Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Taking Control: Identifying Motivations for Migrating Library Digital Asset Management Systems

Taking Control: Identifying Motivations for Migrating Library Digital Asset Management Systems. Ayla Stein, Santi Thompson. D-Lib Magazine. September/October 2015.
     "Digital asset management systems (DAMS) have become important tools for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digitized and born digital content to library patrons." This article looks at why institutions are migrating to other systems and in what direction. Often migrations happen as libraries refine their needs. The literature on the migration process and the implications is limited; this article provide several case studies of repository migration.A presentation by Lisa Gregory "demonstrated the important role digital preservation plays in deciding to migrate from one DAMS to another and reiterated the need for preservation issues and standards to be incorporated into the tools and best practices used by librarians when implementing a DAMS migration".  Repository migration gives institutions the opportunity to move from one type of repository, such as home grown or proprietary, to another type.  Some of the reasons that institutions migrated to other repositories (by those ranked number 1) are:
  • Implementation & Day-to-Day Costs
  • Preservation
  • Extensibility
  • Content Management
  • Metadata Standards
Formats they wanted in the new system included:

Response Num. %
PDF 28 98
JPEG 26 90
MP3 22 76
JPEG2000 21 72
TIFF 21 72
MP4 19 66
MOV 17 59
CSV 16 55
DOC 13 45
DOCX 12 41

For metadata, they wanted the new system to support multiple metadata schema; administrative, preservation, structural, and/or technical metadata standards; local and user created metadata, and linked data. In addition, METS and PREMIS were highly desirable.

The new system should support, among others:
  • RDF/XML
  • Ability to create modules/plugins/widgets/APIs, etc.  
  • Support DOIs and ORCIDs
Preservation features and functionality were the ability to:
  • generate checksum values for ingested digital assets.
  • perform fixity verification for ingested digital assets.
  • assign unique identifiers for each AIP
  • support PREMIS or local preservation metadata schema.
  • produce AIPs.
  • integrate with other digital preservation tools.
  • synchronize content with other storage systems (including off site locations).
  • support multiple copies of the repository — including dark and light (open and closed) instances.
The survey suggests that "many information professionals are focused on creating a mechanism to ensure the integrity of digital objects." Other curatorial actions were viewed as important, but some "inconclusive results lend further support claims of a disconnect between digital preservation theory and daily practices". About two-thirds were moving to open source repositories, while one fifth were moving to proprietary.


2 comments:

Unknown said...

I surprised how many of the respondents cited Digital Preservation as a reason for moving but picked systems that do not include the full range of OAIS functionality.

Unknown said...

So were we!