Digital Curation Systems

Digital Asset Management Systems (DAMS) are information technology (IT) systems that manage what are known as “digital assets”. DAMS focus on complex media files maintaining not only the files themselves but als the information in the files and the information about the files known as metadata. DAMS tend to be relevant for a broad range of file types and are often used for brand asset management (managing all the files associated with advertising and branding) and library asset management (managing all the files in an organisation that need to be kept for the long-term). Depending on the role assigned to the DAMS in the organisation, they often operate as the “source of truth” for all digital assets.

Media Asset Management Systems (MAMS) are information technology (IT) systems that manage “media assets.” MAMS focus on time-based media such as video and audio files for production houses and broadcasters. While DAMS tend to be able to manage video and audio files to a limited degree, MAMS are specifically designed with video and audio production in mind and with capabilities to manage vast amounts of food and sound data and to integrate with complex video editing suites. An organisations MAMS tends to operate as the source of truth for both raw footage and post-production files.

Digital assets and media assets are often interchangeable terms. When it comes to DAMS and MAMS, however, “digital assets” tends to refer more broadly to any publishing- or broadcast-quality file with its associated content and metadata, whereas “media assets” tends to refer to multimedia files – video and audio files. Digital assets tend to be publishing- or broadcast-quality digital media files such as digital photographs, video, audio and text files which may be produced by digitising a museum object or digital photographs of a recent event, digitisation of audio recordings off a vinyl record or video recordings from a smart phone. Media assets would refer more specifically to files and their associated content and metadata that one would find in a film, radio or broadcast collection. Such video (film and footage) and audio files have a time dimension to them and tend to be far larger than their two-dimensional counterparts.

Digital Preservation Systems (DPS) are IT systems designed for the long-term preservation of digital files. The Open Archival Information System developed by many of the world’s leading space agencies provides a foundational reference model for long-term digital preservation. In the ideal digital curation technology stack, DPS’ work alongside DAMS’ and/or MAMS’ to preserve and serve digital media files. In this case the DPS tends to become the “source of truth” for the digital and media assets which are know as Archival Information Packages (AIPs). AIPs are then made available as Dissemination Information Packages (DIPs) to the DAMS or the MAMS for access by the audience.

Different digital curation systems have different strengths. Africa Media Online has put together a portfolio of complimentary digital curation systems that enable:

1. Work-in-Progress – gather and work with media files from all across your organisation bringing arrangement and management of rights and standardised information about the files preparing the best of them for ingestion into the Digital Preservation System
2. Preservation – preserve your digital assets for the long term in a repository that is your immutable “source of truth”
3. Public Access – present publishing- and broadcast-quality digital assets to select audiences whether internal users and/or the public
4. Commercial Use – enable income streams to be created from digital and media assets
5. Engagement – curate the digital files in a way that engages the public

Limecraft is a powerful DAMS system keeping track of all your media assets whether online or on offline storage, such as tape libraries. It maintains proxies of files and knows where they are stored even recalling them from tape.

• A virtual workspace connecting you to all your digital assets, wherever they may be stored
• Build collections, enrich them with metadata and share with colleagues
• Workflow tools including speedy ingestion, audio synchronisation and encoding of proxies
• Connect the physical and the digital world, and add local storage as part of your online collaborative workflows

Save hours of manual work using automatic audio transcription. Limecraft is an advanced AI development house focused on broadcast clients for whom time is money, they use many AI engines to achieve the highest possible accuracy in the least amount of time:

• Using Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) optimised for accuracy, we ensure the best possible result in minutes
• Limecraft handles all possible file formats
• Easily download your media or send them directly to the edit suite
• Create and share shot lists

Automated Subtitling uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to turn audio into high quality subtitles. It saves you the time and cost of conventional subtitling, and you retain the intellectual property rights:

• Uses a combination of speech-to-text (STT), machine translation (MT) and a dedicated service to automate the spotting
• Allows you to create same-language and translated subtitles at a fraction of the cost

