Digital Asset Management Meeting, May 31, 2000

Notes

Generally, our faculty have two types of needs: to manage/access images for which copyright is held, and to manage/access images that are used under the aegis of fair use guidelines. In the former case, for example where images that were created by a faculty member are needed to be digitized and accessed in classrooms and by students outside of class, access permissions may be determined by the faculty/copyright holder. In the case of materials to which our institutions or faculty do not hold copyrights, we are guided by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and its interpretations. In most cases, these are images copied out of texts solely for purposes of presentation within a class setting, materials that cannot be retained nor made publicly accessible.

OhioLINK's Digital Media Center provides us with access to image collections licensed for members' use, and provides members with means to catalog and store image collections that we are willing to share with all 78 member institutions of OhioLINK. The DMC solicits proposals for the digitization of collections of images to which the institution or faculty member holds clear copyright. In this process, it is the responsiblity of the faculty proposer or institution to see that the images are digitized and catalogued according to DMC standards. An example of one such project is Bruce Simonson's (Oberlin geologist) collection that is being digitized currently. OhioLINK's DMC is an invaluable and developing resource for digital asset management, but it may not answer all of our needs, especially for materials that we wish to use in a restricted way because of copyright concerns, or materials that our faculties use without extensive (standards-based) metadata. Additionally, streaming media is becoming more attractive for use in instructional web presentations without and beyond the classroom. The DMC does not currently support streaming media.

The metadata standards of the DMC are based on the Dublin core which some at the meeting felt was more detailed than many of our faculty would care to fill out in the cataloging process. The client software that is provided by the DMC to faculty members who are digitizing collections is easy to use. In some of our local projects, faculty members are associating only a title with each image. Some local projects are based on the provision of local network drive space for image storage, while others are beginning to develop basic interfaces to databases. A list of commercial offerings was discussed. Note was made of the product Embark that is being used at Miami University and the University of California.

Those attending the meeting agreed that it is not in our best interests to reinventdigital asset management tools on each campus, nor to ignore the benefits of the DMC. It was felt that we could reach a critical mass in the use of images and other multimedia materials more quickly if we worked together. The Five Colleges of Ohio intranet also provides interesting opportunities to share image repositories, or to mirror or synchronize image servers. It was pointed out that the use of large or high-resolution images, or of streaming video, demands either very high bandwidth connections (Internet 2 class) or local copies of files so that access, especially in an interactive, instructional setting, is rapid. These needs reinforced the proposal for synchronized, multimedia servers on each of our campuses, based on careful software standards and cataloguing and access protocols that make possible sharing of these curricular materials now without foreclosing future uses of the DMC.

We were reminded several times that faculty members may not have the time to undertake all the detail work of cataloguing their image collections, but that student assistants, trained in the standards that make sharing possible, could be funded to help our faculty members get their materials online. Faculty members attending the meeting all agreed that pulling and refiling slides and queueing up video tapes are not productive uses of anyone's time.

We agreed that we have common needs for image management, that both the DMC and the Five Colleges network are resources worth exploiting to meet our needs, and that standards and funding are the two largest challenges to the work. We agreed to continue this discussion later in the year after several of our campuses gained more experience with some of their developing image projects this summer.

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