Joss,
Here is my answer...
Yes, you are absolutely right, DAM, document management, knowledge
management, research repositories, learning object repositories, digital
libraries - all basically the same thing, put stuff in, catalogue it,
find it, retrieve it, update it.
However, at the end of the day, the actual solutions people need depend
heavily on the type of work they do, the type of material they deal
with, and the standards, legislation etc that apply to their domain.
Try viewing a SCORM or METS package within your average document
management system, or getting it to import/export a LOM or MARC metadata
record, and you'll see what I mean.
At Intrallect, we developed a system for managing "learning objects",
which are often complex, structured packages containing hundreds of
individual files, and LOM metadata (90 hiearchical fields), and later
realised that what we had developed applied equally well to much simpler
kinds of resources, such as documents, papers, images and simpler
metadata such as Dublin Core. It's not so easy to go in the other
direction... ;)
Hope that helps.
Martin
Joss Winn wrote:
> Ah ha! an opportunity to ask a question which has been bothering me for
> some time.... :-)
>
> On Wed, 2007-11-14 at 12:57 +0000, Leslie Carr wrote:
>>> Maybe it depends on what you define the "repository system" as - is
>>> it a single piece of software, is it an architecture diagram for the
>>> Institution's information system, or something else?
>> That way lies danger - once you redefine a repository to be just a
>> database or an entire information environment then (I believe) you
>> lose the point of it.
>> --
>> Les
>
> 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?
>
> 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
>
--
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Martin Morrey, Product Director, Intrallect, http://www.intrallect.com
[log in to unmask], Tel: +44 870 234 3933, Fax: +44 1506 505 117
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