Scope Statement

Dartmouth Media Asset Management — Discovery Project 

Rationale

Dartmouth students, faculty, and staff currently produce and distribute digital media assets — including video, audio, images, and Flash files — of curricular and non-curricular interest to on- and off-campus audiences. Those digital assets are distributed in many ways: on tape, CD, DVD, paper, and via e-mail and the Web.

Even though individuals with basic technical expertise can post many of those assets on a Web server, there is currently no robust online service at Dartmouth that makes it easy to publish, store, find, and use these assets, and that protects intellectual property with security for rights management.

Therefore, a discovery project is being charged to gather and prioritize requested features, identify existing campus resources, and propose solutions that meet Dartmouth’s needs.

The project team would meet a total of 3-5 times starting in September 2005.

Purpose

Evaluate and prioritize the resources required (both existing and proposed) to provide a robust system for publishing and viewing recorded media assets — video, audio, and images — via broadband by Dartmouth constituents, both on- and off- campus.

Objectives

• Identify prioritized constituent needs.
• Propose service model, including publishing and support processes.
• Identify potential staff and infrastructure requirements for a sustainable service.
• Identify costs for the top resource enhancements so Computing management can make an informed go/no-go decision.

Project deliverables

• List of current digital media management processes and resources.
• List of requested constituent features, prioritized.
• Order-of-magnitude estimates for enhancements that provide the greatest influence on successful delivery of digital media assets via broadband, on-campus and off-campus.
• List of identified obstacles to success.

Project constraints

Limited resources: Less than 20 percent FTE for three months for discovery project management.

Success criteria

Final report, integrating constituent input, to provide enough context for a Computing management go/no-go decision on resource deployment.