DAMSEL: Digital Assets Management System for Electronic Libraries

DAMSEL is digital assets management system intended for use by a consortium of colleges to assist in the cataloguing, organization, and intelligent display of rich media content. The project is an extension of a online course delivery service (http://cds.colleges.org) that was completed the summer of 2002 and released as open source.

The project utilizes a variety of pre-existing open source web application development technologies including Apache, Tomcat, Struts, JSP, JDBC, JAAS, and Lucene. The system seeks to provide a secure, central repository to collect, manage, distribute, and publish rich media content, including graphics, images, layouts, animation, video, digital documents, and any format that can be represented in the computer. This project will provide a free alternative to several expensive commercially developed products such as DiMeMas CONTENTdm, Luna Imaging’s Insight, and Extensis Portfolio.

Although the interns designed this digital assets management system primarily with the needs of the REALIA project (www.realiaproject.org) in mind, the system is flexible enough to be used by anyone who needs to organize large collections of digital material, e.g., images, sound files, etc. DAMSEL will also connect with the CDS to allow users to integrate their digital assets into their courses. This product is free for ACS members and will be run at the ACSTC for use by those who want to share image collections and other multimedia. It may also be downloaded to a server.