Derbyshire based Soutron has taken another step towards recognition as a global provider of digital knowledge management, with an award to part fund a collaborative innovation project.

Long acknowledged for library system innovation, Soutron, in partnership with the Chartered Management Institute, Collections Trust and Knowledge Integration, has won funding from  the government-backed Technology Strategy Board for its knowledge sharing innovation project.

The partnership is one of just eight business-led collaborations, including teams led by the BBC, Guardian News and Media and Pearson Education, to share in £3 million government funding for research and development under the umbrella programme Metadata: Increasing the Value of Digital Content .

The programme which, with contributions from the partners involved, is worth £6 million in total, seeks to develop prototypes and demonstrators which have the potential to enter the market within one to two years from completion.

The Soutron-led project, entitled Metadata Encapsulation for Digital Information and Assets (MEDIA), will use an innovative combination of cloud computing services and encapsulation technologies to enable organisations to control and manage digital assets after they have "left" the repository in which they are usually stored.  

Graham Beastall, founder and MD of Soutron comments that "Stored digital material is growing at a rate which would have been inconceivable just a few years ago. This funding will accelerate our delivery of a new breed of solutions which will allow professional institutes, museums and other protectors of digital material, to release the value of their assets. It will also facilitate unprecedented innovation in knowledge sharing to realise the full, and currently unknowable, potential of those assets."

Soutron is already building a reputation for knowledge management expertise alongside its next generation web-based library management solutions and is actively seeking partners to sell its existing knowledge management and library solutions around the globe.