Product Summary

The good news is that your school has mountains of resources for research, administration, and entertainment. There are videotapes, audio tapes, hard copy texts, electronic texts, graphic images of all sorts...the list is long. The bad news is that these resources are not all in one place, and no one person on campus knows how to access all of them. This is why digital content management, also known as digital asset management or DAM, is the coming thing on college campuses all over the world.

The field of higher education is an ideal consumer of digital content management because it is document intensive, requires ease of use, and with the advent of distance learning, a need for anytime, multi-site access to assets. Digital content management products and services offer a distributed repository—a centralized index of the distributed digital assets allows users to search and use those assets. Thus, a university system or consortium can aggregate library assets to enhance collaboration among its scholars and to share the expense.

Instruction too can benefit from digital content management products. The increasing popularity of distance learning has resulted in a less text-based environment on college campuses—creating a rise in the amount of rich media content to be collected, stored, indexed, and distributed. Various providers enable faculty to bring together video and/or audio taped lectures, printed course notes and class exercises, and custom publishing materials such as excerpts from a series of textbooks—creating a complete digital course for students on campus or at a distance.

Artesia

Artesia's TEAMS has been used on college campuses for digital library projects as well as for distance learning. Artesia partners with companies that do the actual digitization of a school's content, and its TEAMS product organizes raw materials in a digital repository and offers tools to load, store, index, search, aggregate, and distribute the content. TEAMS supplies a general taxonomy of defining words to help index content appropriately, and helps institutions that augment or edit these to create a user-developed taxonomy. These taxonomies are loaded into the TEAMS-provided digital containers to be mapped to the digital assets, enabling users to perform a variety of sophisticated searches.

Artesia provides consulting services for an institution's IT staff with a toolkit, complete documentation, and training to implement the solution as well as to enable continued customization— "future-proofing" the enterprise. www.artesia.com

IBM

An umbrella content management solution, Content Manager includes the DB2 Digital Library for digitized library materials, CommonStore for Lotus Domino to offload documents and e-mail to an external archive system, and VideoCharger to deliver distance learning through multimedia data streams to multiple users. Content Manager interfaces with various course management tools, and solution components work across the campus environment in human resources, admissions and registration, and billing. The solution provides a digital container for content, and customizeable indexing tools allow institutions to create a user-defined data model that suits its particular assets.

A variety of sophisticated finding aids enable an instructor to present a digital slideshow, expanding lecture materials on the fly as class discussion brings up new questions. In seconds, an instructor can search for and pull up an image or document to illustrate a concept not in the original lecture materials. www.ibm.com

Xerox

Because colleges and universities typically operate with a lean IT staff, they often need a solution that d'esn't require a tremendous amount of technical expertise. Xerox offers a series of solutions based on user-defined indexing of a database that is easy to use, requiring little training. DocuShare, a Web-based knowledge management tool, supports collaboration by putting multimedia items on a central server for multi-user access. This solution benefits not only scholarly research, but also the sharing of administrative data such as registration or financial aid information. Digital Curriculum Online Reserves is a one-stop-shop approach using DocuShare to make reserve materials more available, combining digitization, indexing, and document conversion—to PDF form, for instance. Materials can be scanned, indexed, and posted to a site in a matter of minutes, where users can download and print copies as necessary. Students, for instance, can download reserve course materials rather than having to go to the library, sign them out, and read them at a particular location. www.xerox.com

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