Digital media, consisting of images, audio, video, and documents have become integral to Yale’s tripartite mission to create, preserve, and disseminate knowledge. The Yale Media Management Environment (aka DAM) provides a phased approach to building shared infrastructure to facilitate the creation, use, and reuse of digital media content across the academic landscape.

Digital media has become an essential component of research, teaching and learning, discourse, creative works, publishing, dissemination, communications, and preservation of cultural heritage at Yale. Historically, academic and administrative units have worked within traditional boundaries to implement solutions to support the creation, use, and reuse of digital media. This has culminated in multiple systems, isolated pools of digital content, and high costs. The high level of expertise required to build robust systems, the high cost of building digital media systems on a small scale, and the complex copyright, privacy, and policy issues are barriers inhibiting the effective use of digital media at Yale.

Media Management Environment at Yale

The Yale Media Management Environment is a core component of the Yale Digital Commons. It provides a phased approach to consolidating technology, leveraging community expertise, developing essential policies and shared practice, and aggregating digital media content to provide a robust campus-wide solution to digital media management.

• PHASE 1:  The first phase of the program focused on the digital imaging workflow and image management needs of Yale’s professional production staff and cultural heritage stewards. Starting in collaboration with the Museums and expanding to the Libraries this phase of the program went live in February 2010. It included the implementation of the Artesia Digital Asset Management system, Isilon Mass Storage system, and development of common practices and workflows in digital image management for cultural heritage collections.

• PHASE 2:  The second phase of the program is adding digital audio, digital video, and open dissemination capabilities to an upgraded Media Management Environment called Media Manager which went live in late summer of 2011. This phase taps the expertise of Yale’s professional audio/video community to shape the environment to support the production workflow, use, reuse, and dissemination of audio and video in addition to documents and images. This represents the baseline capability in digital media infrastructure that Yale’s faculty, students, and staff expect and need to be effective in the digital age

• PHASE 3:  The third phase of the program, slated to begin in 2013, will extend the digital media infrastructure through a site license and integration into the everyday working environments used by faculty, students, and staff at Yale and across the globe. Specifically, this phase will tether enterprise environments such as the Classes*v2 learning environment, the Drupal Sites World Wide Web environment, the emerging digital preservation environment, and ITS Identity Services to the Media Management Environment. In scaling the infrastructure campus-wide, Yale scholars and learners will be able to use the Media Management Environment to easily collect, organize, exchange, use, and re-use digital media, across all of their online research, teaching and learning, and publishing venues, whether inside Yale or around the world.

Getting Involved

The Media Management Environment program has three levels of Partner Participation and supports community collaboration through the YDC Forum. The YDC Forum fosters exchange, discussion, and collaboration among Yale’s digital media community of practice.

Contact ODAI@yale.edu to get involved.

Conclusion

The Yale Media Management Environment Program is a managed approach to provide, over time, the essential scaffolding to Yale’s community for the effective creation, use, re-use, dissemination, and institutional stewardship of digital media in support of Yale’s mission. It establishes a mechanism for containing cost by reducing redundant efforts and gaining economies of scale while expanding capacity in essential digital media capabilities. It utilizes the high level of expertise within the community to shape digital media tools, common institutional practices, essential policies, access to digital content, and to support digital literacy among scholars, learners, and staff. And, finally, it delivers this capacity through a networked environment that extends into the every-day working environments of the institution, and beyond, to provide global reach to Yale’s scholarly work in the digital age.