DSTO is the research and development arm of the Australian Department of Defence, and as such has a vast repository of information including an extensive and growing collection of digital assets.

A project to digitise their enormous image library, accumulated over many years, resulted in a rapid increase in the number of digital assets and DSTO understood that in order to realise their investment they needed a way to organise and distribute those assets to prospective users in an efficient and cost effective manner.

Furthermore, as many of the digitised photographs did not have accompanying written information, it was essential, as a matter of urgency, to capture the image content "metadata" from the various experts throughout DSTO before those experts were no longer available.

It became clear that DSTO needed a Digital Asset Management system, and needed it quickly.

Preferring to opt for a leading brand Digital Asset Management system DSTO chose Canto Cumulus and, as certified Canto integrators, AIMTec was engaged to undertake the project of installing and customising it to DSTO's exact requirements.

Key objectives of this project were:

1. Availability of assets to all users of the defence intranet
2. Easy location of assets using simple or advanced searching
3. Handling of keyword synonyms for searching
4. Navigation of the catalogue using a sophisticated user-configurable categorisation system
5. Ability of remote users to request assets via the web
6. Rapid data entry of metadata
7. Capture of metadata from remote users

To fulfil these requirements AIMTec installed and configured Cumulus and employed the Cumulus Web Publisher with a customised web interface. We also developed specialised software for this project which eventually became part of our Cumulus Essentials product line- including:

• QuickOrder^®(for on-line ordering of assets)
• Clipboard MetaMate^TM (for rapid data entry)
• Cumulus Synonymiser^TM (to handle keyword synonyms)
• Category Tree Pro (for sophisticated on-line navigation)

With ongoing support provided by AIMTec the result is a Cumulus installation that has stood the test of time, adding enormous value to the DSTO image library since 2001.