Int J Digit Libr (2007) 8:61–78 DOI 10.1007/s00799-007-0028-3 REGULAR PAPER AssetCollector: a system for managing collections of cultural assets Georgios D. Styliaras · Georgios K. Tsolis · Chris M. Papaterpos Received: 22 December 2006 / Accepted: 2 July 2007 / Published online: 27 July 2007 © Springer-Verlag 2007 Abstract In this paper, AssetCollector is presented, which is a system for managing collections of cultural assets. Asset- Collector covers the needs of collection curators towards defining, populating and searching a collection in a flexi- ble way, while supporting them in generating reports based on the collection’s assets and reusing them in order to build web sites and CD-ROMs. In order to support the above func- tionality, the system provides the content structuring subsys- tem, the content input subsystem, the search subsystem and the report subsystem. The use of the subsystems is straight- forward and requires no technical skills from the curators. AssetCollector has been successfully applied for organiz- ing various collections of cultural assets in Greece, such as archaeological sites, museums and published books. In the future, an evaluation procedure is planned in order to further refine the use of the system according to the targeted users’ needs. Furthermore, more import and export facilities will be provided, which will make the system compliant with widely accepted standards. Keywords Cultural assets management · Museums · Tangible and intangible objects · National institutions and libraries · Cultural collections G. D. Styliaras Art Sciences Department, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, Greece e-mail: gstyl@uoi.gr G. K. Tsolis (B ) · C. M. Papaterpos High Performance Information Systems Lab, University of Patras, Patras, Greece e-mail: gkt@hpclab.ceid.upatras.gr C. M. Papaterpos e-mail: cmp@hpclab.ceid.upatras.gr 1 Introduction In this paper, AssetCollector is presented, a system that permits the management of a collection of cultural assets throughout their life cycle. More specifically, the system enables the definition of new assets; content association and editing; and reuse of the assets through enquiries, reports, web sites and multimedia products. Additionally, the paper proposes a set of implementation-independent interface blocks that are necessary for maintaining such collections. AssetCollector addresses the needs of various cultural assets curators, such as librarians and publishing companies, who may organize assets for a set of books; museum and archaeological site curators, who may manage content that describes the artifacts exhibited; and administrators of cul- tural collections and galleries. The system presented is suit- able for managing medium-sized collections of multilingual cultural assets that may be analyzed by textual, metadata- based and multimedia content. Assets may originate from tangible objects, such as the artifacts of a museum, or intan- gible objects such as bibliographical records. As described in the next section, regarding collections of cultural assets under consideration, existing asset manage- ment systems do not seem to offer all the needed functionality to collection curators. For instance, many systems tend to act as sophisticated file browsers. In other words, they organize a collection through a set of hierarchically organized files that may be enriched by a set of simple text-based attributes. Moreover, asset attributes are often defined on a single-asset basis and may not be reused easily. Furthermore, it is diffi- cult for an administrator that lacks the necessary technical skills to reorganize the internal structure or classification of the assets. Moreover, the search facilities that are offered often neglect the presence of the added attributes and reports seem to be a static printout of the defined attributes. Finally, 123