Abstract:

Background:
In the early days of the promotion of digital libraries and digital repositories, potential consumers of these products had to be sold on the value and potential efficiencies introduced by these offerings. The challenge was that ten years ago, organizations and institutions had not yet accumulated enough digital inventory to feel the pain and truly experience the problems that these products were intended to address and mediate. Fifteen years into the future and organizations are facing staggering content management issues as Moore’s Law has forced them to not only address the discoverability, version control, and relevance of their digital learning content but to also address the modality that the content is expected to be delivered in.

Problem:
Today’s corporate enterprise and educational institution is facing the most serious and complex content management issues experienced since the dawn of the computer age. As large and mature organizations continue to accumulate massive digital content collections, the difficulty in keeping their content relevant and efficient grows proportionally. In order to adequately manage the risk of large sections of internal offerings becoming irrelevant, undiscoverable, or unused, it is necessary to periodically rationalize content offerings across the entire enterprise to protect the organizations massive financial investment in procuring, producing, and consuming content.

Some of the more critical problems in managing massive content collections include:
• Large percentages of content collections are no longer relevant and/or created for audiences that either no longer exist or have changed demographics dramatically
• Complex and distributed version-management issues
• No clear view into gaps or overlaps in content coverage
• Managing localization needs of content offerings in a rapidly globalizing world
• Understanding what content is outdated or obsolete and what content needs to be adapted for new delivery modalities

Methods:
Organizations need to construct a comprehensive rubric to realistically evaluate the status of their current content management needs and apply the results of the evaluation toward creating a realistic multi-phase roadmap aimed at getting their content collections into a manageable state.

Some of the typical components of such a rubric include the following activities:
• Content and curriculum effectiveness evaluation
• Content coverage, overlap, and gap analysis
• Content reuse efficiency and related ROI analysis
• Revisiting audience analysis data applied and how the audience may have changed
• Appropriate modality selection and availability analysis

At the conclusion of these activities, a multi-stage strategic roadmap should be created to address any issues and gaps uncovered during the engagement along with a recommended set of policies and procedures for self-policing content related issues moving forward. The overarching objectives are 1.) a “refresh/reboot” of the current offerings and 2.) a migration toward a new approach for managing enterprise content focused on macro-level continuous improvement and future-proofing offerings wherever feasible.

Conclusions:
Without a tailored content management strategy, flexible stewardship model, and the appropriate technology, organizations will fail to protect the massive investment that they have made in their digital content and, by logical extension, their precious intellectual property.

Keywords:

Digital repositories, content management, content strategies.