Most web content management systems allows users to upload files and make these files available for display or download by site visitors.  Digital asset management (DAM) systems such as CONTENTdm and the Madison Digital Image Database (MDID) are better designed for large collections of files, particularly images, audio and video.  DAM systems have support for standard metadata schemas such as Dublin Core or VRA and often have image viewer tools that allow users to zoom in and out of images and compare images side by side.  Concerto shares many of the same features as CONTENTdm and MDID.

What distinguishes Concerto from many other DAM systems including CONTENTdm and MDID is its granular authorizations and its service-oriented architecture (SOA).  Like Segue, Concerto uses the Harmoni application framework for most of its basic functionality.  Together, Segue and Concerto can be viewed as providing the basic services needed to support a continuum of publications.  Segue as a content management system focuses on services for "evolving" publications or sites such as those for blogs, wikis, courses and research.  Its emphasis is on versioning, linking, organizing and categorizing content.  Concerto, as well as other DAM systems, focus on services for "completed" publications or assets such as articles, images, audio and video.  Concerto provide tools for collecting assets, adding metadata to describe these assets and provide UIs for searching asset collections.

MiddMedia, the application behind MiddTube, provides additional services designed specifically for audio and video.  While DAM systems such as Concerto can certainly catalogue audio and video, they are not well suited to delivering these types of media.  MiddMedia is a simple interface to a specialized media server (currently the Adobe Flash Media Server ) that can be integrated with other systems on campus including Segue, Concerto and WordPress.  MiddMedia will provide functionality similar to other video sharing services such as YouTube with an emphasis on access control, higher quality video and options of publishing video in non-standard formats.  MiddMedia could evolve to include services for web-based audio and video capture much like Michigan State University’s Viewpoint. 

We plan to integrate Concerto and MiddMedia into other systems.  Thus Concerto and MiddMedia collections could be made accessible via Segue site media libraries.  This will enable faculty, staff and eventually students to build collections of assets in Concerto and MiddMedia and then use these in Segue and other systems.  If audio and video capture services are developed for MiddMedia, these could also be included in Segue and other systems allowing for the creation of plugins that allow users to record audio and/or video from within a web page.