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RSS feedsWith digital content broadening to encompass not just text, but images, audio and video, managing it is becoming more complex.
As a result, according to Stephen Pinfield, academic services librarian at the University of Nottingham, librarians will need new techniques, skills and technology.
"There is a growing understanding that information is increasingly digital and that, while there are well-established mechanisms for managing paper assets, this is not the case with digital ones. Many librarians are realising that more ought to be done to manage them," he explained.
To help in this librarians and information professionals are seeking out new tools and processes. One option is to install a digital asset management (Dam) system.
Chris Schaefer, senior product marketing manager at Dam vendor Artesia Technologies, said that this can provide "a set of co-ordinated technologies and processes that allow the quick and efficient storage, retrieval and re-use of digital files, including text, video, audio and image files".
Dam technology is not new. It was born in the late 1980s, when corporate creative departments began to integrate rich media into their work processes. As the use of multimedia content spread throughout the enterprise, so the need to manage it more widely became apparent.
Companies realised, for instance, that they were too often reinventing the wheel, with employees endlessly recreating content that had already been produced elsewhere in the enterprise.
"Our customers tend to come to us when they realise that they have a lot of rich media, but they don't generally know what they've got, they don't know where it is, and they are having problems distributing it," said Schaefer.
What Dam technology offers is an effective tool for acquiring, storing, indexing and searching digital content. Faced with having to manage an increasingly diverse collection of digital content, many US libraries have begun to turn to Dam vendors; as have museums and other rich media owners.
When Stanford University Libraries was looking for an efficient way of managing and delivering multimedia content, they installed Artesia's Teams technology. So too has Getty Images, one of the world's largest providers of visual content to advertising agencies and the media.
Similarly, the California Academy of Sciences opted for the Cumulus Dam system from Canto Software in order to make its multimedia resources - including research slides, document archives and exhibit documentation - available over its intranet.
And when San Francisco's Exploratorium museum began to digitise its 100,000 analogue resources, including images, text and video, it too opted for Cumulus.
Libraries without walls
Rosemarie Falanga, senior information specialist and co-ordinator of the Exploratorium's Dam project, explained that the museum has taken Dam technology to the next level by using Teams to offer a 'library without walls' service.
"Dam systems were designed for the internal management of multimedia resources and this is what they do best, but our project is also using the system to disseminate resources externally via the web," she said.
"Not only are we disseminating them to the media, which in the past were the largest external audience, but we are developing new audiences: educators, researchers, and other museums."
But buying a Dam system is the easy part. Before it can play a useful role it has to be populated with data, and before it can be populated with data all the organisation's multimedia content has to be audited.
In addition, thought has to be given to metadata. "The power [of a Dam system] lies in the variety of descriptive data that you create to enable you to search on the assets," explained Schaefer. "So there is a lot of upfront work that needs to be done."
Decisions also have to be made about the format in which the rich media files will be stored. While higher grade files deliver better quality content, the consequent file sizes can prove too large for storage or network capacity.
Finally, the 'ingestion' phase takes place, when all the content is put into the system. Since this can take some time to complete, it is important during the audit to prioritise the assets, thus ensuring that the files most frequently used are placed at the head of the input queue.
The end result should be a system in which all the library's digital assets can be quickly and easily located through a user-friendly interface.
What's the Dam difference?
What does a Dam system provide that a traditional online public access catalogue (Opac) cannot? After all, many library automation companies now offer a wide repertoire of solutions for libraries.
In addition to its BiblioTech Pro integrated library system, Inmagic has developed a powerful database and text retrieval product called DB/TextWorks.
The difference, according to Falanga, is that although some Opacs are now able to disseminate digital objects and link to URLs, "the main purpose of the traditional Opac is to circulate physical objects, and one of the key ideas is that the object returns. Since Dams only distribute digital objects, dissemination is one-way."
Also, Opacs are primarily text-oriented bibliographic tools.
Susan Stearns, vice president of marketing at Inmagic, said: "Every once in a while our customers will store full text documents in their DB/Text or BiblioTech Pro databases.
"But since those documents are increasingly created in some other place, what they really want is to be able to describe them, or classify them, and then link to them. That is the most common model."
However, Falanga argued that, for librarians used to traditional library tools, Dam systems have their disappointments. The Exploratorium discovered, for instance, that the Cumulus system is not designed to refer back to analogue media. And, when exporting its data, the museum found that all the category information had been merged into one keyword field.
For this reason, it continues to use a traditional Opac to control its physical collection. "Many institutions needing Dams do not need Opacs," said Falanga.
"And while I can envision Opacs integrating some aspects of Dams - because libraries will own digital objects - I can't see the opposite occurring. So until every piece of information in the world is digital, they will probably remain separate."
The management of digital content has to be seen in a broader context than Dam systems alone. For many, the biggest issue raised by the distribution of digital content is ensuring that copyright is respected.
While Dam systems can describe rights, and many also allow the use of watermarking (i.e. inserting an invisible ownership 'signature' into a file), they cannot enforce them.
"We allow companies to store and manage assets and, as part of that, we work with customers to incorporate metadata fields containing rights-related information about the assets," said Schaefer. "But when it comes to using that information for protection purposes we leave it to digital rights management [DRM] companies."
However, while DRM is seen today as primarily a vendor issue, many believe that, as libraries begin to make digital content available online and themselves become publishers, they too will need to consider using rights management technology.
