This post examines the proposed criteria for eligibility for the SPECTRUM DAM Partner scheme. First, the definition of a DAMS and selected parts of the mapping of DAM activity to SPECTRUM procedures are presented. These are extracted from the SPECTRUM DAM 1.0 document, available at http://www.collectionslink.org.uk/spectrum-dam-resources. The eligibility criteria (taken from http://www.collectionslink.org.uk/spectrum-resources/2104-spectrum-dam-partner-scheme-dam-partner-scheme) are then quoted. Finally, I provide comments on, and suggestions for, the criteria, and a proposed re-wording of them all.
Definition of a DAMS
The Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) defines digital assets as:
“Digital materials created or owned by your institution.
Digital assets exist in a variety of formats, and can include text, web, audio, video and image files. Digital images of objects in your collection are digital assets, as are logo image files, corporate Powerpoint presentations and any other digital resources created by your institution that generate revenue or that provide valuable content to employees or clients.
Digital assets may be used in many contexts, including sales, marketing, education, web development, collections management and digital preservation. Sometimes you will see the term ‘media asset’ used to refer more narrowly to audio or video content.”
In the broadest sense, DAM refers to the processes and practices involved in the creation, description, storage, discovery, re-use and preservation of digital assets.
Significant statements relating to SPECTRUM procedures
Many of the SPECTRUM procedures mentioned in the mapping of DAM activity to SPECTRUM procedures simply say that this procedure may generate digital media, which should be managed by the DAMS. The following points are more significant/specific. Numbers in brackets refer to correspondences to the criteria given in the next section:
| Object entry | The digital assets should be associated permanently with the object number of their corresponding collection item through a scheme of persistent identifiers . (3) [Incidentally, I think this is conflating two separate points. The DAMS should provide a means of assigning persistent identifiers to the digital resources it manages. Quite separately, it should ensure that there are persistent links between digital resources and relevant collections objects and processes.] |
| Acquisition | At the same time as the material object is formally accessioned into the permanent collection, all associated digital assets must be accessioned into the DAMS. (1) |
| Inventory control | Digital assets must be counted as assets of the organisation in the same sense as the physical collections items. The DAMS should serve as a central inventory of digital assets belonging to the organisation in the same context as inventory-level records in the Collections Management System. (1) |
| Location and movement control | In the sense that the purpose of the SPECTRUM Procedure is to promote the recoverability of the collection items, the equivalent DAMS activity must ensure that the organisation is able to retrieve associated digital assets as efficiently as possible. |
| Transport | Where digital assets are sent or transferred (for example, by email, cloud storage or FTP service), the organisation should ensure adequate management and documentation of these processes both to promote accountability and to mitigate the risk of infringement or misuse. (5) |
| Cataloguing | Where possible, the DAMS and associated policies and practices should support the capturing of information about the provenance, rights, usage, format and preservation requirements of the associated digital assets.The cataloguing of digital assets ought equally to provide information about connections or cross-references between assets.The cataloguing of digital assets should be based on a common taxonomy and controlled vocabularies with those used in the classification of the physical collections. (4) |
| Conservation and collections care | Principles of preventive conservation are also relevant to effective digital asset management. It is important to plan the conversion of redundant or non-standard digital asset formats as part of the ongoing maintenance of the DAMS and DAM Strategy. This also relates to the regular assessment of preferred formats when creating new digital assets. (6) |
| Risk Management | Policies and procedures for backup, recovery and disaster planning in relation to digital assets (7) ought to be clearly linked to associated SPECTRUM policies and procedures for overall risk management. |
| Audit | The DAMS should support the process of audit, including provision for the assessment of authenticity and provenance of digital media … (8) |
| Rights Management | Information about the specific rights management conditions associated with the digital assets should be created, captured and managed within the DAMS. (2) |
| Use of Collections | … the DAMS should be capable of interoperating with a wide range of other systems, such as web publishing and e-commerce platforms. (5) |
Criteria for Eligibility (as specified by CT)
- You run a DAM system or have a DAM module or functionality plug-in that is interoperable with a collections management system that is based on, or compatible with SPECTRUM
- Your DAM system includes comprehensive rights management
- Your DAM system can share a common schema and persistent IDs, respecting the complexity of cultural heritage metadata
- Your DAM system can share common vocabularies/authorities
- Your system has the ability to batch-export and import data for interoperability with yours and other systems without losing quality and content
- Your DAM supports a wide range of current industry-standard media formats and is extensible to account for future formats
- Support for back up and data integrity is provided
- Support for data auditing and cleaning is provided
- The end-user has access to support/ a support community/ a user group / community of developers
- You can provide 2 years of accounting records for due diligence purposes plus a recent client reference
Questions and concerns
- Delete (or justify) ‘plug-in’. Before ‘interoperable with’, add ‘part of, or’ (and add a comma after ‘with’)
- Replace ‘comprehensive rights management’ by ‘rights management capabilities conforming to SPECTRUM standards’
- Seems to be two separate points (before and after the comma). First part: delete (or justify/define) ‘common schema’; change ‘share … persistent IDs’ to ‘assign persistent IDs to digital resources’. Second part: presumably this is trying to say that the DAMS should be capable of storing [and delivering? – see (5)] custom cultural heritage metadata?
- Replace ‘share’ by ‘facilitate conformance to’
- I’m not sure that ‘batch-export and import’ captures the sense of ‘interoperating’ in the source text (above). For example, a key capability might be the ability to deliver an image, at a specified resolution and containing the desired metadata, in response to a web request. This may well result in a loss of quality – e.g. if a thumbnail image is requested. This delivery may also involve a change of format/encoding, e.g. TIFF -> JPEG; XML -> HTML. Also, there is potential confusion between ‘data’ and ‘digital resources’. Finally, the suggested wording loses the point in the original text (above), which relates to recording delivery of a digital resource.
- Shouldn’t this include something about format conversion capabilities (as per the source text)?
- OK
- After ‘auditing’ add ‘conforming to SPECTRUM standards’. What does ‘[data] cleaning’ mean? Is it tidying of metadata? Or doing something to the digital resource itself? What happened to the need to assess authenticity and provenance, mentioned in the source text?
- OK
- OK
The criteria cover all the points I extracted from the full SPECTRUM DAMS document, apart from retrievability (Location and Movement Control). Also, as noted under (5), the need to record delivery of a resource has not been included. The point about the DAMS being able to support delivery of digital resources in a flexible way (e.g. choosing image size/resolution/encoding) needs either to appear in the criteria, or to form part of an (as yet missing) normative description of what a DAMS actually is/does.
Proposed re-wording of the criteria
- You run a DAM system or have a DAM module or functionality that is part of, or interoperable with, a collections management system based on, or compatible with, SPECTRUM
- Your DAM system includes rights management capabilities conforming to SPECTRUM standards
- Your DAM system can assign persistent IDs to the digital resources it manages, and allows these IDs to be used to request resources
- Your DAM system can store and deliver custom cultural heritage metadata
- Your DAM system can facilitate conformance to common cultural heritage vocabularies/authorities
- Your system has the ability to deliver each digital resource in an appropriate variety of formats and resolutions, while retaining required metadata
- Your DAM supports a wide range of current industry-standard media formats and is extensible to account for future formats
- Support for back up and for ensuring data integrity is provided
- Support is provided for data auditing which conforms to SPECTRUM standards
- The end-user has access to support/ a support community/ a user group / community of developers
- You can provide 2 years of accounting records for due diligence purposes plus a recent client reference
This still leaves the need to say something about searchability, bulk import/export (possibly), and the recording and/or protection of digital resource delivery actions.