Humboldt University Media Portal: Workspace and Archive

Abstract

Many academic materials are already available in digital format or will soon be digitized. They are handled in countless workflows and storage-procedures all over the campus, in most cases only accessible by their author. Every-day knowledge of all kinds emerges, rapidly vanishing into depths of unknown hard disks or CD-ROMs. Both the flood of sparsely organized digital documents and electronic amnesia increasingly become a problem to be managed by academic institutions. Humboldt University aims to offer scientists and students a new tool for storage, organization, and work with multimedia contents. This media portal should be suitable for both daily work and long term archiving by mouse click, if desired. Storage and reuse should be easy and work for different document types and for single materials as collections of any size and academic genre. All public materials can be browsed across campus and worldwide and form a growing database and historical archive of research. Goals: The basic working system will be further developed in a couple of steps within the framework of last year's program and evaluation of open testing. The project is coordinated by the Multimedia Support Centre for Teachers and Researchers (MLZ) and merges expertise from the Humboldt University document server (international metadata-standards, long term archiving), software from Zweitwerk and Nionex (asset management) and aims to integrate asset brokerage with learning management. The presentation will discuss some of the main aspects in planning and building the media portal for Humboldt University.