Working with supplementary media

EMu's Multimedia repository stores and manages a wide range of document types. These may be:

  • In electronic format (e.g. images, Word documents, video, etc.).
  • URLs identifying a resource on the World Wide Web.
  • An identifier used to locate a particular resource (e.g. the ISBN for a book, or the location of a slide in the slide library).

Each record in the Multimedia repository describes exactly one resource. Data describing the resource may be added to the record, allowing quite detailed information to be associated with it (as a minimum, the full set of Dublin Core fields is available).

An issue arises when there's a need to store resources associated with a Multimedia record. For example, let's say a Multimedia resource is an image of a page containing text. Along with the image it may be desirable to have a text document that contains the words in the image so that users may view the image of the text but also have the option of reading the text in the associated document.

The purpose of supplementary media is to allow associated resources to be stored with a master resource in the same Multimedia record. Supplementary media does not replace the use of over-arching records to related multimedia where each resource is important in its own right, rather it provides a mechanism for storing other media that may be used along with the master resource.

It is possible: