1. Distributed storage of media vs. centralized storage.

2. Does the package actually store the objects within its file structure?

   Yes, InterMedia uses Oracle 8i to store its data

3. Capacity:

4. How good is the package at handling very large collections?

   What effect does large size have on performance?

   Equal to file system performance for an equivalent file-based Web site w/ 100 GB database with 240,000 objects, ranging from 4k thumbnails to 2Mb video clips

   Can some objects be stored within the database and others elsewhere?

   Yes

5. Latency:

6. How long does it take to retrieve an object or a collection of objects from the system?

   How hard is it to add an object?

   Drag and drop with Clipboard client

   Do additions to the system have to be controlled centrally, or can any number of users (with permission) add objects to the system?

   Additions do not have to be controlled centrally

7. Staleness: Is there some means of detecting objects that are not being used and are just taking up space?

8. Yes, the system can collect data about use.

9. Formats: does the product use proprietary storage formats that can only be read using the vendor’s products?

Objects are stored in the database in their native format.

1. How does the package support metadata?

2. XML metadata can be grabbed along with an object being entered into the database

3. What standards and policies are to be used?

4. Comprehensive support for XML

5. Who controls the metadata?
6. Where does it reside?

7. In the database

8. What is the relationship between metadata and object?

9. The metadata is stored in a table with a link to the object (which is stored in a second table)

10. What format(s) are supported for markup?

1. How much development / customization will be required to make the product work at UNC?

2. Considerable customization will be required

3. How easy is such customization and how is it accomplished?
4. How much vendor support will be required?
5. Redundancy / recoverability: It should be possible to "back out" transactions that are inappropriate.
6. How susceptible is the system to corruption?
7. How hard is it to recover a corrupt database?

1. Protection of copyrighted objects. Object-level copyright protection would be best.
2. Setting availability of objects to e.g. a class, a group, a school, etc.
3. Creators retaining ownership of their objects.
4. User authentication.

1. How much can the package handle in terms of concurrent users / database size?
2. How hard is it to add, e.g. a new file format to the system?

1. What formats does the package support?
2. How are different formats to be delivered?

The following document types and formats are desired by our potential users:

• Web pages or Web-based collections of material
• Digital images (JPEG, GIF, TIFF, etc.)
• Digital text documents (PDF, DOC, etc.)
• Digital video clips (MPEG, MOV, AVI, etc.)
• Digital data sets (spreadsheets, databases, GIS datasets, etc.)
• Digital audio (WAV, MP3, etc.)
• Digital models (VRML, CAD, etc.)
• Digital code sets (simulations, source code, etc.)

It sounded to me as though it wouldn’t handle any and every media type, but only certain types (about 34?)

1. Availability of digital materials contributed to the collection by other members of the university for your use.
2. Sophisticated searching and data mining tools for finding useful materials in the campus collection.
3. Facility for adding your own materials to a collection shared with colleagues within the university.
4. Ability to limit access to digital materials or collections (e.g. to a particular class, or group of colleagues).
5. Automatic generation of Web pages from materials you select from a multimedia collection, including imagery, audio, texts, etc.
6. Automatic generation of digital course packs from a multimedia collection.
7. Facility for assigning comments, keywords, or other information to a particular object in an online collection, whether or not the object belongs to you.
8. Facility for adding your own materials to a collection shared with colleagues outside of the university.
9. Security issues CRITICAL with some material
10. Development of Geolibraries

11. Support for spatial data

12. Collaboration with digital libraries at other universities/institutions
13. Ability to track different versions of digital assets; intellectual property rights tracking (e.g. digital watermarks)