Aims and Objectives of the MIDESS Project
- The MIDESS project will be building digital content databases at three of the partner institutions, providing a set of suitable platforms to examine the issues and validity of implementing full digital content management services.
- These databases will be populated with digital content which has already been created, or is currently under creation, by the partner institutions. This includes digitised images from slides and manuscripts and multimedia content such as video and audio materials. A range of subject areas will be included.
- Opportunities for the sharing and re-use of digital collections across institutions will be explored through the active involvement of academic staff at each partner institution.
- Metadata standards will be established, and metadata developed, for each collection added to the repositories. The METS standard will be explored for bringing together various metadata elements – for example, IMS for e-learning materials. METS is a standard which can be utilised to repackage and structure existing metadata.
- MIDESS will explore the role of digital content databases with a particular focus on interoperability with enterprise content management architectures.
- MIDESS will also aim to establish how distributed digital repositories could encourage the wider exposure and sharing of content across institutions through an evaluation of requirements for centralised metadata harvesting services.
- MIDESS will seek to pilot an infrastructure which could serve as a model for future distributed national digitisation activities.