Media Vault Program Update

Media Vault Program Update
October 2010

Greetings MVP Stakeholders,

This month brings the completion of the Media Vault Program, as well as the beginning of new initiatives. It also brings a brief extension, through winter break, for the Extensis Portfolio/NetPublish service.

MEDIA VAULT PROGRAM ENDING
The three-year, grant-funded Media Vault Program comes to a close this fall.  Supported by UC Berkeley’s IT Bank, the MVP has been instrumental in raising issues related to digital asset management and preservation.  Its efforts have addressed fundamental scholarly needs on campus.

The Media Vault Program brought several new services to campus.  Working closely with research and teaching collections, the MVP put in place an innovative digital asset management and archive solution, coupling the notion of long-term preservation with commercially available cataloging and publishing software.  This exploratory offering helped campus collections such as the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology and the History of Art Visual Resources Collection manage their images, recordings and other electronic holdings, and make these objects available on the Web.  Over the last year, the MVP team took the lessons learned from this work and applied them to the creation of a sustainable content management and collaboration service appropriate for use by the entire campus.  (See ‘Media Hub becoming ‘Research Hub’’, below.)

Equally as important, the MVP created a unique partnership among campus and UC system-wide programs, bringing together the UC Berkeley Library, the campus’s Educational Technology Services and Information Services & Technology organizations, the California Digital Library and others in discussions and workshops about this vital area of academic technology.  Program partners have spawned new initiatives such as the forth-coming Research Hub service, the California Digital Library’s UC Curation Center (see ‘New Services for the UC Community from the CDL/UC3’, below) and significant updates by the campus Library to its GenDB service.  Through these and other initiatives, MVP partners continue to provide help to scholars, even as funding for the Media Vault Program comes to an end.

Increasingly, digital materials form the heart of scholarship.  For the past three years, the Media Vault Program has focused its attention – and the University’s – on the proper management of these resources.  It is a complex and expensive endeavor; developing the means to support scholars will take the concerted efforts of many parties.  The vision of the MVP, and the spirit of collaboration that guided it, must live on!

MEDIA HUB BECOMING ‘RESEARCH HUB’
The Media Hub, the content management and collaboration service piloted this spring by the Media Vault team, has gained a new name on its way to launch.  Rechristened Research Hub, this new service from Information Services & Technology’s Data Services Department is designed to support the needs of campus researchers.  Its URL will be easy to remember: hub.berkeley.edu

The Research Hub team is developing terms of service and pricing models in preparation for a limited release this fall.  Look for an announcement soon.

While the final decisions are being made, the underlying hardware and software have been installed, localized, tested and prepared for campus use.  Authentication has been tied to the campus’s CalNet identity management service, so users won’t need a separate password.  Research Hub is in the queue of services awaiting integration with the CalNet Guest Access program; by the end of the semester, partners and colleagues from outside the campus community should be able to work collaboratively with campus scholars, students and staff.

Meanwhile, the Research Hub has been selected as one of the workspace engines behind the Project Bamboo technology proposal.  Over the next 18 months, the Research Hub will be used to prototype workspace features and to test the online workspace requirements of scholars in the Humanities, Arts and interpretive Social Sciences.

MVP EXTENSIS-BASED SERVICE EXTENDED FOUR MONTHS
The Media Vault Program’s Extensis Portfolio/NetPublish-based service, originally slated to close in October of 2010, has been extended through the end of January 2011, giving MVP pilot participants time to move their collections and catalogs to other platforms.  Thanks to closeout funding from the campus’s IT Bank and the continued generosity of the Library, collection owners will now have until the beginning of spring semester to retrieve their materials.

The Media Vault team will contact participants in the upcoming weeks to help define migration plans.  If you have questions in the meantime, please contact the Media Vault team by email at mvpochelp@lists.berkeley.edu.

NEW SERVICES FOR THE UC COMMUNITY FROM THE CDL/UC3
The California Digital Library (CDL) has announced two new services for the UC community.  Merritt, the next generation repository service from CDL’s UC Curation Center (UC3) will allow UC3 to extend the reach of its services to new constituencies such as museums, archives, research groups, academic departments and data centers.

