A Central Media Asset Management Tool for the Campus

Todd Stabley, Duke University

With the proliferation of digital content creation tools, the rise of university communication teams distributed among schools and departments, and the emergence of professional production teams integrated into IT, the body of digital media assets many universities have been accumulating has been growing exponentially. To help protect Duke’s investment in these resources, Duke’s Media Technologies team has been working to centralize our approach to media asset management through a service called dMAD (Duke Media Asset Depot), which currently contains nearly 4 million image and video files. Some of the benefits we’ve seen since launching the project in early 2023 have included discoverability of previously inaccessible materials, increased sharing and collaboration, and better communication of best practices for things like file organization, naming, and metadata. In this session we’ll talk about how we defined requirements for the project (for instance, one requirement was that it work on-prem with our existing NAS storage), and how we positioned this service among existing tools and built support from key partners such as Duke’s central communications office. We’ll discuss tools we evaluated and our comparison process, how our current provider, MediaBeacon, works along with its strengths and limitations, and share our roadmap for the future as well as integrations with other campus tools.