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