digital asset management

[deborah]

As an aside, I'm really interested, as I look around the net, to see if other institutions have manged to have needs-driven digital asset management initiatives rather than tools-driven. The problem seems to be that all of these digital asset management projects (course materials, IR needs, exhibits, etc) occur all over an institution, and existing software projects have been organically slipping into other niches to fill needs. Need course materials stored? Let your course management monopoly package do it. Need to catalogue your e-journals, and then your local pre-prints? Let your OPAC software store them as well. There's exciting projects going on building more comprehensive and planned tools, but the needs are now, and users aren't just clamoring, they're using whatever they can find.

Are there potentially going to be products which will be good at storing IR text documents and websites and internal archival materials for preservation and display and multimedia objects for classroom and research use and and easy-to-use upload server for student work and whatever else comes up? Or should we resign ourselves that any good system will have to involve a number of technological solutions?

*reburies head in tool research*

Comments

[cavlec.livejournal.com]

Best I can tell you is to make sure you can get your stuff OUT of whatever tools you're using now, because they are almost certainly not gonna be what you're using in five years.

The situation right now rots. It will, however, improve. The Manakin UI project for DSpace is doing weird and interesting stuff. Fedora is putting together a front-end. Greenstone is making noises about interfaces for DSpace. Right now, though, we just have to wait it all out.

[deborah]

yes, I'm currently nose-deep in requirements documents, and one of our big "must haves" is "exit strategy". Which several of our current tools don't have, and no, I'm not talking about any big educational tool monopolies or anything.