The JISC-funded MIDESS Project is examining issues related to the management of digital audio, images, video, and other digital content in distributed digital repositories as well as at the national level. It is being conducted by the London School of Economics, University College London, the University of Birmingham, and the University of Leeds.
Here is an excerpt from the "Aims and Objectives of the MIDESS Project" page:
- The MIDESS project will be building digital content databases at three of the partner institutions . . .
- These databases will be populated with digital content which has already been created, or is currently under creation, by the partner institutions. . . .
- Opportunities for the sharing and re-use of digital collections across institutions will be explored . . .
- Metadata standards will be established, and metadata developed, for each collection added to the repositories. . . .
- MIDESS will explore the role of digital content databases with a particular focus on interoperability with enterprise content management architectures.
- MIDESS will also aim to establish how distributed digital repositories could encourage the wider exposure and sharing of content across institutions through an evaluation of requirements for centralised metadata harvesting services.
- MIDESS will seek to pilot an infrastructure which could serve as a model for future distributed national digitisation activities.
The project has produced a number of interesting documents, especially the detailed workpackages, which deal with issues such as digital preservation, enterprise storage, intellectual property, and user requirements.
