DAM-ing the Digital Flood

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IT Directions

DAM-ing the Digital Flood

9/2/2008

By David Raths

Digital Asset Management systems are maximizing an increasingly vital commodity at colleges and universities: multimedia files.

DAM-ing the Digital Flood "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.