CIS and DIM

I am learning the acronyms. CIS is USC's Collection Information System. The group I am working with is creating the system using Documentum and Oracle, and migrating away from a legacy system built on BRS and its non-relational database.

DIM is Digital Information Management. They are the people that digitize the information and create the metadata for the Collection Information System. I had meetings with both groups this week. The CIS people are very much into working through their agenda of finishing the migration, adding to collections, improving thesaurus control, and improving the Contributor software for adding material to the system. This they are building themselves.

The DIM area has fabulous scanning facilities - an entire studio devoted to it, with cameras large and small, scanners large and small, special lighting, editing software, and temporary storage devices to hold the information until it is approved and moves on to have derivatives created (thumbnails, jpegs and the like) via MrSID and gets metadata treatment.

The metadata group uses qualified Dublin Core and XML to serve descriptive information to the public. I got a good description of the positives and negatives involved in adapting Documentum to the tasks at hand. Documentum was designed for corporate revision control and audit trails. It is requiring customization for application in the digital archive arena.

The whole system runs on 3 servers, one for ingest (getting info into the system), one for renditioning, and one for thesaurus management using Documentum's Content Intelligence System (also CIS, not to be confused with USC's Collection Information System!). More than anything I am amazed at the staff resources being applied to all of these steps, in particular to the customization of Documentum.