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.

Digital Preservation Matters.