Tim's Weblog
Tim Strehle’s links and thoughts on Web apps, software development and Digital Asset Management, since 2002.
2014-11-14

Browsing the newspaper – an unusual DAM feature

Our DC-X DAM software is one of those DAM systems that (while offering general-purpose DAM functionality) focus on the news/publishing industry. For our newspaper- or magazine-publishing customers, publication metadata is among the most important: Name of the publication, publication date, page number, section name etc. (see DC-X publication data, based on the PRISM standard). This metadata applies to pages (usually single-page PDF files), articles (plain or formatted text), images, graphics/logos and ads – which are all stored as separate assets.

While all that metadata is neatly stored in the DAM and highly useful, accessing the newspaper archives within the DAM doesn’t feel like reading a newspaper at all. You have to perform a search to get at the pages, and get back a list of individual assets not optimized for reading page by page.

After a few custom implementations, we’re finally releasing the prototype of a newspaper/magazine browsing view that utilizes the publication metadata. It shows a pair of pages at the top, with buttons to navigate between pages. And it lists the article, image and ad assets that appear on these pages.

It’ll take a few rounds of customer feedback, but I’m confident that we’ll end up with an interface that’s a much more natural fit for our customer’s most valuable assets, their publications!