Digital Asset Management System Research Articles

Challenges in delivering digital content in archival and production environments

Archives both large and small face similar challenges. Indeed, digital asset management can be difficult whether managing 300 assets or 300,000. This paper examines the creation and management of digital asset management systems by two wildly different organisations, showing the need for accurate metadata, standardised workflows and automated processes no matter the size of the archive or how the content is delivered.

The power of key performance indicators: How aligning success metrics to company objectives elevated the importance of digital asset management at Pampered Chef

Pampered Chef, a premier direct seller of high-quality kitchen tools, went through a total facelift in 2015, with a transformative cultural shift and new emphasis placed on aligning objectives throughout the organisation. Cascading objectives were introduced along with key performance indicators (KPIs) as a means to measure performance against objectives. The new process provided an opportunity to highlight the importance of efficient digital asset management (DAM). Over the past four years, use of Pampered Chef’s cloud-based enterprise DAM system has grown exponentially, increasing the number of yearly downloads from 5,000 to over 6 million. This case study examines the iterative approach taken in determining the KPIs with the greatest impact to measure the success of DAM optimisation initiatives.

When a Repository Is Not Enough: Redesigning a Digital Ecosystem to Serve Scholarly Communication

INTRODUCTION Our library’s digital asset management system (DAMS) was no longer meeting digital asset management requirements or expanding scholarly communication needs. We formed a multiunit task force (TF) to (1) survey and identify existing and emerging institutional needs; (2) research available DAMS (open source and proprietary) and assess their potential fit; and (3) deploy software locally for in-depth testing and evaluation. DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM We winnowed a field of 25 potential DAMS down to 5 for deployment and evaluation. The process included selection and identification of test collections and the creation of a multipart task based rubric based on library and campus needs assessments. Time constraints and DAMS deployment limitations prompted a move toward a new evaluation iteration: a shorter criteria-based rubric. LESSONS LEARNED We discovered that no single DAMS was “just right,” nor was any single DAMS a static product. Changing and expanding scholarly communication and digital needs could only be met by the more flexible approach offered by a multicomponent digital asset management ecosystem (DAME), described in this study. We encountered obstacles related to testing complex, rapidly evolving software available in a range of configurations and flavors (including tiers of vendor-hosted functionality) and time and capacity constraints curtailed in-depth testing. While we anticipate long-term benefits from “going further together” by including university-wide representation in the task force, there were trade-offs in distributing responsibilities and diffusing priorities. NEXT STEPS Shifts in scholarly communication at multiple levels—institutional, regional, consortial, national, and international—have already necessitated continual review and adjustment of our digital systems.

基于区块链的数字资产管理系统框架设计与分析

基于区块链的数字资产管理系统框架设计与分析

The fringe benefits of change and the importance of re-envisioning workflows

The Skirball Cultural Center (SCC) in Los Angeles, California, is a cultural centre and museum with a mission based on 4,000 years of Jewish core values and 400 years of democratic ideals, focusing on inclusion and welcoming people from all communities and generations. In pursuit of that mission, the SCC organises and presents art, music, theatre and literary events, and educational programming, much of which is documented photographically and stored in a digital asset management system managed by the Susanne Kester Archives at SCC. The decision to upgrade the archives’ digital asset management system yielded unexpected changes to the department’s workflow and the scope of the digital collection. This case study examines the challenges that accompanied the upgrade of the digital asset management system and the unanticipated benefits that derived from the change.

Lessons learned: Preserving oral histories of the Vietnam war

This paper explores some of the challenges that the University of Southern California (USC)’s Digital Library faced while publishing born-digital content using CONTENTdm, the digital asset management system developed by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). Through the specific context of an oral history video project, developed as part of a class assignment by USC Professor and Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur Genius Awards winner, Viet Thanh Nguyen, some of the major expectations and challenges are illuminated. These project-specific problems shed light on some of the broader evaluations of digital asset management systems in general. These experiences can help to shape considerations for choosing a platform in the future. The paper concludes with a brief discussion about the USC Digital Library’s requirements for its next system and some final thoughts on the ever-elusive ideal digital asset management system.

Store, Catalog Digital Files With Digital Asset Management System

Nonprofit Communications ReportVolume 16, Issue 8 p. 8-8 Data Management Store, Catalog Digital Files With Digital Asset Management System First published: 13 July 2018 https://doi.org/10.1002/npcr.31001Citations: 1Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article.Citing Literature Volume16, Issue8August 2018Pages 8-8 RelatedInformation

Taxonomies and metadata for digital asset management

Taxonomies, which can aid in the retrieval of digital assets, are of various kinds, and different kinds (hierarchical, faceted and thesauri) are suited for different situations. Taxonomies may be implemented in a digital asset or content management system either for tagging assets or for categorising assets or for both, and there are different circumstances that favour tagging versus categorising. Standards for taxonomies include both guidelines of standards bodies for best practices in developing controlled vocabulary, and specifically thesauri, and various industry recommendations for metadata schema so that controlled vocabularies can be shared. Taxonomies typically form part of a larger metadata architecture. Therefore, taxonomy design and metadata design should go together.

