About This Guide

About This Guide
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This document contains an overview of the StudioCentral Library Digital Asset Management System:

Audience for This Guide

This guide is for StudioCentral Library administrators, developers, and others who want an overview of StudioCentral Library and how it is used. This guide is a prerequisite to understanding the documents that describe how to install, configure, and administer StudioCentral Library, and how to develop StudioCentral Library applications.

Conventions

The following type and symbol conventions are used in this guide:

Convention	Meaning
Italics	Used for filenames, glossary entries (online, these show up as underlined), document titles, new terms, onscreen button names, tools, utilities.
Bold	Used for Datamodel and attribute names.
...	Ellipses indicate that a preceding element can be repeated.
nnn	Placeholder for the version number in the part number: 007-1234-nnn.
Right angle brackets (>)	Indicate a path through menus to a menu option. For example, “File > Open” means “Under the File menu, choose the Open option.”
StudioCentral	Refers to the StudioCentral Library product.

Following are the differences between the online and print versions of this document:

Cross-reference links appear as quoted strings on paper and as colored text when viewed onscreen.
At the beginning of each chapter is a list of topics discussed in that chapter. If you are viewing this book online, you can jump to the discussion of any of the listed topics by clicking an item in the list.
Glossary entries appear in italics in print and as underlined links in the online document. If you view the document online, you can display the glossary definition by clicking the underlined link.

Important Terms in This Book

You will find a glossary in the back of this book. To save you from having to look up many words as you first start reading, this section contains a partial glossary of some of the more important terms.

StudioCentral Terminology

The following terms refer to StudioCentral features and functionality:

Asset		The primary unit of storage in StudioCentral. An asset consists of two parts: metadata (descriptive information) and content (actual digital data). Assets can contain references to other assets, which allows composite assets to be stored.
Content		The actual multimedia data: digital images, sound files, and so on. Content is stored separately from metadata.
Datamodel		StudioCentral feature that is used for structuring metadata, which is an asset's descriptive information. Datamodels organize and define an asset's metadata and its relationships to other assets using attributes (name/value pairs). Datamodels can be nested. An asset has one or more Datamodels associated with it. The default Datamodel for assets is AmsBase.
Metadata		Descriptive information about an asset, such as the compression format of a video asset. Each piece of information is called an attribute. Metadata is stored separately from content. Each asset always has system attributes, and may also have Datamodel attributes.
Repository		A storage unit for digital assets. Each repository consists of one database, for storing metadata, and one or more content servers, for storing the content. A StudioCentral server may include multiple repositories in either a single-server or multi-server configuration. The multiple repositories are managed by a single Ams Server process.

StudioCentral Library User Terminology

The following terms refer to persons who use or administer StudioCentral Library:

Administrator		Individual who supports end users by performing tasks such as defining Datamodels, starting and stopping servers, giving users access to assets, and so on.
Developer		Software engineer who writes end-user application programs and plugins that use the StudioCentral AMP protocol to access StudioCentral.
End user		User of StudioCentral Library application programs, such as the Macintosh client.

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StudioCentral™ Library Overview		Chapter 1. Functional Overview