Digital Asset Management: Grounds for Collaboration
Scott E. Siddall
Denison University

Presentation
The Context
Planning the Work
Outlook

My point?
Digital asset management is
Important
Enterprise-wide
Can be sustained and enhanced only    through collaboration and planning

The Context
The human need to organize

The Context
How much has been digitized?
Lots, but not enough.
We all have important analog resources
Just imagine how much hard drive capacity we’ve used up in the last 20 years

The Context – evolving concepts
Document management

The Context – what are digital assets?
Images
Some common and some unique
Quality varies enormously
Audio and video
multiple formats including streaming
Texts and images of texts
PDFs, Word, OCR, searchable or not
Learning objects
simple and compound (entire course content)
URLs

The Context – what are digital assets?
OK….anything digital…
 Binary Large Objects (BLOBs)

The Context - databases to the rescue

The Context - databases to the rescue
Objects can be digital assets themselves
digital video clips, digital images of events, PDFs

The Context  - DAM databases
Binary content cannot itself be easily searched, indexed

The Context – metadata is crucial
Librarians have crafted metadata for decades
Data about data
Metadata:
Describes item
Facilitates management, description and preservation
Enables discovery of item
Several schema (read open standards)
MARC record in the OPAC
Database of bibliographic and item records
Searchable, indexed
Cataloged objects are textual, physical, digital

The Context – metadata is crucial
 DC – Dublin Core
http://dublincore.org
METS – Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard
http://www.log.gov/standards/mets/   (works with OAI)
TEI – Text Encoding Initiative
http://www.tei-c.org/
 VRA – Visual Resources Association
http://vraweb.org/
 EAD – Encoded Archival Description
http://www.loc.gov/ead/
 CDWA – Categories for the Description of Art
http://www.getty.edu/research/institute/standards/cdwa/
 RDF – Resource Description Framework
An XML standard

The Context – metadata is expensive
Time required for content specialists to create and proof key fields of metadata
Balancing metadata quality with results
Risks of not finding materials
Risks of “dirty” results
Perfect can be the enemy of good

The Context – metadata is expensive

The Context – the market
Scope and size of DAM market
$1.5-3.0 billion annually; $320 million in profits
600+ vendors with 1,200+ applications
Ripe for consolidation
The commercial players
Artesia (publishing)
Canto (desktop to small workgroup)
eMotion (broadcast)
MediaBin by Interwoven (corporate)
North Plains ‘Telescope’ (publishing)
Webware (corporate)
IBM and Stellent (corporate)
Extensis (desktop to small workgroup)

The Context – The higher ed niche
The higher education market players
Auto-Graphics Digital Asset Management
CONTENTdm (e.g.,  Univ.  of Puget Sound’s collections)
Documentum DAM
Dynix Horizon Digital Library
Endeavor ENCompass
Ex Libris Digitool
Innovative Interfaces Millennium Metasource
Luna Imaging Insight
SIRSI Hyperion
VTLS VITAL
(Why or why not integrate into campus OPAC?)

The Context – open source
Open source DAM systems
FEDORA  Flexible Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture
Release 1.2.1 released April 20, 2004
Digital Library Extension Service
from the University of Michigan
Greenstone
e.g., Chopin collection at the University of Chicago
Madison Digital Image Database
MDID; v2.0 in July
And homegrown systems
e.g., Whitman Image Project

The Context - ARTstor
The art history and image equivalent of JSTOR
Funded by the Mellon Foundation
“Grand Opening” on July 1
http://artstor.org

Slide 20

Slide 21

Slide 22

The Context - ARTstor
Subscription basis
300k images, largely art and art history
Pilot of hosting for campuses, individuals
Addresses intellectual property issues
Federated searching to discover ARTstor and local content through one interface
High resolution images
Scene7’s Infinite Imaging Platform
Individual accounts
Provide workspaces, instructor tools
Allows annotations
Images and groups of images (searches, gatherings) have a URL for insertion into CMS

The Context – ARTstor
Offline Viewer
Analog to walking around with slide trays
Local application
Downloads encrypted JPEGs
Protects IP of image owners
Allows ARTstor collections to be used in non-networked environments

Planning the Work
What’s it take to implement a successful DAM project?
Planning, planning and planning
With all stakeholders =
Grounds for collaboration

Planning the Work
Set goals, scope and get political support
What is the nature of the content?
Who is the audience?
How will the collection be accessed and used?
Select and customize metadata scheme
Who is going to catalog objects?
Is the infrastructure ready?
How will cataloging quality be assessed and enforced?
Set digitization standards
Evaluate and select software and hardware
How are projects and even objects selected?
How will copyrights be managed?
Is there a campus IP policy?

