Beyond “Availability”: Content Productivity Still A Key Challenge Facing Museums in 2004
Phil Locke, Victoria & Albert Museum, United Kingdom

Mini-Workshop: Content Re-Use

Delivering information to multiple audiences can be time consuming and costly. This task becomes increasingly complex as an organization grows its content and as new content sources and delivery channels are continuously added. To maintain high productivity while ensuring consistency, it is necessary to reuse content across delivery channels whenever possible. Without the ability to efficiently manage content reuse, an organization creates a complicated, delicate web of information that can quickly fall victim to change.

In today's multi-channel world, the key to efficient content reuse lies in the ability to proactively manage content relationships and to implement change across all channels, quickly, easily and by non-technical staff. he Victoria and Albert Museum has just finished phase1 of a large exercise to maximize and manage the information flow when content meets technology, via a new Enterprise Content Management delivery system for its Web site. After 5 months preparing a Technical Requirements Specification based upon past experiences, the V&A now has a practical ECM solution that enables efficient content reuse and cost-effective delivery across multiple channels.

This paper will show how the V&A's new ECM system speeds delivery of content by publishing optimized and re-useable content directly to delivery applications - whether this be the Web, Intranet or as a document or gallery interactive.