How machine learning can help solve the Big Data problem of video asset management

This paper highlights similarities between problems in video asset management and Big Data management, and outlines how machine learning can assist in solving them. Machine learning has reached fever pitch in the industry as both the excitement around the technology, and the usefulness in addressing return on investment problems converge. As models are used to analyse video content for faces, emotions, objects, text, landmarks and more, digital asset management (DAM) systems must account for the influx of a tremendous amount of new metadata, often with varied structures and schemas. The value of this highly contextual metadata for every video asset an organisation owns is clear, but it is critical that any DAM system incorporating such new metadata does so in a way similar to how enterprises manage Big Data. This paper advises DAM owners and developers to consider using schema-less data stores to incorporate the data output from machine-learning models, and rethinking certain expectations regarding data management in order to get in front of a growing problem.

Core DAM + more DAM: One company’s attempt to integrate digital asset management into organisational DNA

Digital asset management (DAM) is more than just a system – it is the way an organisation manages its valued assets during the entire life cycle, from conception all the way to distribution. In 2016, New Balance refreshed its DAM strategy by engaging a new partner to help integrate DAM into its organisational DNA. This was only possible with a partner that could meet its core needs, while offering stability and functionality to meet extended plans to engage DAM system users. This paper takes a closer look at New Balance’s journey from recognising its need for a new partner through a rapid launch that would position DAM as central to its business.

CONTENTdm to Digital Commons: Considerations and Workflows

This case study details Seton Hall University (SHU) Libraries’ decision to end its subscription to CONTENTdm, the selection process for a replacement digital asset management system (Digital Commons), and the challenges and solutions associated with migration. It outlines workflows for migrating image collections from CONTENTdm to Digital Commons, which include the use of Python scripts to harvest and rename JPEG images from CONTENTdm via its API. This case study is useful for institutions that do not have access to master files or metadata for rebuilding collections and must therefore rely upon content stored in CONTENTdm as their only image sources.

Facilitating preservation through collaboration: Harmonising practices across university departments

In 2015, the Indiana University’s (IU’s) Communications Department partnered with IU Bloomington Libraries to collect and preserve born-digital institutional heritage. While this department utilises Widen as its enterprise digital asset management system, storage limitations necessitated the partnership in order for the objects to persist. Starting with 5 TB of content, IU librarians collaborated with the University Archives in order to analyse the digital objects’ metadata and determine a workflow for ingestion and long-term preservation of digital objects. This partnership expanded to include the IU Kelley School of Business as well, leading to new challenges in terms of aligning practices across various units. The partnership between IU Communications, Kelley School of Business and the IU Libraries has posed many challenges to the existing infrastructure. It has required both social and technical solutions in order to establish a collaborative workflow that will in turn provide the basis for similar future projects with other schools and departments.

A Clean Sweep: The Tools and Processes of a Successful Metadata Migration

ABSTRACTIn 2016, the University of Utah's J. Willard Marriott Library migrated digital asset management systems from CONTENTdm, a vendor-provided solution from OCLC, to Solphal, a homegrown system utilizing several open source tools. During the migration, issues with metadata led to a large-scale metadata cleanup and standardization project, enhancing discovery in the new system. This article discusses the method used to determine which system would best meet the library's needs, methods for metadata migration, issues observed during migration, metadata management capabilities of the new system, and future plans for post-migration metadata cleanup and remediation to ensure that the metadata is consistent with best practices.

Descriptive Metadata: An Analysis of British Pathé Newsreel Collections from World War Two

AbstractBritish Pathé is considered to be the finest newsreel archive in existence, a treasure trove unrivalled in historical and cultural significance, containing 85,000 short film clips totalling 3,500 hours of footage (predominately shot in grainy black and white with later works in colour) of major events, notable figures, fashion, travel, sports and culture, and is particularly strong in its coverage of the First and Second World Wars. In 2002, the process began to convert the film negatives into high-resolution digital files and upload them onto a computer database. A digital asset management system was utilized to host the archive and provide search abilities. One of the initial problems when converting the film negatives to digital files was a lack of detailed information. To combat this, the adoption of a better descriptive metadata scheme, using clearer, simpler keywords would make the site more user-friendly and easier to access. By comparing, sorting and categorizing a limited number of archival footage files from World War II on the British Pathé website, specifically “D-Day: 70th Anniversary Collection,” to create a statistical analysis of current descriptive metadata, a picture will emerge as to the user-friendly environment of the website. By using graphs, diagrams and stills, a deduction can be made as to whether the current keywords are well served or need improvement.ss

Developing the Read/Write Library

Background: This article considers the use of Fedora-based library digital asset management systems (DAMS) as digital humanities (DH) research platforms.Analysis: The features of DAMS are evaluated to identify the ways in which they can currently meet researcher needs, and to suggest areas where further development is necessary.Conclusion and implications: Fedora-based DAMS hold great promise as the basis of digital humanities research platforms. Mature functionality is available for identity management, file and metadata management, versioning, publishing, social media sharing, discovery, interoperability, and long-term preservation. Further development is necessary in order to incorporate annotation, mark-up, and text analysis tools.

