[Web4lib] Greenstone or a DAM or something else?

[Michael Neubert]

Greetings -

Unfortunately I am in the position of being asked a question that I can't
begin to answer properly - but need to.  Perhaps someone on the list can
provide some advice.

I work at a relatively large institution that has agreed to accept a gift of
photographs and scrapbooks - with the provision that we digitize all the
items and return the digital files to the donor along with metadata (MODS
records, in this case).  Well, fine - there's nothing terribly problematic
about that.

The problem is that the donor organization doesn't really know how to go
about dealing with the digital files that we will return to them and seems
to expect our advice.  Unfortunately this isn't exactly our area of
expertise, either.  We use in-house applications to present digitized items
to the public, we don't do in-house digital assets management.  (The Wernher
Von Braun "that's not my department" solution won't work in this case, I'm
afraid.)

That would be my question, then.  If you have 5,000 photographs and 20,000
scrapbook pages to manage, would you use Greenstone (an open source solution
to building a digital library) or is there a better DAM solution that can be
had off the shelf that will take in the MODS records - something with a
moderate price?  Note that they will <not> be offering off-site access to
these materials which here are heavily encumbered with rights issues.  The
theory, at any rate, is that this is a one time thing - they aren't planning
to add to it.  Or is there another route?

Thanks!
Michael Neubert

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