This page describes similarities and key differences between DAMS1 and DAMS2

Reminder: DAMS Policy

https://cloud.wikis.utexas.edu/wiki/x/WsRPAg

• The DAMS is part of a larger digital stewardship ecosystem: The DAMS can be used to streamline access to curated content, predominantly for public access through the Collections Portal, the HRDI and Primeros Libros Portals, or Spotlight.

  • The DAMS is not for temporary storage of digital items.

  • The DAMS is only a secondary storage location for asset files that UTL curates. All content that is added to the DAMS must be preserved in UTL’s digital archival infrastructure (exception: Primeros Libros content provided by partner institutions).

  • Reformatted content that is not digitized by UTL’s Digitization unit must conform to the UTL Digitization specifications: https://cloud.wikis.utexas.edu/wiki/x/wQGRAg

  • For digitized/reformatted content, the ‘main’ asset Media entity typically contains the Production Master. Avoid storing Archival Master files in the DAMS, unless you anticipate frequent access requests. Archival Master files can be restored from the digital preservation archive upon request (contact Karla Roig Blay).

  • Born-digital content must adhere to UTL standards for acquisition and stewardship of born-digital collections. Consult with the Digital Processing Archivist (Jeremy Thompson) or other Digital Stewardship staff BEFORE you agree to acquire born-digital content.

  • Archival processing of born-digital files, in particular redacting of content and file format normalization must be completed before the content is ingested into the DAMS. Unredacted/unnormalized files MUST NOT be stored in the DAMS.

• The DAMS is the last step before publishing and not a parking lot: Ideally, content added to the DAMS will have sufficient metadata to allow for management and timely publishing of content.

  • All content must be inventoried outside of the DAMS prior to ingest.

  • Archival content: Content that by nature of its formal characteristics and organization is best described in an archival finding aid should have a sufficiently detailed finding aid, if necessary accompanied by an inventory that provides item/object-specific metadata.

  • Library materials: Content that by nature of its formal characteristics is best described in a catalog record must have a catalog record. All materials that can be cataloged in the OCLC database must have an OCLC number.

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• Every asset is a Node: The new version of the DAMS is based on Drupal, a web content management system. Content in Drupal is referred to as a “Node”. Every asset in the DAMS, including collections, serials, books/issues, pages, is represented by a Node, which has a unique ID. The Node stores the metadata which describes an asset.

  • Assets in DAMS2 technically have two IDs: a running-number node ID, which is unique only within the context of the current DAMS2 instance, and a UUID, which is generally unique. Users will typically interact with assets through the DAMS2 GUI using the Node ID.

  • DAMS1 PIDs were retained during the migration, in order for Collections Portal URLs to remain stable. New content that is published to the Collections Portal will also receive a UUID-based URL.

  • Paged Content is modeled similar to DAMS1 by creating a ‘sparse’ Node for each page and associating the page Nodes with a book/issue-level asset Node.

• Every file is represented by a Media entity: Media entities in Drupal allow to associate files with (technical) metadata about a file. When adding files to the DAMS, they are associated with a Node that represents an asset.

  • Media entities are functionally similar to datastreams in DAMS1.

  • Similar to the different types of datastreams in DAMS1, DAMS2 distinguishes different types of Media entity (representing for instance the main asset file, derivatives/service files, thumbnails, transcripts, etc.).

• Assets are bundles of files: Similar to DAMS1, which bundled different types of datastreams under a Fedora object/PID, asset Nodes in DAMS2 are typically associated with different Media entities: the ‘main’ asset file, derivatives, OCR results, transcripts or captions (if applicable). It depends on the Content Model of a particular asset, which types of Media will be available.

  • Upon ingest, the DAMS software automatically creates certain types of derivatives.

  • Media entities other than the ‘main’ file entity will be automatically named.

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User accounts will be created upon request by a DAMS manager.

You will find your credentials in Stache: https://stache.utexas.edu/

If you change your password in the DAMS interface, the Stache user credentials will not be updated automatically. Please contact a DAMS manager if you need to reset your password.

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Ingesting an audio file will trigger creation of an MP3 derivative

It is possible to add a custom thumbnail image for audio assets, for instance showing a photo of the media carrier. Custom thumbnails must be added in a separate step after the initial ingest. The thumbnail files must be named using the following pattern: [node ID]-additional.jpg (the node ID won’t be available until the asset was ingested first).

Audio content published to the Collections Portal or the HRDI Portal will be streamed via the Wowza media server.

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Video

Allowed file extensions: mp4, mov

Captions are required for publishing audio assets with linguistic content, an optional transcript can be provided as well

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DAMS2 contains managed vocabularies ('taxonomies') for some pieces of metadata, to improve the uniformity of metadata across assets. Some of these are open ended, meaning they can be extended as needed during ingest.

During batch ingests, taxonomy terms must be created before the Node metadata that reference a term. When creating metadata, look up terms in the existing taxonomies and reuse terms as appropriate, making sure that the spelling matches exactly. New taxonomy terms must be created before the Node metadata that reference a term. For the time being this will be managed as part of the pre-processing of metadata spreadsheets.

Updates to metadata or taxonomy terms follow the same process as batch ingests of new content. If you want to update asset metadata, you need to specify the ID of the node you want to update. Contact the DAMS administrators for support with obtaining node IDs.

Metadata field overview and crosswalk from DAMS1 metadata template CSV: DAMS2 metadata field crosswalk.xlsx

Metadata spreadsheet template: DAMS2 metadata template v.0.2.xlsx
(changed in v.0.2: renamed column AdditionalFile_0 to PDF_0, see crosswalk)

Taxonomy term lists (for easier browsing/searching): DAMS2 taxonomies

Ingest process

The ingest process will be managed by DAMS administrators for the time being. You need to provide a metadata spreadsheet and the files that will be ingested.