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Background
Digital asset management is to slides and video clips what the online library catalog is to books and journals. It is a system for organizing and managing access to digital materials that have rapidly become very useful in teaching and research as networks allow us to access them. In conversations with our colleagues in many academic disciplines, we are asked routinely how faculty members can "put their images up on the web" so students may access them outside of class, or how they can access someone else's materials, or share their own. In the Five Colleges of Ohio alone there are dozens of faculty members who have collections of hundreds if not thousands of images and video clips.
Many of these issues were discussed in 1996-98 under the auspices of a planning grant from the Mellon Foundation - the Ohio Five "Shared Images Project." In 1998, a project on visual literacy was funded by the Collaboration with Technology Program. Oberlin College has a "digital media group" considering these issues. Kenyon is creating a slide and image database. The digital asset management project funded by the Collaboration with Technology Program seeks to identify opportunities for the Five Colleges to meet some of these needs consortially. We are imagining the visual equivalent of the CONSORT library system. We are imagining ways of meeting needs that may not be met by Mellon's ArtSTOR Project or by OhioLINK's Digital Media Center.
Current Work
Meetings were held in May of 2000 and in July of 2002 to identify and discuss our common interests. Faculty and staff from Denison, Kenyon, Oberlin, Ohio Wesleyan and Wooster attended these meetings. Notes from the 2000 and 2002 meetings are available online.
We have selected CONTENTdm as the initial digital asset management system for a limited number of pilot projects on each of the five campuses. The software was acquired through a vendor agreement negotiated by the Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges on behalf of all 92 instutitions that are CLAC schools or supported by the Mellon Foundation. This is the same software that has been adopted by the Realia Project sponsored by the ACS, GLCA and ACM schools for digital asset management in modern languages.
Training for Ohio Five staff in metadata standards and CONTENTdm took place in mid-September.
Geri Ingram conducting hands-on training for Five Colleges staff at the OCLC.
We are now defining one faculty pilot project on each campus. Funding for the licensing of CONTENTdm on each of the Five College campuses have been provided by the Mellon Foundation through the Collaboration with Technology Program. Additionally, the Program will be licensing CONTENTdm's Multi-Site Server this Spring. This software allows us to conduct searches across all the CONTENTdm installations in our group of schools. Training costs have been subsidized by the library directors of the Five Colleges. The work is guided by a committee of librarians and technologists and coordinated through the offices of the Five Colleges of Ohio.
Online discussions
An e-mail listserver supports exchanges of e-mail about this project. To subscribe, please send an e-mail containing the following line only as a message to mailserv@denison.edu:
subscribe oh5damIn addition, a web board is available to support discussions about digital asset management.
Resources for Digital Asset Management
Guides to Quality in Visual Resource ImagingPartial listing of digital asset management software
Digital Imaging Tutorial (updated)
Preserving Cornell's Digital Image Collections
Copyright and Digital Images
CONSORT Colleges list of resources
(This project has adopted CONTENTdm for asset management)
CatTrax
CONTENTdm
Cumulus 5 Workgroup
Destiny
Extensis Portfolio
FLEXSTOR.db
Gallery Systems EmbARK
Greenstone Digital Library Software
Informix Media Management
Insight Software Systems
LizardTech - Imaging Software
Madison Digital Image Database
Slooze
The Bulldog Group
The Linux Portal Web-Graphics
Webware Corp (Mambo)
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