Hello Matt, I agree that it is a bit of a long shot to expect CIS vendors to get up to speed with digital asset management, along with integrating it quickly. The area itself is moving very rapidly and traditional CIS development can be quite demanding for them; let alone having time for the R&D into what we as individual institutions may desire in terms of DAM functionality. Also any DAM vendors are being bought out by large Enterprise Content Management (ECM) vendors moving into that space. Down on the bottom of the planet, I have been requesting such functionality (let along digital preservation functionality) from our vendor for a couple of years. I still cannot see it happening soon though. Integration, although costly, seems at present to be the only option at present other than the potential influx of ECM vendors looking for new markets. Integration though also means what goes where and as collection objects themselves move into the digital realm from the traditional physical types this blurring of the line is itself a large area for discussion. We have started discussions with 3 other large museums in Australia and New Zealand to share thoughts, ideas and standards for working with digital collections. As you mention, Fedora does seem to offer possibilities for both access and preservation management but as we have limited IT staff; the current level of programing requirements makes it somewhat unfeasible for us. Possible thru a discussion group such as this, a collaborative digital collections model could be developed, initially for integration of thoughts with which to provide vendors with functionality suitable for a larger target of potential customers, with similar functional requirements, rather than one-off individual customisations. Alternatively, in the longer term possibly those that are able build the some of modular bits of the model within something like Fedora could work with the larger community's functional requirements to jointly build a better open source Lego-like solution??? Thanks for kicking off the discussion. cheers, Douglas Douglas Elford BT AIPP Digital Assets Services Coordinator Collection Information & Digitisation National Museum of Australia GPO Box 1901, Canberra, ACT 2601 Australia Phone: 61 2 6208 5282 FAX: 61 2 6208 5014 E-mail: d.elford at nma.gov.au
>>> matt.morgan at metmuseum.org 4/07/2006 2:02 am >>> On 6/30/06 10:01 AM, "" <> wrote: > Hi Matt, > > I'm curious about where the drive is coming from to have a "one stop > solution" mean there's one system under it all. I often feel sorry > for the folks at Past Perfect when I see comments elsewhere about why > doesn't it also do accounting, POS, and your taxes on top of already > managing museum collections, archives, libraries, and membership. I > think it juliennes potatoes too. I didn't mean to argue that CIS's /should/ offer DAMS-type services. I just think it's a common hope. I was surprised to realize this when it came to DAMS, but museums are the DAMS vendors' most demanding customers. For example, the number of them that can satisfy Deborah's hierarchy demands even partially (or with difficult workarounds) is pretty few. You would think that big real estate companies (region, city, neighborhood, street, house, room--just guessing but you get the idea), for example, might have similar needs. But I guess they're not using DAMS yet, or they're not being very demanding. So given the unlikelihood that a top-notch CIS vendor, really specialized in that field, could also become a first-rate DAMS vendor, I think the one-stop solution is not going to happen. > > Colleges and universities are working to build institutional > repositories (IR) to capture "grey literature' on campuses, and some > of these solutions may be adaptable to building digital repositories > of non-collection materials in a museum, as you suggest - CAD > drawings, exhibit scripts, PR copy, etc. I have seen some custom software vendors looking at Fedora (http://fedora.us) as a back-end for a combined (physical and digital) asset management solution. It certainly meets all the storage & organization requirements, and with an easier-to-use UI layer it could work. > > The challenge of course, is that sometimes these materials are > related to objects in a CIS, or images in DAM. As I suggested to > Dianne, the question may be, how do we build more open systems that > allow interaction between different functions. That is definitely the right approach! Thanks, Matt
