By Jeffrey R. Burrows

Once upon a time, people found clip-art handy for the occasional flyer or to brighten up a presentation. Web sites have changed all that, and Web masters must discipline mounds of media of all types -- images, sounds, Java applets, movies and soon perhaps smells.

Notes has revolutionized the way many companies pass and organize their information, and it can be put to work similarly for managing media. This article will demonstrate some of the possibilities and benefits, and point you to a ready-made example, free and with all source code included, ready for use. (If you're the impatient sort, you can download and play around with Domino Media Library -- R4.6 & R5 compatible -- now. Grab it from http://www.rhizomatics.demon.co.uk/software/dommedia.zip)

Basic Notes features
If you store multimedia files in Notes documents, all the basic features such as replication and workflow can be leveraged for Web site management. Replication allows standard media libraries to be centrally managed across multiple servers and even easily used on your laptop. Workflow allows you to put the same approval process for images in place that you would for documents, so that image-conscious executives can personally approve the Web site's new look. More fundamentally, the document, which contains the media file, can also have various Notes fields incorporated to allow commenting and classification.

Binary file access
Part of LotusScript's overlooked legacy from traditional BASIC interpreters is a set of file handling commands, almost identical to that of Bill Gates's old GW-Basic, which can be used to manipulate both text and binary files. Therefore, there's no type of file which can't be read, analyzed, and even written to from LotusScript; the only obstacle being an understanding of the mystical world of binary file formats. A good starting point for deciphering most binary file formats can be found at http://www.wotsit.org.

If you know the binary file formats for a .GIF or .WAV file, it's perfectly possible for Notes to act as a media library with a little more intelligence than simply being a file store. For example, the image width and height, number of colors, stereo channels of .WAV files, which are usually stored in the first few bytes of a binary file, could all be extracted and stored as Notes fields.

While all of this can be accomplished by writing custom LotusScript routines to analyze binary files and extract the relevant files, the Domino Media Library which accompanies this article implements a technology called Binary Field Exchange. This is accomplished entirely in LotusScript, supplied in a script library included with the database, together with all the source code, to be freely reused and modified as you wish.