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December 4, 2005

Adam and I attended a digital asset management (DAM) symposium in Atlanta hosted by the NITLE and the ASC Technology Center. Among the DAM systems presented included CONTENTdm, BEPress, ARTstor, MDID, Luna, DSpace and Fedora.

CONTENTdm seemed to be the most commonly used system with a good user interface for metadata and reasonable support for various media types. Madison Digital Image Database (MDID) was popular amongst institutions whose assets were primarily images. For asset collections of primarily textual material, BEPress was popular. DSpace was favored when there were diverse collections and a need for archiving and workflow management.

Fedora remains one of the most widely respected systems, seeming to provide the most flexible architecture for managing a wide variety of digital objects. It is also finally becoming possible to use with the recent development of applications for creating and managing collections in Fedora including ELATED and more recently FEZ. This latter product may be particularly interesting to Middlebury since it uses PHP and MySQL and offers the tools needed to maintain an institutional repository much like DSpace.