Creating a Digital Asset Management System for African Collections

Over the past 14 years Africa Media Online has been engaged in a project to create a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system appropriate for African digital collections. This paper looks at some of the challenges faced in building the MEMAT system that conforms closely to the ISO standard for long-term archiving of digital media at the same time as being cost effective, highly flexible to cope with multiple metadata schema and standards of input, and operate across low bandwidth to make it applicable for collections in South Africa and other countries in Africa. It will also look at the challenges of sustaining such a system as a private company and responding to the needs of museums and archives, particularly in a heritage sector that that tends to be under-funded and where familiarity with the management of digital assets is not commonplace.