Rushes management redefined. This workflow gets the most out of a production day from set to edit. In our scripted TV & feature film workflow, we use the following integrated applications.:

• Limecraft Edge backs up, synchs, transcodes and uploads your rushes, no matter whether you are shooting on ARRI, Red, Canon, Sony, or whatever you prefer
• Limecraft Flow is a browser-based dailies management software which organises your clips according to the screenplay and allows you to control who can view or download dailies

Remote and collaborative video production streamlined. The ideal workflow for magazine, documentary or human interest productions. In our unscripted TV & entertainment workflow, we use the following integrated applications:

• Limecraft Edge backs up, synchs, transcodes and uploads your rushes, no matter whether you are shooting on ARRI, Red, Canon, Sony, or whatever you prefer
• Limecraft Flow is a browser-based media management software that handles encoding and playback enabling you to manage your media through collections, tags and custom fields and easily download and share your media

Contact marketing@africamediaonline.com for a free online demo of Limecraft

Picvario is incredibly flexible in terms of its deployment and its ability to draw on multiple storage instances:

• Picvario can be installed on premise on client servers or operate as a SaaS application on AWS servers
• You can use its in-built storage or it can be connected to external storage on S3-compatible services, FTP, Google Drive or Dropbox

Using Elastic Search, Picvario is able to implement advanced search options including:

• Simple and advanced searches
• Boolean and wildcard searches
• Search by orientation
• Search by empty fields

Picvario enables you to specify access to digital assets, to whom they should be distributed and how long including:

• Time-based access permission
• Access at multiple levels from asset level to collection level
• Personalised access links
• Customise download rights

Picvario incorporates powerful AI tools for:

• Face recognition,
• Emotion recognition, and
• Object recognition

Picvario intorporates advanced multilingual support:

• Instantly translate title, description, keywords, alt text, licenses and copyright fields
• The platform supports numerous languages and writing systems
• Unlimited number of translations per field

Contact marketing@africamediaonline.com for a free online demo of Picvario

Quartex is the only digital collections platform that includes both Optical Character Recognition (OCR)and AI-powered Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology. Together, HTR and OCR enable search beyond metadata, making your text-based materials more discoverable and accessible through automated transcription and full-text search. Quartex can become your transcription one-stop-shop; your command centre for generating editable, fully searchable manuscript transcriptions and transcriptions of all your handwritten and printed digital assets.

Open your AV materials to deeper exploration with the in-platform hosting, streaming and discovery capabilities of Quartex. From oral histories and music recordings to newsreels, commercial films and footage from private collections, your audio-visual files can be ingested into Quartex and showcased with our powerful range of discoverability and accessibility features.

Engage your user community and improve understanding of your archival collections with dynamic, feature-rich and easy-to-build digital exhibitions. As well as being a vital means of staying connected with audiences as part of your outreach strategy, digital exhibitions also create journeys into your digital collections. Use them to guide users deeper into your most popular or historically significant resources or to highlight less well known facets of your collections.

Achieve your open access objectives with Quartex, which enables you to publish your digitised archival collections for global audiences. Give analogue collections the digital profile they deserve, opening up new research opportunities and broader awareness of your library’s holdings, and publish newly digitised materials that enable researchers to critically evaluate accepted knowledge. Quartex uses the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) to publish resources for collaborative research.

Quartex is easy to implement and intuitive to use, and supports diverse user needs and workflows, providing a robust and scalable solution to digital asset management and presentation. Manage digitised assets your way with customisable settings and workflows, and powerful batch editing functionality. Then customise your front-end site or multiple sites to meet WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards as well as your navigation and branding requirements.

Quartex is more than a digital asset management (DAM) system. It’s also a powerful content management system (CMS), a website creation tool with which you can build multiple, showstopping websites to showcase your digital collections. Build responsive and highly searchable websites that meet WCAG 2.1AA accessibility standards as well as your own navigation and branding requirements.

Contact marketing@africamediaonline.com for a free online demo of AM Quartex