Les,
Hi. The last thing you mention in your description of an Institutional
Repository is the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, and you don't
mention the harvesting model at all. For some of us, these things would be
at the top of the list, along with the information architecture implied by
the use of the OAI-PMH.
Repositories manage digital assets. But they do it in a particular way. If
harvesting metadata records and creating searchable aggregations from a
network of repositories is what you want to do, then the repository model of
asset management is the one you want.
You also mention 'place' a number of times. The repository model actively
diminishes the role of 'place' in the management of information,
particularly if preservation is a key function of a repository network.
Where an item actually is is of less importance than being able to identify
the item through its metadata, and being able to access the item from that
record. The easy conflation of 'repository' and 'place' may be contributing
to the idea that a digital asset management system is the same as a
repository.
Best,
Philip
*********************************
Philip Hunter
IRIScotland
Digital Library Division
Edinburgh University Library
George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9LJ
Tel: +44 (0)131 651 3768
*********************************
----- Original Message -----
From: "Leslie Carr" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2007 4:16 PM
Subject: Re: Hiding items [Was Re: e-prints and hiding metadata]
> On 14 Nov 2007, at 14:30, Joss Winn wrote:
>
>> What is the difference between an enterprise Digital Asset Management
>> system that has been developed for specific business needs and a
>> repository system that has been developed (by EPrints Services, for
>> example) for specific business needs?
>
> Get ready for a storm of replies, none of them the same :-)
>
> I've just looked up the wikipedia entry for "Digital Asset Management",
> and blow me, the definition is almost identical to the one that I use for
> repositories. It's certainly very similar to what I think of as the OAIS
> model and includes "ingesting, annotating, cataloguing, storage and
> retrieval of digital assets" and "downloading, renaming, backing up,
> rating, grouping, archiving, optimizing, maintaining, thinning, and
> exporting files". So you might imagine that the two were the same - or
> maybe that an Institutional Repository is just a specific kind of DAM.
>
> Here are the applications that are listed for DAM: content re-use within
> large organizations, retrieval of large amounts of infrequently changing
> media assets, for example in video or photo archiving, revision control
> of frequently changing digital assets and pushing music, videos and games
> out to digital retailers. The idea seems to be "I have lots of content
> that I want to use, edit or sell".
>
> When I talk about an Institutional Repository, this is what I mean:
>
> it's a convenient place for storing my stuff (working papers, published
> or exhibited material, public data etc)
>
> it's a place where other people (more qualified than I) can look after it
> and ensure that it stays accessible and useful long after I've lost
> interest in it because it's part of the public record or public
> literature or taxpayer funded activity. No-one will come back to me in 3
> years and say "your disk died. I hope you had a backup". Or "we've
> decided to stop supporting SharePoint and now we want to use Zope. Please
> re-enter any data that you want to appear in the new environment". Or
> "you're over quota - please delete some material". Or "you can't share
> this data with anyone because it's behind the firewall."
>
> - it's a very visible platform for work that I want to share with the
> community.
>
> - it's a discrete vault for sensitive material
>
> - it's a complete record of my intellectual output - my contributions to
> research and scholarship and education
>
> - it's a place that helps me to manage my digital profile by tracking the
> usage and impact of my work
>
> - it's a place that allows my work to be used and reused in different
> contexts by different people and different services, for scientific
> analysis or for publicity and marketing
>
> - it's a place that allows the hosting institution to develop and manage
> a complete collection of its joint intellectual capital.
>
> - it's a place that makes it as simple as possible to deposit documents,
> data and metadata, perhaps by scavenging the information from other
> sources, or injecting its facilities into the users' desktop or
> scientific data gathering equipment.
>
> - it's a place which interacts with other public services for
> disseminating metadata and data holdings (via OAI-PMH)
>
> So perhaps an IR is a DAM that is highly tuned towards the needs of the
> university community? In particular, it is public facing, and permanent.
> --
> les Carr
>
>
>>
>>
>> If the single aim of the use of repositories in Universities was for
>> 'Open Access' in it's strictest sense, then I could answer my question,
>> but reading literature like the JISC Roadmap report
>> <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/publications/roadmap-200604/rep-roadmap-v15.pdf
>> > and their Web 2.0 report
>> > <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digitalrepositories/web2-content-learning-and-teaching.pdf
>> > and looking at all the new repository projects that are being
>> funded <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/projects.aspx> (ours included),
>> it seems to me that academic users can't wait for repositories to serve
>> pretty much the diversity of business functions that DAMs serve.
>>
>> Given this increasing and inevitable diversity of uses repository
>> software is going to be employed in (and funded by JISC to do so!), what
>> is 'the point' of a repository as distinct from a DAM, ECMS or 'entire
>> information environment'?
>>
>> Joss
>>
>> --
>> Joss Winn
>> LIROLEM Project Officer
>> CERD
>> University of Lincoln
>> Brayford Pool
>> Lincoln
>> LN6 7TS
>>
>> Phone: 07789485910
>
>
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