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Today Susan and Erik attended a webinar on a Digital Asset management system offered by a ExLibris information systems. It was interesting to see how the vendor discussed asset management and how this current example of a system differs from those previously offered, particularly because we have used a few of their previous products! In the current system a sharp distinction was made between archiving/preservation activities (which fall under the purview of the software) and the discovery layer (which does not).

The speaker discussed a number of use cases that focused on archiving books, legal documents, websites, and a variety special collections resources. I was left wondering what differentiated this sort of system from traditional IR or digital archive systems. The webinar included a few interesting features such as format conversion, metadata tracking on submission and preservation processes, and a form of version control for migrated digital objects.

We were motivated to attend this webinar more to inform our interest in the ‘state of the art’ with regards to digital asset management systems and hope to be able to complete some comparative analysis of systems in the coming months.