocab
• new - I don't know
• supp - Files for compound objects in the collection