Digital Assets Content Management System

BACKGROUND The effective management of content is a key challenge in the digital era. The publishing of websites is often a spectacular and expensive " once-off " exercise that delivers an impressive result in the short term, but in the long term represents many challenges for content management and re-use. Currency of website content rapidly becomes an issue. Similarly, many organisations have a wide range of text, image, sound and video assets that are distributed on a range of systems, but which are poorly management and do not facilitate searching, indexing or use, internally or externally. A range of tools for document management, content management and website support do exist, but few are build with a mind to multilingual handling, archival control of content and editorial control of publishing. The system developed by Prosentient Systems for Digital Asset Management is targeted specifically to address the market gap in this area. This white paper is a conceptual overview of the software function and current literature review of the state of play in content management systems. A Content Management System allows documents (web pages, and potentially multiple other document formats) and metadata to be stored in a database through a simple user interface. Because the content is stored separately from the presentation design, documents can be contributed by staff who do not need to be familiar with HTML and complex publishing procedures. Design and presentation aspects are handled by web designers who set up the appearance and functionality of the site with HTML templates. After a site has been set up and handed over it can be updated simply and consistently by pasting text into entry forms and single button clicks to preview and publish. Navigational index documents are automatically rebuilt and metatags inserted to facilitate the operation of search engines. The separation of content also facilitates content re-use, and delivery in new technological formats (eg XML). Prosentient systems has built a system with core capabilities in the management and re-use of digital content in a multilingual framework. The new Digital Asset Management System will have the following features: • a generalised import engine capable to facilitate database capture of existing site content (images and text) • embedded XML handling and XSL publishing capability • considerably expanded digital asset management facilities • inherent multilingual capabilities • enhanced content re-use facilities While there are some (very expensive) tools for content management in the …