Planning the Work - goals
What’s a collection?
Institutional holdings
Galleries
Museum exhibits
Historical societies
Special collections
Archives
Faculty collections
Learning objects
eReserves
Emeriti collections
Research and teaching collections
Student collections
ePortfolios

Planning the Work - goals
Collections can be:
Discipline-based
one or more departments
From consortia of similar institutions
Thematic collections from dissimilar institutions
public and academic libraries, museums, historical societies
Centralized or distributed for federated searching

Planning the Work - goals
Other types of “collections”
Public affairs campus photos
Senior theses
Products of faculty scholarship
Managed documents

Planning the Work - standards
Selecting metadata schemes

Planning the Work - standards
Setting
digitization
standards…
1600 x 1200 at     24 bit color depth
JPEG2000
For printing
Color management

Planning the Work
Technologies
Server selections
Storage and backup requirements
Bandwidth
Media types, streaming
Client selections
Plug-ins, thick and thin clients
Piloting and assessing the software

Planning the Work

Planning the Work - software specifications
Allows collaborative and distributed collection development/management
Platform (hardware, operating system) agnostic – server and client
Web-based client with easy-to-use interface
Basic and advanced searching across collections, across sites (federated searches, virtual collections, stored result sets)
Common client-side players/viewers
Client tools for manipulation, comparison, per-user annotation
Flexible support for metadata standards
Support for many object formats, and developing formats (e.g., jpeg 2000)
Support for high-resolution, zoom-in features
Supports Unicode text for display and searching
URL access to objects
Customizable display interface
Based on open standards (database, metadata, etc.)
Flexible access control list features
Standards-based export functions to avoid “lock-in” and promote remote indexing

Planning the Work - workflow

Planning the Work
Who’s going to catalog the objects?
Automated metadata creation
Video analysis can produce metadata
Image capture with data

Planning the Work – collaborate!
Multiple goals
Range of standards
Cross political boundaries
Shared control, responsibility
Expensive metadata
Collaboration is not optional

Planning the Work – collaborate!
Faculty collaborating with librarians, technologists and students
Institutional representatives collaborating to plan cataloging and access to campus collections
Consortial representatives planning metadata structures for regional projects

Outlook – the market
Market effects on the higher ed niche
Consolidation of vendors
Push to portals and enterprise wide solutions
Open source developments will pressure commercial offerings, and may eventually replace some

Outlook – the tools
Proprietary systems may “lock in” content with tools
Open standards and interoperability will be a “must have”

Outlook – the tools
Large institutions:
Different tools for asset management, content management, document management, etc.
Small institutions:
one tool serving many needs

Outlook - our needs
Faculty need to experiment with DAM tools as part of planning process
We must collaborate to avoid reinventing wheels, to sustain DAM projects
We need better searching tools, metadata automation, digital rights management
DAM will become an important enterprise application – right behind ERP and CRM
DAM tools will eventually be integrated into portals

Conclusion?
Digital asset management….
Is important today
Will be enterprise-wide tomorrow
Can be sustained and enhanced only    through collaboration and planning

Resources
Vendors focused on the higher education market
ARTstor
Auto-Graphics Digital Asset Management
CONTENTdm
Documentum DAM
Dynix Horizon Digital Library
Endeavor ENCompass
Ex Libris Digitool
Innovative Interfaces Millennium Metasource
Luna Imaging Insight
SIRSI Hyperion
VTLS Vital
Bitter Harvest (discussion of OAI harvesting issues)
Global Society for Asset Management
EContent’s Research Center on DAM (news)
Digital Asset Management Symposium (annual event)
Journal of Digital Asset Management
Digital Asset Management in the Liberal Arts (proceedings of a symposium)
Digital Asset Management Initiative at the University of Michigan
OhioLINK Digital Media Center
Preserving Cornell's Digital Image Collections
Digital Imaging Tutorial from Cornell
Research Library Group’s Guides to Quality in Visual Resource Imaging