The Centre for Flexible Learning offers services for streaming audio and video files for courses, departmental and institutional use.  Sources of media assets are typically original productions and media licensed for course use from text publishers.  These assets are made available to students, faculty and others over local area network and the Internet via a Windows streaming media server.  The centre has hundreds of digital media titles that are already available or will soon be available for use.

At present there are only minimal workflow procedures in place for information concerning media assets to be documented and no procedures in place to access titles in a searchable catalogue.

A Digital Asset Management (DAM) system is a tool for organizing digital media assets for storage and retrieval and ideally for publishing.  It also allows you to attach metadata, important information about each asset. Metadata can be descriptive, such as keywords or categories; technical, such as file type, or size; or legal such as rights and credit.  Assigning metadata to an asset allows you to search for the asset by describing it.

In the absence of an off-the-shelf product, it is our intention to develop a proof-of-concept application.  This project will focus on providing functionality described in points 1, 2 and 4 of the specification above.  As a proof-of-concept project, this application is not intended as a finished application but rather a demonstration of the design concept.

The project will assist in our evaluation of the time and resources that would be required to produce an operational system that would satisfy basic asset management needs.