Digital content life cycle

From Digipedia

The concept of the digital content life cycle is an essential building block in the success of Digipedia’s function to encourage wider accessibility to digital content. There is a wide range of choices to be made when creating, managing and exploiting e-content; choices that will depend on the context of how the e-content will be used and maintained as much as choices on technical issues. Digipedia offers a range of options and approaches depending on the user’s point of entry into the management life-cycle and the knowledge and experience they bring with them.

Providing maximum potential access to that e-content calls for a comprehensive framework that embraces all aspects of the management and decision-making processes. The digital content life cycle does this by brigading the tools and techniques under three headings:

The components of the digital life cycle

Providing maximum potential access to digital content calls for a comprehensive framework embracing all aspects of the management and decision-making processes since a diverse range of resources is necessary to build a complete picture. Some are the product of international standards organisations such as NISO while others are guides to best practice or research studies on particular techniques relevant to the creation of particular formats of content or on new approaches to delivery, for example, personalisation. There are within this diverse set of resources two particular requirements. The first is to establish the means to decide which is the right resource for the right content and also whether the resource is current and transferrable to different settings. Meeting these two requirements that will define the success of the aggregation and convergence of digital content that is at the heart of the Strategic Content Alliance's mission.

Paradoxically, in the context of creating content integration, the design of a digital content life cycle, that supports effective decision making and implementation calls for the disaggregation of the elements of the resources that make up the life cycle: to use the tools and techniques effectively adopts the alignment of those resources under three headings:

Deciding

The route to useful digital content begins with a clear understanding of the purpose of its creation (digitisation) or acquisition (purchasing user licences). Questions such as, what are the national or organisational strategic priorities that the digital content will support? What will be the audience and what are their known needs? Are there opportunities for collaboration or sharing of existing resources? All need careful consideration before beginning a programme of work.

Designing, Acquiring, Describing

The requirements of the creation/acquisition stage will depend on whether digital content is created from existing physical resources or whether existing e-content is to be licenced for used from an external supplier. The former will, of course, call for the assessment of appropriate techniques and standards for digitisation, description and disclosure through repositories, etc along with the evaluation of different approaches to the management of the digitisation process, for example in-house or external commission. Both strategies (creating new resources or licencing existing ones) will require analysis of audience needs and the design of services that support those needs as effectively as possible. This study of the users along with usability criteria – accessibility – and design matching need – personalisation, for example.

This stage will also require careful planning for management of intellectual property rights and identity management to control access to authorised users.

Disclosing, Sustaining, Developing

The third component of the digital content life cycle includes all of the processes and decision tools for the ongoing maintenance and development of the digital content once created or acquired. Sustainability and evaluation are closely linked since the assessment of success should depend as much on the value delivered to the user as the cost of providing the service. Curation, collections development and preservation are also critical parts of the life-cycle in just the same way as they are with traditional physical resources. Finally marketing and the optimisation of accessibility are processes started at the design stage, but continuing through the time that the e-content continues to be a part of the collection.

Putting the resource categories into a matrix with those three headings facilitates further analysis and, of course, a visible statement that can encourage discussion and debate about what tools should be used in what circumstances, at level of granularity that will help the policy maker or practitioner to make sensible decisions.

Furthermore, in terms of the types of resources it is useful to break them down further into four categories against which it will be possible to plot the specific tools that will relate to the particular stage of the life cycle:

Decision support tools
Demand and usability
Technical processes
Management processes

DRAFT DIGITAL CONTENT LIFE CYCLE MATRIX

Decision support tools

CATEGORY/PROCESS	___DECIDING____	___DESIGNING___	___DISCLOSING__
National policies	Links to be added	Links to be added	Links to be added
Sector policies	Links to be added	Links to be added	Links to be added
Case studies	Links to be added	Links to be added	Links to be added

Demand and usability

CATEGORY/PROCESS	___DECIDING____	___DESIGNING___	___DISCLOSING__
Accessibility	Links to be added	Links to be added	Links to be added
Audience research	Links to be added	Links to be added	Links to be added
Personalisation	Links to be added	Links to be added	Links to be added

Management processes

CATEGORY/PROCESS	___DECIDING____	___DESIGNING___	___DISCLOSING__
Curation and preservation	Links to be added	Links to be added	Links to be added
Project management	Links to be added	Links to be added	Links to be added
Business models	Links to be added	Links to be added	Links to be added
Sustainability	Links to be added	Links to be added	Links to be added
Financial planning	Links to be added	Links to be added	Links to be added
Human resources - capacity and capability	Links to be added	Links to be added	Links to be added
Collections development	Links to be added	Links to be added	Links to be added
Evaluation, impact and value	Links to be added	Links to be added	Links to be added
Internet marketing	Links to be added	Links to be added	Links to be added
Search engine optimisation	Links to be added	Links to be added	Links to be added
Repository management	Links to be added	Links to be added	Links to be added

Technical processes

CATEGORY/PROCESS	___DECIDING____	___DESIGNING___	___DISCLOSING__
Digitisation	Links to be added	Links to be added	Links to be added
Standards and formats	Links to be added	Links to be added	Links to be added
Legal issues	Links to be added	Links to be added	Links to be added
Resource description and discovery	Links to be added	Links to be added	Links to be added
Access and identity management	Links to be added	Links to be added	Links to be added

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