Digital archiving and digital asset management enables you to preserve, describe and index images, audio, video, text and other organizational material.

Information about information

One of the most important principles of digital asset management is the ability to describe the documents you are trying to preserve so that you and others can retrieve these documents at a later time. These descriptions are known as metadata and allow those responsible for archiving your organization's material to attach descriptions about what information they are preserving in a consistent way.

Metadata may include information about the material's author, date collected, brief description about the material or even the licensing requirements for obtaining and using the material in different applications.

Digital Asset Management Systems

In addition to the ability to preserve and describe important material, a good DAMS should also provide you with powerful indexing capabilities so you can quickly and easily retrieve your archived material, workflow management to allow you to manage the addition of multiple items and metadata in a controlled and consistent way, as well as the ability to expand and customize the metadata you are using to describe your material.

Introducing DSpace

DSpace is a free and open source system that provides a platform for archiving, preserving and managing various organizational material.

DSpace is ideal for institutions such as museums, libraries and universities and provides a great way to manage research materials and publications, but can also be tailored to meet the needs of all kinds of organizations.

Through the use of the Dublin Core standard, DSpace can provide out-of-the-box storage for generic digital material such as video, audio, images and text, whilst also being flexible enough to store other information formats whether they be customized or an industry standard.

Save money, save time

If you are considering buying off-the-shelf proprietary digital asset management software, consider the total costs involved, not just the software license but also installation, configuration and ongoing support as well as whether the license will need to be renewed annually. You should also be careful of distributed or web based solutions; these can carry extra “client” costs which requires a license be purchased for each desktop computer that accesses the software.

DSpace, on the other hand, is free and open source software; not only free to modify and improve to meet the needs of your organization but also free of any complicated licensing costs; and Wijiti continues to keep costs low by providing quality, cost-effective service and support for all your DSpace requirements.

Check out our competitive installation, training and support plans.

How do I get started?

Wijiti provides affordable service and support to organizations interested in rolling out DSpace, whether it be a basic installation or full digital archiving solution.

We can also assist your organization with user training to help you and your team get the most out of DSpace. We provide in-house and remote training in the following countries;

• United Kingdom

• United States*

• Canada*

• Australia*

• New Zealand*

• South Africa*

• Singapore*

• Hong Kong*

^{* Remote training only. Consists of user training over the telephone or via other Internet technologies such as Skype. Please contact us for more information.}

Wijiti can also assist your organization with;

• Customization and theme development

• Data migration to new or existing DSpace systems

• Custom converter development for the Dublin Core Meta Toolkit

Content Management Integration

Wijiti is working hard to integrate DSpace with leading open source content management systems. We have already relased Joomla!-based extensions for displaying digital assets and there are plans underway to support Drupal.

Further Information

Contact Wijiti for more information about our DSpace pricing guides

Find out more about DSpace

Check us out on the provider grid

Video courtesy of the DSpace Foundation.