Significant features include:
• permanent storage
• access via persistent URLs
• tools for long-term management
• an easy-to-use interface for deposit and updates

EZID (ee-zee-eye-dee) enables persistent identification of and access to a scholar’s research, which is critical to the long-term distribution and availability of the work.  Currently, EZID allows users to acquire DataCite Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) or Archival Resource Keys (ARKs).  CDL plans to add other identifier schemes going forward.  EZID is available via a machine-to-machine programming interface (an API) and as a web user interface.

The Research Hub team is already working with the UC3 team to automate the transfer of content from UC Berkeley to the UC3 Merritt platform.  For more information about Merritt or EZID, please contact UC3 (see contact link, below).

So, the program ends, but the effort continues. It has been a pleasure working with each of you – and will continue to be, in new and different forms of endeavor.
Best,
The Media Vault team

Useful Links:
Research Hub (UC Berkeley): https://hub.berkeley.edu (coming)
About: https://hub.berkeley.edu/about (coming)
Contact: hub@berkeley.edu (coming)
Project Bamboo: http://projectbamboo.org/

Media Vault Team email address: mvpoc-help@lists.berkeley.edu

California Digital Library / University of California Curation Center (UC3): http://www.cdlib.org/services/uc3/
DataCite: http://www.datacite.org
UC3 contact page: http://www.cdlib.org/services/uc3/contact.html
Merritt webinar: http://www.cdlib.org/cdlinfo/2010/05/21/webinar-of-merritt-repository-development/

Media Vault Program Update

May 21, 2010

Greetings MVP Stakeholders,

Much of our effort since the New Year has been put towards the development of the Media Hub, a content management service that we propose to offer to campus by the start of fall semester.  The Media Hub makes it easy to store, manage and share documents.  It provides a workspace for files and media related to research and other types of collaborative projects, one that is hosted on secure campus servers and available from anywhere with a network connection.

CTC PROPOSAL

Plans for the Media Hub service were outlined in a proposal submitted to the Campus Technology Council in March.  Under the proposal, the Media Vault Program — as a set of use cases centered around research content, keenly intent on support for museum and departmental collections — would be refocused on the broader collaboration and document management needs of the larger campus community.  We asked for funding to develop this effort in alignment with the campus’s Operational Excellence (OE) initiative.  Though it represents a change in emphasis, this focus is still, we believe, consistent with the original aims of the MVP.

From its inception, the Media Vault Program was developed with the core principles of organizational effectiveness in mind.  Starting from an understanding that individual researchers, research units and collections were underutilizing their digital scholarship — or even putting it at risk — because they couldn’t afford the cost of purchasing and maintaining technology systems, MVP’s vision was to align existing services, and, where appropriate, to provide new services centrally, to support the management and sharing of scholarly digital media.  Doing so would enhance “research excellence,” reduce the risk to valuable, often one-of-a-kind content and increase the potential of fundraising with newly exposed collections.

The broader focus on content management can help us reach these goals.  For one, it allows IST to address the most common campus needs — easy-to-use document management, web publication and web-based collaboration tools — TODAY, through a standard, financially-sustainable delivery model.  Two, it gives us license to bring together the many campus experts across the entire range of content-related areas.  By connecting the technical community with communities of practice for specific content technologies and providers, we can address the specialized concerns of sophisticated users.

Centrally, we will also make relevant policies accessible.  We will help qualify vendors and negotiate content-oriented services from external service providers.  We will smooth the path to adoption of popular new technologies, such as Drupal, that have already attracted campus- and system-wide investment.  We will provide architectural support so that content and platforms move towards the goal of efficiency and interoperability and reuse.

We hope to hear the outcomes of the budget process by the end of the fiscal year.  The proposal will become available for viewing in the next few weeks on the Campus Technology Council Campus IT Funding Request Process web site.

