Bring Your Rich Media Library to the 21st Century
- The Transition to a Digital Library

With the amount of information growing at an accelerating rate, achieving and maintaining a state-of-the-art media library becomes a necessity. While many vendors claim that an all-digital library is obtainable, reality often dictates that libraries have both a physical and digital content makeup.

Many media libraries can be likened to “cleaning out the garage”. The question of “how to get started”, is the biggest barrier to success.  Both the cost and time to create the ideal library can be major commitments of resources.

In order to achieve a library that meets the needs of your organization, there are several major components to consider. This document outlines how to determine your objectives and the major steps needed to achieve your long-term strategic goals.

What to ask before you begin:

Several things must be considered before you begin the transformation. Questions such as:

Once some or all of these questions are addressed, laying out strategies to achieve your goals becomes easier.

Phases of Transformation:

Moving content from the physical/analog world to the digital world will require you go through several steps. There are parallel but separate steps when dealing with rich media content, such as video, still images or print material. Detailed below is a description of the overall process, with references to content specific requirements.

Phase 1 – Library Assessment:
The first phase for transforming the library is library assessment. What will give your collection the greatest value at the earliest opportunity? Should you be focused on new content being created then come back and look at legacy materials at a later time? Does the degeneration of physical media require that you focus your efforts on preserving content of older material? Are there legal requirements that need to be met that better organization and new distribution capabilities can help you with? In other words, what part of the ‘garage’ do I start with?

Phase II – Metadata Structure:
The attributes associated with assets are Metadata information. Metadata can be as simple as a part number for each asset, to very structured information layered into index fields, keywords and abstracts. The primary purpose of meta-data is to allow assets to be easily and quickly found through the use of databased tools. By describing an attribute or a set of attributes for assets, researchers and content consumers looking for relevant content can see everything the library has to offer. Structuring the metadata information is key to the long-term success of the collection.

Phase III – Targeting:
Once you have assessed the library you can prioritize the content that needs to be targeted. For example, if you have determined that preservation of old material is a high priority, which materials really need to be preserved and which can be deep-archived or even disposed of.  It is not uncommen to find a 10 to 20% retention rate from the original amount of library content.

Phase IV – Analog to Digital
Often the most expensive part of library conversion is transferring physical media to electronic media. Effective targeting (Phase III) can help lower the expense of phase IV considerably.

Motion assets go through an encoding process to create digital motion files.  Still images go through a scanning process.  Text, such as documents and catalogs can be scanned as an image, but can also be scanned through an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) process that will allow the printed materials to be edited.

Determining what digital formats are required is also important. Do you need broadcast quality digital video or will lower quality digital video files serve your needs? Do you need to consider having proxies of your content so you can quickly view files online? Would storyboards of video help you make decisions faster?

Phase V – Asset Ingestion/Uploading
At this phase, the assets (video/stills/documents) can be registered into an Asset Management System. Metadata records are created and fleshed out with specific metadata information as determined in Phase II. The digital assets are uploaded into the Asset Management System, the physical counterpart can be archived and both the physical and digital asset married to its metadata.

At this point, the assets start to become more valuable because they are easily found.

Phase VI – Asset Delivery
Assets become truly valuable when they are accessible and an Asset Management System can greatly facilitate and manage how assets can be used.

There is often a need for assets to be pushed out to individuals or groups from the library manager. There is also a need to allow those individuals or groups to pull from the library when it is convenient for them. Additionally, the content should be available in a way that can be best used by the content consumer. This could be both digital and physical formats or either one. A good Asset Management System should allow both push/pull and multi format delivery.

Additionally, content libraries can grow large as more and more materials are added to the library. This can create confusion for the content consumer. Having a method to control what the content consumer can see and acquire can be a great benefit.

Secure Internet based Application Service Asset Management Systems also have several key features that can be beneficial:

Conclusion:

Moving your library into the 21st century is not a small undertaking, but by breaking the process down in manageable steps your goals can be achieved. Allied Vaughn has extensive experience with some of the largest organizations in the world, and can help you navigate the transformation process.