DigitalWell™ Asset Management System

Many broadcast stations, colleges, schools, and departments have a difficult time retaining and sharing digital resources in a way that is flexible and can be maintained over the long term. A Web-based tool from the University of Washington and ResearchChannel, DigitalWell™ provides an easy way to acquire, collect, classify, store, and deliver large collections of digital content.

DigitalWell™ began seven years ago as a collaboration among the ResearchChannel, UWTV, KEXP, and UW Computing & Communications organizations to explore solutions for collecting and distributing digital media over the Internet. At that time UW campus-wide streaming media infrastructure needs were rising; DigitalWell™ was an ideal way to meet the demand for more infrastructure and support collections of digital media. C&C worked with the UW Catalyst group and UW Libraries to enhance the broadcast oriented asset management environment into a system that could be used by the entire K20 community for teaching, learning, and research.

In the broadcast world, DigitalWell™ automates the capture of production quality digital assets for post production work and subsequent transcoding to on-demand formats. Digital programming and associated metadata are maintained in a scalable mass storage system and tightly integrated with a station's broadcast traffic system.

DigitalWell™ supports a wide range of digital media types including documents, photos, streaming audio and video. DigitalWell™'s on-demand streaming services support industry standard formats (Windows Media, Real, QuickTime, MPEG2 and MPEG4) at bit-rates ranging from low speed modem, DSL, LAN, standard-definition video to studio-quality high-definition video.

DigitalWell™ has an easy-to-use web-based interface compatible with current web browsers and computing platforms. DigitalWell uses WebISO (web initial sign-on) Authentication to ensure security and control access to collections. Its scalable federated architecture ensures that collections can be built, accessed, searched, and shared between disparate networked communities. Developed in concert with a grant from NSF National Sciences Digital Library and the Library of Congress, DigitalWell™ will ensure long term interoperability with other national digital collections.