Distributors' responsibilities
Certainly there is an argument for saying that, given the ease with which digital content can be flawlessly copied, the responsibilities of all those who distribute it have become commensurately greater than in the print world.
As Mark Bide, a senior consultant at London-based digital content strategy consultants Rightscom pointed out, everyone in the information chain is now implicated in rights management.
"After all, the only people who own all the rights in a piece of content are the original creators," he explained. "So everybody in the chain from that point onwards only uses rights and then passes them on."
However, these are controversial matters for librarians. Leaving aside inflammatory matters such as 'fair dealing' and the 'first sale' doctrine, today's DRM techniques raise a number of practical issues.
Firstly, while content can be protected by encrypting it and placing it in a DRM 'wrapper', this wrapper can usually only be opened and viewed in a proprietary secure viewer, and only by a licensed user equipped with decryption keys.
As Martin Lambert, chief technology officer at DRM vendor SealedMedia, pointed out: "There is no point encrypting the content, merely to decrypt it, drop it on your desktop, and then email it to all your friends, and stick it on an Albanian web server."
In other words, DRM assumes the delivery of content to known users who have proprietary software installed on their access device, raising privacy and usability issues. What happens, for instance, if a visitor to a library website wants to access a piece of content that is DRM-protected?
They have no licence, and they have no viewer. In theory both can be downloaded, but do users really want to do that simply to access a chance piece of content that may or may not prove relevant to their needs? And what if they want to access the content without giving out their personal details?
"The world right now is stuck between the need to protect ownership and the desire to increase access," said Falanga. "Until we have the technical ability to distribute easily, painlessly and inexpensively to a vast audience, I don't see a solution to the problem that does not create more problems than it solves."
Access versus ownership protection
One problem, according to Bide, is that there is no standardised structure for the management of rights-related information. "Unless we have got a way of expressing those rights and permissions in a machine-readable form, nobody can hope to effectively manage digital assets," he said.
Bide suggested that the solution lies in the creation of DRM standards. "We expect to see these emerge sometime in 2003 via MPEG-21. This will provide rights expression standards for the delivery of any type of media," he said.
If technologists have their way, initiatives like MPEG-21 will create a world in which every piece of content, whether proprietary or public domain, will be born with usage and ownership rights. These will stamped across its metaphorical forehead - a kind of digital ID card - before it is released to the world.
The end-game assumes that every time a user, or software agent, approaches a piece of content on the network it will 'read' the terms on which that content can be accessed, and whether and how any payment should be made.
Since this process would take place in real time, the content would then be released immediately to the user, so long as he or she was deemed to have access rights, possibly for perpetuity but more likely for a limited period of time. After this period, the content would self-destruct.
Vitally, once rights expression standards have been agreed, this content could in theory be viewable in any standard viewer (probably using a browser plug-in) and, once a universal micro-payment system is in place, the process could be transparent and anonymous.
This is only one vision, and many aspects of DRM are distasteful to librarians, not least the very concept of 'pay-per-use'.
Nevertheless, it is becoming increasingly clear that some form of DRM is set to become a core component of information management in the digital world, be it only a case of managing the DRM solutions adopted by content providers.
Certainly, any library making content available over the web cannot ignore the implications of contributory infringement at the least.
However, for the moment at least the Exploratorium has no plans to use such technology. "Given the goals of the project, it would be unacceptable to us to use a DRM technology that severely limits usage," said Falanga.
So how does it deal with copyright issues? "We have ducked the bullet to some extent," she conceded. "During this phase of the project the only assets automatically distributed via the web will be medium-resolution, suitable for classroom and web use.
"The high-resolution images will continue to be individually requested, so we will still maintain control without going to the next step."
More importantly, most of the resources being offered by the Exploratorium have been created by salaried staff, so the copyright belongs to the museum itself. The issue would clearly be different were it to provide access to third-party material still in copyright.
"While we are planning, on a limited basis, to include third-party assets as part of the project, the third party would have to be someone who agreed with our mission and priorities," stated Falanga.
The copyright in many of the multimedia files being handled by the California Academy of Sciences is owned by individual researchers, which partly explains the decision not to make them available over the web.
"Avoiding the issues of digital rights and digital protection is a big reason why this is an internal project," explained head librarian, Annie Malley.
As Trudy Levy, founder of Image Integration, which is advising the California Academy of Sciences on its Dam project, puts it: "What is unclear is what it is necessary for libraries to do to protect themselves from infringing other's rights.
"Libraries need to define their legal basis. That a library's patrons are restricted to those who can get in their doors does seem archaic."
The future
Whatever the future holds, many believe that the biggest management issue today lies less in finding the right technology, and more in changing people's attitudes and behaviour.
Most people give little thought to managing their own information, let alone information belonging to the wider enterprise. How many of us, for instance, know the contents of our hard disk?
Secondly, far too little thought is given to the provenance and ownership of the rising tide of data flowing through internal networks.
Generally this will consist of digital content that has been purchased, content which the organisation itself has generated, and employee-generated content in which third-party material has been incorporated, often without any thought given to rights issues.
Herein, according to Pinfield, lies an opportunity for information professionals, both as rights advocates and as information managers.
"Instead of just buying in externally produced information resources and managing those, we should be at the heart of managing our own institution's information resources as well," he concluded. "It is a new role that we really have to take on."
Richard Poynder is a freelance business and IT journalist.
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