Digital Preservation of Law Reviews: Two Ways

On November 7, 2008, the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship was released to the public. One of its main tenets ‒ that law schools and libraries “stop publishing journals in print format and rely instead on electronic publication coupled with a commitment to keep the electronic versions available in stable, open, digital formats” ‒ was an open call to law libraries to start thinking about digital preservation strategies for their law reviews.The Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA) responded to the need by developing the Law Review Preservation Program, an initiative which archives law reviews hosted on the Bepress Digital Commons platform in Controlled LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), or CLOCKSS.For those law libraries without subscriptions to Digital Commons, there is an open-source, freely available alternative solution for ingesting digital law reviews into any preservation platform. This application, called the Submission Information Metadata Packaging, or SIMP tool was developed at the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah, initially as a solution for ingesting content into the Ex Libris Rosetta Digital preservation platform, as part of a CONTENTdm digital asset management workflow. Though the development of the SIMP tool was inspired by Marriott’s need to ingest digital files from CONTENTdm to Rosetta, they built it to work with any Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) and Digital preservation platform.This article will explain these two strategies for digital preservation of law reviews, informing law librarians of the options which might best suit their needs.

Digital asset management is not software or a system, but how to do business

Digital asset management (DAM) is still new to many businesses. Indeed, some companies have DAM systems and do not even know it, while others are using the web content management systems built to run their websites as their DAM tool. Digital content is currency. It is traded back and forth within departments, internally as well as globally in some organisations. The value a DAM system can provide is when that content can be used across the company, across departments and then across the globe. Marketing departments are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on digital photography, web content elements, code snippets, videos and applications. Once those assets are purchased, where do they go from there? Most likely it is somewhere on their personal drive, a cloud drive, USB or worse, with their vendor. The true value of a DAM is having that one source of truth. This paper focuses on how to shift a company's internal culture to one where DAM is a way of doing business, not just a piece of software.

A museum goes meta: Initiating enterprise content management at the Minneapolis Institute of Art

In the 21st century, cultural heritage organisations' reliance on digital content has grown exponentially. The Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) is hard at work building practical capacity for the full range of digital media created by its staff. Recently, with the support of grant funding, Mia developed new conceptual models and a new metadata specification that is driven by standards, which it is actively sharing with the field. This paper will describe Mia's enterprise content management project, its efforts to improve digital content management in order both to maximise the resources being channelled into content creation and to provide the deep level of engagement with museum collections that digital resources can deliver. It will explain the project outputs: a metadata specification, a new open source digital asset management system and a federated search interface, and will share some lessons learned along the way.

Open Oregon Digital: Transforming metadata for the semantic web

Oregon Digital, the shared digital collections of the University of Oregon and Oregon State University, recently migrated its digital asset management systems to Hydra and its digital collection data to linked open data (LOD). The Hydra Project is an open source technical framework with a Fedora back-end for providing access, management and preservation of digital content. This paper outlines the steps taken by Oregon Digital to crosswalk data, standardise institutional and cross-institutional collections and publish URIs required for LOD implementation. It also discusses the future benefits of LOD for cataloguing, searching and discovery of the digital collections.

Hitting the Road towards a Greater Digital Destination: Evaluating and Testing DAMS at the University of Houston Libraries

Since 2009, tens of thousands of rare and unique items have been made available online for research through the University of Houston Digital Library. Six years later, the Libraries' new digital initiatives call for a more dynamic digital repository infrastructure that is extensible, scalable, and interoperable. The Libraries’ mission and the mandate of its strategic directions drives the pursuit of seamless access and expanded digital collections. To answer the calls for technological change, the Libraries Administration appointed a Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) Implementation Task Force to explore, evaluate, test, recommend, and implement a more robust digital asset management system. This article focuses on the task force’s DAMS selection activities: needs assessment, systems evaluation, and systems testing. The authors also describe the task force’s DAMS recommendation based on the evaluation and testing data analysis, a comparison of the advantages and disadvantages of each system, and system cost. Finally, the authors outline their DAMS implementation strategy comprised of a phased rollout with the following stages: system installation, data migration, and interface development.