General

In the context of the DAMS, what we call a digital asset is essentially a bundle of different types of data, consisting for instance of a primary media file (publication/production file), either born digital or digitally reformatted, accompanying metadata, and any additional/secondary/derivative files. The DAMS stores these different types of data in so-called datastreams.

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Simple assets are assets that does not have constituent parts or "child" assets. Examples are individual photographs, audio files, movies, or single-page print material. In comparison, a complex asset contains constituent parts which will have individual PIDs in the DAMS, e. g. the issues of a journal or the pages of a book.

Simple asset content models

In order to appropriately store, manage and disseminate digitized physical assets, the DAMS uses content models for different classes of media. The following content models are available for processing simple assets:

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See the documentation page on content models for details on each model and the file types supported.

Paged content/ complex assets

Digital assets can be designated upon ingest as either a parent or a child in a parent-child relationship. Digital assets that have child assets are referred to as complex assets. Currently, complex assets are used to model paged content, e.g. Books or Issues of publications/serials. Typically, a book-level asset and its pages are created using image files that are the result of a scanning process (digitally reformatted content).

Page-level assets

The individual pages of a book or serial issue are stored in the OBJ datastream of Page assets. These assets typically do not contain descriptive metadata. Page-level assets cannot be published to the Collections Portal individually, only as part of a Book or Issue.

Book/issue-level assets

A Book or Issue asset stores information about the Page assets the book or issue consists of, and their order. In addition, the Book or Serial Issue asset stores the descriptive metadata for the book or issue. Typically, Book or Serial Issue assets does not contain an OBJ datastream.

Publication/series-level assets

Publication-level assets are intended to organize publication issues inside the DAMS. The DAMS GUI will show a calendar display to navigate publication issues based on creation/issuance month and year. Publication/series-level assets cannot be published to the Collections Portal and there is currently no calendar display available on the Collections Portal to browse serial issues.

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