Artesia Technologies: Teams
Teams captures all types of media through filters that automatically add physical descriptive properties.  Descriptive metadata can also be manually added.  Dubbed as Enterprise Digital Asset Management, Teams seems to be especially well-suited for e-commerce and large organizations who must manage a lot of multimedia content.  Users of the Artesia's Teams include the Library of Congress, the Washington Post, and General Motors.

Bulldog
Bulldog Two.Six is a flexible content management system designed to be compatible with media of all  types.  With the use of media plug-ins, the system will generate thumbnails of image and video files, and extract file-specific metadata.  Non-digital moving image objects can also be incorporated into the system by capturing information manually or through a migration from systems that track physical assets, such as a commercial database file or from a main frame.  Bulldog is focused on four key target segments: broadcast, entertainment, publishing and corporate.  Users of the Bulldog applications include Sony Pictures Entertainment and Microsoft Studios.

Canto (Site is in German) / Review of Canto's Cumulus software (in English)
Canto's Cumulus software offers cataloging tools and extensive search functions to manage multimedia files.  Cumulus 5 allows digital files to be easily cataloged and shared (software allows for emailing of digital assets).  Cumulus is reasonably priced for a single-user license ($99);  however, networked versions are substantially higher in price.  The single-use edition could be a cost-efficient option for managing a relatively small collection of digital files.

Convera (company created by Intel and Excalibur Technologies)
Combining technologies from Intel and Excalibur, Convera offers products to manage digital content assets.  Products include:  Convera Screening Room for video content management (capturing, searching, viewing, editing, and publishing video content); and Convera Screening Room Capture, a video logger based on XML.  Convera products seem to be targeted to institutions with very large collections of video content.  Users of Excalibur software include:  DirecTV and PBS affiliates.

eMotion
Cinebase merged with PNI Ltd. to become eMotion, a company which offers two digital asset management products:  MediaPartner 4.0 and Global Brand Manger.  eMotion's products seem to be geared toward advertising firms, corporations engaged in e-commerce, or organizations with very large collections of moving images.  Users of eMotion software include:  Discovery Communications, Inc. and Fox Kids Europe.

Mate (Media Access Technologies)
Mate's Visionary DM generates content description for video, audio, and still images, using image and speech recognition technology.  Due to the questionable success rates of current image recognition technology, Visionary DM may be of interest only to a limited number of organizations with collections suitable to such technology.  Also, Visionary DM works only with digital assets;  traditional assets can  be incorportated into the system only after they have been digitized.
 
 

CATVids 2000
CATVids allows for quick cataloging, and it especially useful for collections with many feature films because information can be downloaded from the Internet Movie Database and incorporated into cataloging records.  Screenshots demonstate the interface, field options, and reports available.  Prices start at $39.

MANAGE Your Videos 98
The program allows indexes by Title, Star, Co-Star, Director, TapeNo, and Category. Also the program can print mutiple movie titles on a single VCR label.  $25.  This may be one of the most basic and inexpensive video inventory software products available, but it could be useful to an institution with a very limited budget.

Video Librarian for Windows
An easily navigatable database for organizing videos;  fields include: title, star, co-star, cast, director, rating, critics rating, category, publisher, year released, movie#, tape#, start/stop counter, recording speed, notes and a 254 character note field for a movie synopsis or other information.  Video Librarian also allows for queries and reports.  $29.  Again, this product is very basic, but it is a step up from MANAGE Your Videos 98 and could be useful to an institution with a very limited budget.
 
 

AMIA's Questionnaire on Digital Asset Management Software Functionality
AMIA sent out a questionnaire to several vendors of digital asset management software and the responses from the participating vendors are posted.  The questionnaire asked vendors for:  a description of product's functional strengths, architecture, vocabulary control, security, rights management, asset storage, as well as how metadata is entered into system (manual and/or automatic indexing), and how "traditional," or non-digital assets are handled by the system.  This is an excellent resource to learn about many vendors of digital asset management (DAM), as well as make comparisons between DAM systems.  But note:  some of the participating vendors have merged with other companies (see notes above).

Digital Asset Management 101
An online editoral from the Newspaper Association of America which provides an introduction to Digital Asset Management.  With a simple description of what DAM is, and what questions to ask when comparing systems, this site has useful information for those looking to get a digital asset management system.

Library of Congress Pilots Digital Asset Management Solution, TEAMS
Article from www.creativepro.com describing the Library of Congress' piloting of Teams software from Artesia.
 
 
 

Compiled by Andy Preyer, MLIS student in UCLA's Department of Information Studies.  March 2001.