Saturday, September 25, 2010

Digit Ass Man

I've now been registered and inducted onto the new graduate course in digital asset management at King's College, also referred to as MADAM, or even, wonderfully, DIGIT ASS MAN, as it appears on my ID card. One hopes that the quality of the course and its outcomes will be inversely proportional to the rather unfortunate manner in which its title may be abbreviated.

Having met the faculty responsible for the programme, I'm very confident that this will prove to be the case. I believe that this is the first formalised training on this subject anywhere in the world, and the process is necessarily going to be organic - I haven't experienced this form of openness amongst faculty, or freedom for self-direction as a student, in higher education before. I also calculate that we have a 1:1 ratio between faculty and students, which is going to make this a rich experience.

The course website describing its content can be found here, and it kicks off on Tuesday with the core component introducing DAM. I also expect to open with an optional module on metadata theory and practice. While currently there is a heavy emphasis on the digital, the course intends to touch on traditional archives theory, which seems important for reasons I've touched on previously (i.e. to be prepared to help institutions expand to digital). Finally, the King's environment is an exciting one, with the Centre for Computing in the Humanities churning out a large number of interesting and varied projects, and I'm intrigued to see that the Department of War Studies, amongst other policy departments, is just around the corner...

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