VYRE: Company - Customer Details


QUB Case Study
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Business profile and background

  • Company: Queen's University Belfast

  • Industry: Education

  • Site scope: Digital Image Gallery

  • Content and Digital Asset Management Solution: VYRE Unify

Queen's University Belfast is a broadly-based, research-driven university with a dynamic world-class research and education portfolio. Its record of academic achievement stretches back more than 150 years. The University was founded by Queen Victoria in 1845 as the Queen's University in Ireland, and opened in1849.

In 2001 it launched a £150 million campaign which has among other things also provided resources to invest in teaching, learning, research and development.

Challenges faced

In recent years there has been a move in academia to make more information available electronically. This includes both materials to assist the research process, as well as learning objects. Therefore Queen's University Belfast took its first steps towards a Digital Asset Management solution in 2004.

The University's objective was to make some exemplar manuscripts from the Library's Special Collections available electronically in a Digital Image Gallery; and its technical in-house team set out to develop a database driven website for this purpose.

However, it became clear this presented the University with a few challenges in the management of its assets, and it needed a more sophisticated system. For example Queen's could not easily reuse the assets with these database systems. Furthermore, there was no mechanism to cross-search all of the University's assets since they were all in individual silos.

 

"With the database systems we had developed in the past we were left with a few challenges when managing our digital assets. We could have developed a new database system. However, it would not have had as many features or the flexibility that the VYRE system offers us now. VYRE Unify gives the University maximum flexibility and extensive scope. Its functionality has met all of our requirements and allows us now to manage and expose our digital assets really well." Ricky Rankin, Principal Analyst Information Services, Queen's University Belfast

Project requirements

The University decided to tender for a Digital Asset Management system that would help construct websites that could have their own distinct look and feel, based on rich media types: images, video, audio.

The main requirements were as follows:

Digital Objects

  • Capability of storing a range of digital objects, using them in multiple collections, and combining simple objects to form complex ones

  • Referencing external objects

  • Validation process to prevent duplicate entries

  • Ability to create hierarchical collections

  • Conversion to different formats

  • Different resolutions for images

  • Watermarking

  • Ability to brand individual assets

Metadata

  • Support for metadata for searching collections and making them visible to search engines

  • Possibility to make some metadata elements mandatory

  • Default set of metadata to be associated with each object

Object upload

  • Easy way of entering information into the system preferably using a web interface including bulk uploads

  • Levels of control / workflow to validate information being uploaded

  • Automatic conversion of assets as they are uploaded into the system

  • Version control

Presentation

  • Ability to build a number of different collections with their own individual identity

  • Conforming to the accessibility legislation

  • Ability to expose the collections to external directories or catalogues

  • Ability to control access

Searching

  • Find relevant information quickly and easily and have an advanced search facility

  • Search across multiple collections

  • Different ranking schemes for displaying results

  • Constrain searches to a particular set of fields

  • Save search results for frequently used searches or to use elsewhere

Management

  • Ease of management and access, so that owners of collections can manage those themselves.


VYRE solution

VYRE's Digital Asset Management (DAM) functionality, provided through the VYRE Unify framework, offered not only maximum flexibility and extensive scope but it also provided all the features Queen's University Belfast needed to manage and expose a wide range of formats such as documents, manuscripts, journals, video, images and audio. In addition the VYRE framework gives maximum flexibility and does not constrain how the University wants to present its assets.

Ease of use and management is essential and VYRE Unify provides a high level of flexibility in the administrative interface. This will enable Queen's University Belfast to quickly create a management layer that can be customised to fit the University's exact user needs, which is greatly enhancing the satisfaction of users.

From a technical viewpoint, VYRE Unify uses the latest XSL technology and is designed to be totally standards based and "out of the box". This means that it provides the University with the highest level of autonomy as well as total control for in-house technical teams. VYRE being standards based also makes the learning curve simpler as information is readily available for example via the Internet. Furthermore, VYRE Unify is also quick to deploy and includes many features, which expedite both the creation of sites and the migration of content.

Project scope

The initial aim of the project is to demonstrate the viability of the Digital Asset Management system by migrating the current Digital Image Gallery to VYRE Unify. Once this has been achieved, mechanisms will be sought to make the system available more widely throughout the University and beyond for both research and teaching.

So far the University's technical team has worked with the VYRE Professional Services team to determine how best to:

  • Redesign the data structure

  • Build content repositories for holding collections

  • Build generic administrative interface for adding, editing and viewing content and metadata

  • Associate content between repositories and between users and repositories

  • Build an advanced searching facility for all content

  • Produce displays of search results that reflected the structure of the documents found - transcripts that comprised many pages are presented as a single document that can be navigated by moving from page to page.

Project status

The Somerville & Ross collection has been used as a pilot to learn the capabilities of the VYRE system. The technical and Library staff within Information Services have been working together to ensure that the system provides the required functionality.

To date, the system has provided the flexibility required to enable the technical staff to easily modify the system to meet the growing requirements of the library staff.

The remaining collections will be migrated over the next few months.

During the next academic year (2007 / 08) pilots will be run to demonstrate how the VYRE system might be used to store and deliver digital learning objects.

Future

The University is hoping to build an Institutional Repository and Photograph Archives that will initially store e-prints and e-thesis. The VYRE framework will provide the core of this system.

The University has also purchased VYRE's e-commerce module so that it can make its assets commercially available in the future if it wishes to do so.