unit 7

I am new to digital information. Right now the only questions I have are ones that are addressed in each unit. I am working on keeping my head above water. I don't know what questions to ask and I have not worked with digital collections before so I don't know what should be in a collection and what is too much. I will continue to read everyone's posts and try to take it all in. I am excited to see what I have learned and what I can do so far. Everything I look at still leaves me with questions and uncertainties. I am just grasping the very edge of all that we are learning but I continue to understand more and more.

However, I looked at Enterprise Content Management (ECM). It is a formalized organization and storage system for documents and other content. ECM are tools that are used throughout the lifecycle of the content. ECM evolved to include new metadata and information about how the content was used. This allows the organization to access data used in business decisions.
The ECM has evolved from electronic document management systems (EDMS) of the late 1980’s. These original products were stand-alone products that could resolve customer inquiries. As the internet was introduced the term was changed to ECM. Open Source ECM products are both internal and external making outsourcing possible.
ECM have three key ideas, they are integrative middleware which is behind the scenes infrastructure for web-based IT, independent services which means there is only one general service available which avoids redundant functions, and as a uniform repository for all types of information which is a content warehouse.
ECM technology is an invisible infrastructure that supports specialized applications and fit into multi-layer models for managing structured data.