UVM’s page.

My page.

UVM’s Home Page.

After many sleepless hours of coding, v1 of a basic re-design to UVM’s website is up and running. Links (as many of them as I could get) work as well.

Check it out here.

I’ve been doing a re-design of UVM’s website on my own time. Let me know what you think.

The current page.

New Design:

I am going to go out on a limb here and talk about the future of Digital Asset Management. I believe the reason why DAM software is not working well for most people is for a few really big reasons.

1. There are too many non-compatible non-cross-platform solutions out there.
2. Many of the best solutions are not open-source. That makes many institutions unable to buy contracts for the use of the software. The institutions are also dependent on outside programers and this is always a risk.
3. Many solutions don’t implement robust infrastructure. That is to say, the time it take to query and load an asset takes way too long for the DAM software to be useful. This is often a fault of infrastructure problems at each particular institution. Many institutions haven’t funded gigabit switches enough. They are slowly adding these switches to critical network nodes, but the increased bandwidth hasn’t trickled down to the end users yet. Added to this is the need for large enough servers to through out the data fast enough.

The solutions? Well, there are a few obvious ones.

1. Go with an open-source, standardized, digital repository system like Fedora Commons or Dspace.
2. Add an extendible and “sexy” front and back end online GUI for creating user accounts and the like.
3. This is critical. Create a FUSE-based File System “glue” layer between the repository and the end user. Why do this? Simple.
a. Increased unlimited security. The file system can be upgraded with various encryption methods very easily.
b. Platform independent.
c. Open source.
d. This is the best of all. End users can use WHATEVER desktop DAM solution they want to use. All they have to do is point their DAM software to a hard-drive on their computer and away they go. They can be importing files into Final Cut live off a Fedora server. They can be scrolling through Art History slides from the Thirties in Adobe Bridge. They can run a spotlight search on the entire archive. That search would be translated into a Fedora query and return as a Spotlight result. Boom, done.

Users would be able to use their preferred applications. The ones they use all the time. The documents they would be working on, however, would be organized, archived, sorted, and versioned, somewhere else. This increases security, decreases the risks associated with HD crashes, increased collaboration (just imaging typing in someone’s user-name in Spotlight to see their shared MS word docs right in a hard-drive on your desktop), and decreases the amount of time it takes to train everyone on some clunky, underdeveloped, solution that nobody will really use.

You want to archive 3000 songs? Drag them into a folder and the rest gets done automaticly. If iTunes can scrub through metadata on a drag-and-drop, FUSE can do it to.

You want to see multiple versions of a file? Do a search of the HD.

You want to manipulate the photo? Open it in Photoshop and do that.

You want to collaborate with a peer on a document? Set the permissions directly in the file with Get Info or any other platform independent permissions window.

The possibilities are endless and the learning curve is minimal. So that’s where the future of DAMs lies. Not monolithic solutions, microlithic solutions with solid translators in-between. Imagine two people working on a digital archive at the same time. One person is using Adobe Bridge on a Mac, another person is using a normal browser on a PC. They are doing the same thing in their preferred way!

Now stop whining, wringing your hands about how he’s a Republican in disguise, and start actually getting out there and helping eachother. He’s not our savor and he’s a far cry from the evil. He’s one dude with the crummiest job in the world. Only one other person even applied for it! And it won’t do to freak out and stay scared all the time.

Go help your neighbors with their empty beer bottle collection already.

VOTE!