Information Scotland The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland ISSN 1743-5471 Issue contents | Journal contents | About the online edition of the journal April 2006 Volume 4(2)

Digital assets

Mandate for the future

A new toolkit on digital preservation and asset management for the education and LIS communities offers practical support and real life examples. Craig Green reports.
Increasingly, the intellectual assets of organisations are being held in digital format, and the preservation and access to these digital resources has become a pressing issue.

Such assets are dependent on a rapidly changing technological infrastructure. This makes them significantly less permanent than their paper-based equivalents.

The recent EU consultation document i2010 Digital Libraries has brought the issue of digital assets and their preservation into sharp focus for the library and information sector. Managing digital assets has also received some attention in the education sector recently with JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) funding a call for proposals on this topic.

Glasgow’s John Wheatley College, with support from SLIC, CILIPS’ sister organisation, was successful in submitting one of these proposals. The aim was to produce a toolkit to enable further education colleges to apply a coherent approach to the management and preservation of digital assets.

Partnering the college in the Mandate Project (Managing Digital Assets in Tertiary Education) was the Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR), based at the University of Strathclyde. CDLR staff were able to contribute their considerable expertise on metadata and workflows.

The project gained further support from a steering group including SLIC, CDLR and Glasgow City Council, the Scottish Funding Council and the JISC Regional Support Centre South and West. Although Mandate case study work continues until June, the toolkit is available now.

The toolkit is available as a website or pdf document from www.jwheatley.ac.uk/mandate/. Based on tested practice, it focuses on curricular documents in the college and offers a model strategy for adoption and use by other colleges.

The Mandate project included an examination of the roles of various members of the college staff – including teachers, librarians, administrators and technicians – in the creation of metadata, workflow models, and templates suitable for supporting managed information lifecycles. To illustrate a workflow model the toolkit drew on an example provided by CILIPS using Council minutes.

The asset management system is based on Dublin Core metadata and MARC 21 to enable browsing for materials by curricular area and course. This also enables seamless searching of the library catalogue to give information about physical assets and links to digital assets in the same ‘search results’ window.

John Wheatley sees its library catalogue as key to supporting flexible learning. A unified search for physical and digital learning materials was therefore crucial, and output to MARC 21 format became a main system requirement.
The system design takes a holistic view of digital assets. The finished system will manage college documents associated with its governance, such as minutes of meetings for public access, teaching materials for staff access and learning materials for student access.

The Mandate Toolkit comprises:
l A database structure for web-based information storage including specifications. The current technical base at the College is based on Microsoft servers, so Active Directory, SQL Server and Internet Information Server lie at the heart of the system

l Templates to support the creation of metadata suitable for storage and retrieval processes and also suitable for supporting managed information lifecycles in the context of metadata and workflows.

l A case study, which demonstrates its application in John Wheatley College and discusses some of the main issues included in such developments. Information professionals can use the case study to see the issues demonstrated in the context of real decisions taken by a small organisation as it develops its approach to the management of digital assets.

l A training programme. While recognising that librarians in colleges will already be trained in information handling skills, the project anticipates a key role for them in supporting the training of others. The toolkit outlines aspects of training related to developing a digital asset management system including:

For staff:
l Understanding the strategy and its purpose;
l Awareness and familiarity with Workflow models and the various roles of staff within these;
l Use of specific software; and
l Information handling skills

For students:
l Information literacy skills

The Mandate toolkit offers valuable practical support to the education community and the wider LIS sector, and it is available now. A presentation on Mandate will be offered at the annual SLIC FE event, ‘Sharing Vision, Planning Practice’ due to take place 23 November. IS

Craig Green is Information and Learning Services Manager at John Wheatley College, Glasgow.

Information Scotland Vol. 4(2) April 2006

Information Scotland is delivered online by the SAPIENS electronic publishing service based at the Centre for Digital Library Research. SLAINTE (Scottish libraries across the Internet) offers further information about librarianship and information management in Scotland.