Product Description: DigitalWell Overview

DigitalWell is an asset management system that provides an easy way to acquire, collect, classify, store and deliver large collections of digital media over IP-based networks.

Media assets are too often created and collected by disparate organizations and departments both within and among institutions. As a result, many broadcast stations, colleges, schools and departments have a difficult time retaining and sharing digital resources in a way that is flexible and enables repurposing of resources for research over the long term. DigitalWell addresses these problems by streamlining and simplifying the acquisition, aggregation, cataloging, storage and delivery processes associated with managing large collections of digital content. In particular, DigitalWell enables access to high-quality, high-definition video and audio assets via next generation IP networks.

As a digital library, DigitalWell provides an ideal infrastructure for meeting the demands of supporting large collections of digital media. DigitalWell is interoperable with other leading digital library systems and data grids based on Storage Resource Broker (SRB). These include MIT DSpace and Cornell Fedora. SRB provides an abstraction layer that simplifies metadata mapping between systems and also facilitates incorporation with a wide range of storage systems. The DigitalWell system is suited for use by the entire K–20 community for teaching, learning and research.

In the broadcast world, DigitalWell automates the capture of production-quality digital assets for postproduction work and subsequent transcoding to on-demand formats. Digital programming and associated metadata are maintained in scalable, tiered storage systems and are tightly integrated with a station’s broadcast traffic system.

DigitalWell supports a wide range of digital media types, including documents, photos, streaming audio and video. DigitalWell on-demand streaming services support industry-standard formats (i.e., Windows Media, Real, Quicktime, MPEG2 and MPEG4) at bitrates ranging from low speed modem, DSL, LAN and standard-definition video to studio-quality high-definition video.

DigitalWell has an easy-to-use Web services-based interface compatible with current Web browsers and computing platforms. DigitalWell uses WebISO Authentication to ensure security and control access to collections. Its scalable architecture ensures that collections can be built, accessed, searched and shared between disparate networked communities.

ResearchChannel, in conjunction with the University of Washington, recently announced DigitalWell will be made open source in early 2006. For more information on DigitalWell, e-mail info@researchchannel.org.