NITLE/ACSTC Symposium: Strategic Planning for
Digital Assets Management

December 1-3, 2005

Georgia Tech Conference Center
Atlanta, GA

All symposium materials collected from speakers are available for download.

Download PowerPoint presentations for the speakers (ZIP file format).

Download the Strategic Discussion wrap-up notes (MS Word file format).

The goal of this symposium was to enable teams from NITLE colleges to share solutions and consider processes for planning campus-wide (or consortial) strategies for managing a wide range of digital collections and assets.

Sessions covered:

1. Basic planning for digital collections - the decisions to be made and options to be considered.
2. “Show and tell” sessions about DAM solutions.
3. Possibilities for collaboration.

We collected in advance and distributed detailed case studies from colleagues at small liberal arts colleges about the process for making decisions about DAM needs and applications, solutions selected and rationale.

Agenda:
Note: All sessions include time for discussion of issues raised.

Symposium Reading:

• Clifford Lynch, "Where Do We Go From Here? The Next Decade for Digital Libraries", D-Lib Magazine, July/August 2005
• Reading List on Digital Assets Management from CLIR:
  http://www.clir.org/activities/registration/feb05_biblio.html
• NINCH Guide to Good Practice in the Digital Representation and Management of Cultural Heritage Materials:
  http://www.nyu.edu/its/humanities/ninchguide/
• Managing Digital Assets
  Strategic Issues for Research Libraries Forum, Wash D.C. October 28 2005
  http://www.arl.org/forum05
  

Abstracts:

Session I: Welcome & Opening Address: Thinking Strategically about Digital Assets Management.
David Seaman
Director, Digital Library Federation

Session II: Partnerships that Work: Organizational Structures for DAM
Roger C. Schonfeld
Ithaka Research

Images have gained prominence for pedagogical purposes in the past decade or so in ways previously unimaginable. New technologies have played a key role in this development, which has in some cases been transformational. Campus information services organizations have evolved, sometimes very successfully, to support increased image use and new technologies. Local digital "assets" and remote collections are increasingly being brought together in support of teaching and learning. How do different organizational structures and other campus characteristics allow colleges to make most effective use of images in an increasingly complicated environment? In this session, findings on this question from seven site visits to liberal arts colleges will be reported in order to stimulate a discussion about success factors.

Session III: Solutions Showcase I

DSpace
Scott Siddall, Denison University

We will examine the features, strengths and weaknesses of DSpace, the open source software that can be used to capture, store, index, preserve and redistribute scholarly materials. We'll consider how DSpace can be used to support both institutional as well as consortial repositories, examine workflow and metadata creation, and touch on some use cases.

Luna Insight and ArchivalWare
Cort Haldaman

For the past few years, demand has been increasing for a campus-wide digital asset management solution for faculty members. This demand was driven by retiring faculty members who wish to leave their research and teaching resources to the university after their retirement, as well as by an increase in cross-discipline collaborative projects where materials must be shared between departments. As a university, Furman has been looking at many solutions, both commercial and open-source, and we have found two commercial products that look outstanding. ArchivalWare and Insight are both digital multimedia databases that meet our needs, but we need to decide what our focus for this digital asset management solution should be before we can choose a product. Should a digital asset management solution be primarily a research aid or a teaching tool?

MDID
Vicki Sells, Pat Thompson Sewanee: The University of the South
At Sewanee, we have an implementation of MDID available for faculty use in teaching. Much of our modern art history image collection is available via SDID (Sewanee Digital Image Database). Faculty have access to the art history collection and can also upload personal image collections they want to share with students or with other faculty.

Session IV: Community involvement and collaboration

“Crossroads to Freedom:” Rhodes Civil Rights Repository
Katherine Lambert-Pennington, Russ Wigginton, Rhodes College

Crossroads to Freedom: An Online Collaborative is a virtual archive that captures critical components of the Civil Rights era in the Mid- South. By virtue of the social issues and geographic scope of the Collaborative, community partnerships and collaboration are central to the project's success. Our presentation will focus on some of the questions that we have addressed in the planning and early implementation phases of the project. How do you boot strap a project - financially, within the institution, in the community? How do you assess the community's perception of the college and, then, what do you do with that information? What sorts of resources are necessary? How do you pitch your project to diverse audiences - individuals, foundations, non-profits, government offices, and other educational institutions? How do you identify and manage turf issues?
How do we envision the archive being used in schools and the community at large? How does this meeting of technology and social issues facilitate interdisciplinary learning? What role can projects like this play in on-going social change?

