One of the main virtues of digital imaging is its ability to make collections vastly more accessible. Digital technology helps achieve institutional goals, whether highlighting particular aspects of local history or reaching a national or international audience. Collections that were once too remote to be viewed are now accessible; objects that were once too fragile to be handled or exhibited can now be seen by broad audiences. By making it possible to bring together diverse materials or collections from scattered locations for comparison and research, digital technology can be a powerful teaching aid, especially when institutions work together to create a critical mass of complementary material.
Unique identifiers are essential for the management of information in any digital environment. Identifiers assigned in one context may be encountered, and may be re-used, in another place (or time) without consulting the assigner, who cannot guarantee that his assumptions will be known to someone else. To enable such interoperability requires the design of identifiers to enable their use in services outside the direct control of the issuing assigner. The necessity of allowing interoperability adds the requirement of persistence to an identifier: it implies interoperability with the future. Further, since the services outside the direct control of the issuing assigner are by definition arbitrary, interoperability implies the requirement of extensibility. Hence the DOI System is designed as a generic framework applicable to any digital object, providing a structured, extensible means of identification, description and resolution. The entity assigned a DOI® name can be a representation of any logical entity.
represents an 'ontology' for cultural heritage information i.e. it describes in a formal language the explicit and implicit concepts and relations relevant to the documentation of cultural heritage. The primary role of the CIDOC CRM is to serve as a basis for mediation of cultural heritage information and thereby provide the semantic 'glue' needed to transform today's disparate, localised information sources into a coherent and valuable global resource. ... the CRM looks very similar to an object-oriented database schema. However, as a formal ontology, it represents a higher level of abstraction: a simplified representation of how experts and laymen perceive reality, specifically the reality of cultural heritage, in terms of categories (classes) and relationships (properties). It is a common ground of understanding rather than an arbitrary convention and, as such, it is extensible and unlimited.
Digital Asset: A digital asset is any form of content and/or media that have been formatted into a binary source which include the right to use it. A digital file without the right to use it is not an asset. Digital assets are categorised in three major groups which may be defined as textual content, images and multimedia (after van Niekerk, A.J. 2006. 'A methodological approach to modern digital asset management: An empirical study', Proceedings of the International Academy for Case Studies, Volume 13, Number 1, p.53ff. Allied Academies, New Orleans Congress, Spring, 2006).
Digital Asset Management consists of tasks and decisions surrounding ingesting, annotating, cataloguing, storage and retrieval of digital assets, such as digital photographs, animations, videos and music. Digital asset management systems are computer software and/or hardware systems that aid in the process of digital asset management.
a set of coordinated technologies that allow the quick and efficient storage, retrieval, and reuse of digital files that are essential to an organisation. It provides the rules and processes needed to acquire, store, index, secure, search, export, transform and make accessible these assets (or derivatives of them) as well as their descriptive information. In particular, what merits highlighting is the fact that a DAMS can increase enormously the value of digital assets by managing the metadata about the assets. It is the metadata that make them useful (and re-useful) to the organisation, by indicating, for example:Who created it? When? In what format? Are there other versions of it? What rights do we have to this asset? For what purposes has it been used before in the organisation or by partners? These metadata are essential to heritage organisations whose functions are to collect, archive, preserve, and provide access to their collections for scholarly and educational communities.
Digital Asset Management involves the creation of a digital archive to hold resources, the provision of an infrastructure that will help to keep the entities from becoming obsolete, and a range of discovery and browsing tools to enable potential users to be able to identify, locate and retrieve the digital entities held by the DAMS.
When associated with suitable policies, procedures and licensing arrangements, DAMS provide institutions with a way to facilitate the exploitation of their digital assets without depleting the value of the asset itself. [My italics]
Content acquisition, cataloguing & and management
End-user experience
Media management
Protecting Intellectual Property and copyright
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