Customer Story:
Charlotte Mecklenburg Library
Serving nearly one million residents across 23 branches in Greater Charlotte, North Carolina, Charlotte Mecklenburg Library plays a central role in providing access to knowledge, culture, and community resources. Among its many offerings is a growing collection of digitized local heritage materials.
This work is led by John O’Connor, Manager of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room—a dedicated special collections and archives unit responsible for preserving and sharing the region’s cultural record.
To support this work, the library uses TIND Digital Archive to consolidate collections, enrich metadata, and streamline operations with powerful batch tools and flexible preservation features.
"One of my favorite features of TIND DA is the user interface. People expect a big search box, right, Google has popularised that. And that’s what they get with TIND.
Having a nice UI on the backend is also really a critical piece for me. For my staff to be able to work with this platform and not having to do a bunch of training is really key for keeping my lean staff doing digitization work efficiently."John O´Connor, Manager of The Robinson-Spangler Room at Charlotte Mecklenburg Library
The Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room at Charlotte Mecklenburg Library has spent decades digitizing materials such as photographs, postcards, and archival collections. But as the digital archive grew, the limitations of their legacy system became clear.
Developed in 2005, the platform struggled to support the library’s needs. Digital assets and metadata were fragmented—split between the platform itself and a local shared drive—making consolidation and preservation difficult. The interface felt outdated and unintuitive, and there were growing concerns about future maintenance. Scaling or upgrading the system would likely require additional technical staff and new training, placing a burden on internal resources.
Recognizing the need for a modern, sustainable platform, the team began a careful evaluation of available digital asset management and preservation systems.
After reviewing several options, John O’Connor and his team selected TIND Digital Archive—a hosted, cloud-based solution designed for long-term preservation and efficient metadata management.
TIND DA stood out for its clean user interface, robust batch tools, and low-maintenance design. Having worked with open-source systems in the past, John was aware of the hidden complexity they can bring. TIND offered a simpler path forward, eliminating the need for dedicated technical staff while still meeting the team’s goals for flexibility, sustainability, and discoverability.
"We chose TIND because the interface was easy to use for both the public and our staff. We were impressed by how flexible TIND is when adding new items and editing metadata for those items. We loved that TIND uses MARC for its descriptive metadata, allowing us to quickly and easily train cataloging staff to help with digitization and digital archiving.
We have seen a lot more efficient use of our material and a lot more efficiency in finding material."
John O´Connor
The implementation of TIND DA was a game-changer for the library. The repository was first launched with the "La Noticia Historical Archive," a significant Spanish language newspaper in Mecklenburg County. TIND DA's full-text search capabilities allowed users to explore the newspaper's extensive archives with ease.
John’s team noted the user-friendly workflow for adding content to TIND DA. For photographs, the process involves digitization, cleaning, metadata creation, and then uploading using either the submission form or the batch uploader. The library's expertise in MARC (Machine-Readable Cataloging) played a crucial role in efficiently creating metadata for these digital items.
A key example of TIND DA's utility was evident in managing the "La Noticia" archival collection. Initially, the archive had Spanish language descriptions, but recognizing the diverse user base, John added English descriptions using TIND DA's native batch editing tool. This tool proved invaluable to the project, enabling English language metadata to be quickly and accurately updated across individual records.
John’s team noted TIND's customer service as “exceptional,” with responsive support and comprehensive documentation. This support was crucial during the initial setup and ongoing use, especially compared to the often inconsistent documentation and resources from open-source alternatives. Because the system was so intuitive and easy to use, the library ended up doing the whole migration themselves.
"During implementation, we've worked with a project manager who has been really, really fantastic. He was very detail-oriented and got us to think through a lot of things about how we would want to organize our metadata that we didn't necessarily think about, to begin with."
- John O´Connor
TIND DA is not just a tool but the foundation of Charlotte Mecklenburg Library's digitization strategy, according to John. Recognizing the limitations some patrons face in physically accessing the library, John is committed to expanding digital access to the library's treasures. Upcoming projects include integrating new scanning technologies for sheet-based documents and expanding the digital archive to include more of the library's vast and unique collections.