ENGAGEMENT AND BETA TESTING

The Media Hub team has spent March and April demonstrating the proposed service to campus units, labs and groups, showing off its strengths and gathering feedback on its features and its value.  We have reached out to people working in a range of areas: collections, print and web publications, research, instruction and engaged scholarship.  Several of these engagements have deepened into short-term “beta projects,” closer examinations of the fit between the service and the users’ needs.  Media Hub staff are learning from these interactions about feature, performance and support requirements of the service.  The beta program is scheduled to run through the end of May, after which the team will focus on “hardening” the platform, that is, getting it ready for prime time.

WORKING TOWARDS AUGUST LAUNCH

IST’s Data Services department has requested funding to launch Media Hub and to support the service for a year.  While we await approval, we’re nailing down the details of the service offering.  We’ll be sending around information on costs, terms of service, etc., in the upcoming months.  Meanwhile, we’re familiarizing ourselves with version 3.3 of the platform, which offers a number of improvements to the service and should be available to us later in May.  Then, while we configure, tweak and lock down the hardware and software during the summer, we will also be hard at work preparing support and training materials and procedures.

A GOOD-BYE

Finally, the Media Vault team bids farewell to Michael Ashley.  Michael’s vision and style have given shape to the MVP since the program’s inception.  As a fierce advocate for the needs of researchers, Michael has also reminded us – constantly – that we’re here to solve problems, but that we’re not alone in the effort: there’s an entire world of researchers, collection managers, cultural heritage institutions and vendors chipping away at solutions.  Michael, we miss you already.  Don’t go far!

Best,
MV Team

ps. Read the MVP Spotlight for recent news relating to digital scholarship, access and preservation at Berkeley and around the world.

Media Vault Program Links:

Web site:  http://mvp.berkeley.edu

Wiki: http://mvp.berkeley.edu/wiki

Media Hub links:

Service: http://mediahub.berkeley.edu (password required)

Info: http://mvp.berkeley.edu/mediahub

email: mediahub@berkeley.edu

Media Vault Program Update

December 22, 2009

Greetings MVP Stakeholders,

As we head into winter break, we leave you with several updates on work completed during the past few weeks.

1. Media Vault content running on the “Gen 1” Extensis Portfolio platform has been moved to a server and storage provided by the Library. The transfer was done this past weekend and the material is once again available for use. This important and complicated behind-the-scenes change should be invisible to users. If you notice anything unusual, please let us know. Big thanks to Ian Crew for a ton of work and congratulations on a job well done.

We gratefully acknowledge the generosity and support of the Library in making this storage available. In particular, thanks to Bernie Hurley and Lynne Grigsby for agreeing to give us access to the storage, and to Eric Fernandez and Paul Payne for configuring it.

2. Reminder re: support for MVP’s Extensis Portfolio-based service during the winter furlough period this year. We will be on mandatory furlough closures and holidays, December 23, 2009 through January 6, 2010. Any server outages or requests received during those days will be handled on the next business day, January 7, 2010.

3. Alfresco 3.1 Enterprise Edition has been installed in the Data Center and is currently being configured. Alfresco was selected by the MVP team to be the basis of the next round of discussions on “Gen 2” Media Vault services. We’re eager to engage with you, and with campus, about this enterprise content management platform. Look for more about that in the New Year.

4. The year ends with a farewell to Lizzy. We offer a heartfelt ‘thank you’ to Lizzy for her great work with the MVP and, before that, the Okapi Program and the Scholar’s Box project. Among her roles with MVP, Lizzy served as NetPublish guru, technical writer, webmaster and editor of the monthly Spotlight feature. With Okapi, she was Omeka master and video producer for many projects, including Ars Synthetica, Okapi Island in Second Life, Tracing Tambo Colorado, the Open Archaeology Collection, Remixing Catalhoyuk, and work with the students of the Blum Center for Developing Economies/Global Poverty and Practice minor. In all her contributions, she brought wit and flair to our work. Lizzy, we wish you the best!

Happy holidays to all,

MV Team