Walled Gardens in the DAM

A 'walled garden' provides your unit flexibility to catalog, tag and search hundreds to thousands of assets, in unit-specific storage area.

Below are highlights to using a 'walled garden'.

  • Determine the amount of space you need to protect and store your assets. Contracts start at 1 terabyte and scale to accommodate your growing collections.
  • Assets may include photos, videos, 3-dimensional renderings, maps, artwork, even portable document formats (PDFs). Create your walled garden collection based on your unit needs.
  • You decide what assets can be shared beyond your unit's use.
  • Walled Gardens require a unit to assign a primary asset owner. This person manages the collection and assigns access rights to the rest of their unit. The Asset Owners community help build and improve DAM collections for all of Ohio State. 
  • Asset Owners work to train their asset contributors. These are usually photographers, videographers or designers who understand how to upload and tag assets for the good of the searching community. You may have unlimited contributors to your walled garden. must complete Contributor training and utilize Ohio State tagging taxonomy and guidelines.
  • Your unit's walled garden may be made available to your entire unit for searching and accessing assets. This helps your unit become a self-serve community, using search to find assets of donors, deans, faculty and students for marketing, donor relations, or management materials. Training is available for all.
  • Search within the DAM helps you find assets from all the collections that you have access. This includes Ohio State signature gallery assets, shared assets collections and/or your unit’s walled garden.

What file types can be stored in the DAM?

The Ohio State DAM is supported by MerlinOne, which uses libraries and SDKs to ensure forward compatibility. For file types where supported, all embedded metadata is associated with respective fields in Merlin. Supported files include:

  • JPG, PSD, CR2, NEF, DNG, BMP, PNG, TIF, PDF, PICT, BMP, & GIF. For raw camera files, either embedded metadata or XMP sidecars are supported. (Queues for input must be configured for sidecar files.)
  • PDF, AI, and EPS files. All text layers for these formats are indexed for searching purposes.
  • Microsoft Office documents. All text in Word documents is indexed for searching purposes, even hidden cells on multiple worksheets of an XLS/XLSX file are indexed.
  • Common video and audio formats supported: MPEG-1, MPEG-2, DV, Windows Media, Quicktime, AVI, MP4, mov, MXF, m2v, mts, asf, rm, mp3, and wav.

How much storage is available?

A cloud-based storage solution allows for an unlimited amount of storage.

The minimum that units can lease is one terabyte, but contact the Ohio State DAM administrator to learn about DAM storage options that fit your needs. Contact websupport@osu.edu

To learn more, schedule a consultation

If you are curious if a DAM solution is right for you, you can schedule a consultation and demonstration of the Ohio State DAM. Contact websupport@osu.edu

If you have questions regarding the DAM, or need accessibility assistance, send an email to  websupport@osu.edu

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