Liberal Arts Scholarly Repository
Ann Zawistoski, Carleton College

The Liberal Arts Scholarly Repository (LASR) was founded by Carleton College, Dickinson College, Middlebury College, and Trinity University as a way to explore institutional repositories at liberal arts institutions. The presentation will cover the consortial process for choosing a repository solution and piloting a repository project, and the benefits seen from using a consortial approach.

REALIA/IDEAS
Alan Boyd, Oberlin College
Mike Thiedemann, Earlham College

In creating multi-institutional, standards-based digital resources supporting Asian studies and modern language study, IDEAS and The REALIA Project have involved librarians, IT staff, faculty, and students in developing collaborative structures and workflows. Key decision-making points will be reviewed as will the challenges still facing these projects as they grow and strive for sustainability over the long term.

Session V: Solutions Showcase II

CONTENTdm: The University of Puget Sound Digital Collection program.
Michael Nanfito

In developing a project plan - and ultimately a program for digital asset management - we sought a system that: includes an intuitive administrative tool enabling faculty and student assistants to enter collection metadata; enables access to any digital media; allows users to search across collections; provides for future growth and conversion; does not require programming support; would be exportable to more robust data environment; and uses Dublin Core metadata standards.

We recognized that our initial system implementation might well be de-commissioned in 4-6 years in favor of a more robust database system or a consortial program. Based on features, price, and perceived scalabilty, we selected ContentDM from DiMeMa. CDM was originally developed at the University of Washington Center for Information Systems Optimization (CISO) under the direction of Greg Zick (Electrical Engineering), in conjunction with UW Libraries.

In addition to expected features such as advanced search, pan and zoom of images, and sorting results while in the record, some of the more valuable components of CDM include easily crafted custom queries, a plugin that provides ability to export items to Powerpoint, and compound objects (postcard, image cube, document and monograph).

BE Press Digital Commons
Chris Nolan, Trinity University

Impressed by the bepress e-journal software platform and its possible use for other materials, the directors of four liberal arts colleges selected it to begin archiving and promoting their undergraduate student theses. Librarians from Trinity University will discuss why this platform (now distributed by ProQuest as the Digital
Commons) was chosen for the project, how its usage has grown to include other campus materials, why other software is being used for some repository items, as well as give a brief demonstration of how materials are added to and accessed from the collections.

ARTstor Hosting
Jessica Walker

From ARTstor's point of view, hosting is a means of helping institutions make better use of both their local collections and ARTstor's collections by uploading institutions' digital images onto the ARTstor servers and serving those back to users at that institution. By placing the images within ARTstor, local collections can benefit from ARTstor's tools for discovery and presentation. Currently, we are conducting a pilot project to learn about the process of ingesting, constructing, and hosting institutional collections. Since the pilot began in 2004 we have been improving the process by which we ingest, vet, and launch the collections. We are pleased to be able to discuss our hosting solution - which will be fully launched in the summer of 2006 - and answer any questions participants may have about our service.

Session VI: Looking to the Future

"Why Fedora (the Repository, not the Operating System)”
Thornton Staples, University of Virginia

This presentation will be a general introduction to ways to think about using the Flexible Extensible Digital Repository Architecture. Fedora is a foundation upon which many different digital asset managements strategies can be constructed. Examples of content models will be dicussed and demonstrated. New funtionality in the Fedora repository service will also be discussed, as will some other services that are
built upon it.

“Balancing the Promise of Fedora with Real-World Requirements”
Stacy Pennington, Rhodes College

Fedora, as a platform, shows tremendous promise as a way to store, retrieve, manage, and catalog vast amounts of digital objects in a way that allows controlled dissemination and great flexibility in how it is used and deployed. However, translating between real-world campus objectives and Fedora technology as it now exists can be difficult, especially in relating to what functional users expect from software.
This presentation will examine the process of selecting digital asset management software at Rhodes and how we worked to balance digital archiving and software expectations of users with IT demands for management.

“Fedora for the Future”
Andrew Rouner, University of Richmond

This presentation will be a general overview of the University of Richmond—Perseus IMLS grant-funded project, with special attention to the role of choosing DAM systems. On the Richmond side, the grant has two primary purposes: the digitization of Civil War era newspapers on the one hand, and the establishment of a foundation for a digital library at Richmond on the other. Although we initially chose Fedora as a single solution for providing access to our content, as the project progressed, we realized that we had other needs that Fedora could not address. As we learned more about Fedora in this process, we gained a better perspective on its strengths for the near and long-term.