The Five Colleges Digital Assets Management interest group meeting held on 7/8/02 at Kenyon College was convened by S. Palmer and lead by A. Boyd. The group began with a roundtable overview of the wide range of digitization projects ongoing at each campus. These projects include slide, manuscript, text, video, and audio materials. Most have been geared toward direct classroom use and have not been planned to assure appropriate long term file management, storage, and access to the resources.

The group heard S. Siddall describe the ongoing development of the Mellon Foundation's ArtSTOR project a digital media storage and distribution project similar to JSTOR that is scheduled to be available for subscription in 2003 (at an as yet undetermined price).

Scott also let the group know that he is installing the popular CONTENTdm digital collections management software on a server at Denison. He noted that a 50% price discount on CONTENTdm will soon be available for CLAC and other institutions (http://www.contentdm.com).

Scott and Alan related their experience working on the managing board of the REALIA project (http://www.colleges.org/~alianco/Alianco_media.html) especially the challenges of assisting faculty to develop metadata for collections of digital media they might want to contribute to institutional collections or sites such as the OhioLINK Digital Media Center (http://dmc.ohiolink.edu).

The group discussed possible areas of Ohio Five cooperation and grant development as well as cooperation with other consortia. At present, the group proposes that the Ohio Five take the following immediate steps that will help us explore consortial digital assets management in a very hands on manner and give us experience that could shape future grant proposals:

1. We will expand the Denison license for CONTENTdm to cover all Ohio Five institutions. Initial funding for this is likely available from the Mellon Collaboration with Technology project. Each institution would likely have to pick up the modest annual maintenance costs in future years.

2. We will identify at least one digital media pilot project per campus that we will mount on the CONTENTdm server at Denison and describe using metadata standards agreed upon by the Ohio Five. We will strive to select projects from diverse disciplines that utilize a variety of source/media formats. Most projects will involve small faculty collections (e.g., 100-200 slide images) that have broad appeal and significant curricular impact. The faculty members must be able to (a) set aside time to work cooperatively with a student assistant to develop metadata and (b) clearly grant copyright permission to the materials. Projects using library or archives held collections will also be considered.

3. We will set up OCLC training in metadata construction and CONTENTdm functionality for one or two staff members from each institution. Partial support for this training may be available from the CONSORT project budget.

4. Each institution will provide support for any student-assistant help needed to complete the pilot project(s).

5. We will work to make substantial progress on all pilot-project collections this fall and have a publicly accessible website by early 2003.

Minutes submitted by Alan Boyd, Associate Director of Libraries, Oberlin College Library, 148 W. College St., Oberlin, OH 44074 1532. 440 775 8285 x229 (tel). 440 775 6586 (fax).

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