IT Directions
DAM-ing the Digital Flood
Digital Asset Management systems are maximizing an increasingly
vital commodity at colleges and universities: multimedia files.
"LIKE PLUMBING FOR MEDIA." That's how
Louis King describes the system to manage digital
assets at the University of Michigan,
where he is managing producer of digital
asset management systems.
The 19 schools and colleges at the Ann
Arbor campus are experimenting with different
ways of using multimedia in the classroom,
he reports. And like a plumber, he tells
users, "You do what you want with the
water; let us get that valuable commodity
to you. We don't think of digital asset management,
or DAM, as a system. We think of
it as infrastructure."
With the widespread digitization of art,
photography, and music, plus the introduction
of streaming video, many colleges and universities
are realizing that they must develop or
purchase systems to preserve their school's digitized
objects; that they must create searchable
databases so that researchers can find and share
copies of digital files; that they must track access control
and permissions information; and that they need to
integrate multimedia with learning management systems.
Although today there is a wide range of commercial solutions
available (each of which can cost hundreds of thousands
of dollars), there is also a thriving open source community
called Fedora Commons, targeting digital asset management in higher education.
Yet a few years ago, neither proprietary nor open DAM
solutions existed.
For instance, when the University of Michigan sent a
request for proposals to vendors in 2002, the project team
leaders realized they weren't going to be able to purchase
off-the-shelf software. "There wasn't any one solution out
there that we could buy," King says. "All the vendors
brought more than one [partner] company to the table."
Working over several years with a group of vendors
including IBM and Stellent (now part of Oracle), Michigan created a system
called BlueStream, to ingest, manage, store, and publish
digital media. When video files are loaded into BlueStream, the system extracts metadata, indexes video for
streaming, and automatically creates derivative copies in
several file formats. And before it makes video collections
available to students, the system creates a workflow to
allow departmental users to process and check the quality
of files and the accuracy of metadata.
To demonstrate what the combination of tech tools and
clear access and permission policies can do for academic
units, King's group created the Living Lab at the university,
tasked with helping campus units develop processes, skills,
and shared services to improve their use of rich media. One
Living Lab pilot project involves the university's Department
of Education: More than 50 teacher candidates document
K-12 classroom activities with cameras, filming teachers at work to better understand effective teaching methods. The
students then create blogs to put the videos in context.