Dada: Digital Assets, Distributed Access

Managing the creation and use of digital assets has become an increasingly pressing challenge for museums and cultural institutions. A number of approaches and systems have been developed to meet this challenge, varying widely in complexity and cost.

"Dada" is an attempt to "get under the hood" of such systems by presenting a detailed conceptual approach of how such a digital asset management system could work and what it should do. Our hope is that developers and institutions alike will find our work useful for specifying requirements and evaluating solutions. Our approach addresses such issues as workflow, metadata capture, preservation, and use. We summarize the approach in the following sections and describe it in more detail in the downloadable design document.

• Introduction What this is all about
• Design Overview How it works
• Scenarios How people would use it: six step-by-step scenarios
• Database What the basic entities and relations are
• Design Document What is in it and how to get it
• Contact Who we are and who has helped