Normal 0 0 1 865 4936 41 9 6061 11.1282 0 0 0 MCN Digital Media SIG meeting minutes, Portland, OR, Nov. 13,2009 The annual meeting of the MCN digital Media SIG was held at the MCN conference in Portland on Friday at 5:30, just prior to the SIG Pub Crawl. The meeting this year had some new faces, with 13 people attending. The meeting opened with the SIG Chairman, Stanley Smith giving a brief review of what the SIG?s primary function has been for MCN-- primarily choosing and hosting seminars, talks or panels for the annual conference. This year?s panel was Speed the Plow: Rapid Capture Digital Workflow, which highlighted rapid capture case studies from five institutions. The panel was well attended, and had extensive follow-up from many of the audience later in the conference. Erik Landsberg from MoMA talked about the recent meeting of the ImageMuse group in NYC. ImageMuse is a somewhat informal group of imaging managers from over 60 institutions from all over the world. ImageMuse primarily meets online via a listserv, but does try to get together in person occasionally?usually in concert with major conferences or tradeshows. The ImageMuse listserv is a great place for imaging managers to pose questions, discuss technical issues, and generally stay in touch with each other throughout the year. It was decided at the meeting in NYC that ImageMuse would open membership to more institutions?hopefully doubling participation. We discussed the desirability of bringing more MCN members to the ImageMuse listserv, and this fits nicely with the current efforts at ImageMuse to broaden its reach. Alan Newman from the National Gallery of Art posted the following on the MCN listserv yesterday, and I will repeat it here: ImageMuse is a group of museum imaging and publishing professionals. We have worked together to define guidelines for the creation and use of digital files for reproduction. Our work resulted in the 2007 UPDIG Digital Image Submission Guide for Fine Art Reproduction at http://updig.org/disg/fineart.php
A number of ImageMuse museums are working with Franziska Frey, McGhee Professor in the School of Print Media at Rochester Institute of Technology, through a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to research the art image interchange cycle and to extend current industry practices and standards. Additionally, we continue to work together to share basic information on Digital Asset Management applications, color profiling of DSLR cameras, rapid capture workflows and other technical issues in our work. We are looking to expand our membership from the current 60 members (from 28 organizations?mostly large American institutions) to 150 members representing 75 organizations large and small and significantly international. If you are the head of a museum or archives imaging department, a DAM manager or a publications production manager you can join ImageMuse at the following web address http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ImageMuse/ click Join this Group to submit a request for membership. We discussed possible content for next year?s conference. Several museums at the meeting have been participating in a new Mellon-funded Benchmark project being conducted by Franziska Frey from RIT. This project is an extension of a seminal benchmarking project that was finished in 2005 by Franziska and Roy Berns called ?Direct Digital Capture of Cultural Heritage Benchmarking American Museum Practices and Defining Future Needs?. http://www.cis.rit.edu/museumSurvey/documents/Benchmark_Final_Report_Web.pdf The current project is called ?Benchmarking Art Image Interchange Cycles?, and deals with how publishing workflows affect the quality and rendering of our images. This has always been a significant issue for institutions that publish images of their objects, and Franziska has devised a way to measure several key points in this workflow?in a quantitative way. The conference presenting her results is in June of 2010, and we are hoping to get Franziska (and co-author Susan Farnand) to come to Austin in November to present their findings to MCN. We also talked about presenting a panel that highlights some lesser-known and more technical ways of capturing images of our objects. This may include multi-spectral and hyper-spectral capture, High Dynamic Range methods, Reflection Transformation Imaging (RTI), Polynomial Texture mapping (PTM), as well as information on conservation techniques such as UV and IR capture. This idea has some good support, and I believe we may propose a session for Austin. Another idea expressed for next year is to have some way to present a follow-up for the case studies that were presented in the Rapid Capture panel?maybe a poster presentation, or a short presentation along with a more detailed document. After the meeting we adjourned to the Rose and Thistle?a popular Scottish bar near the hotel. While it was difficult to discuss imaging issues over the din, we all heard Chris Edwards?s arteries slamming shut from the consumption of Scotch Eggs (a hard-boiled egg is wrapped in sausage, then dropped into the deep fryer). An evening of quaffing and mirth! New members of the DM SIG: The main venue for us during the year is the MCN listserv. Traffic this last year was somewhat spotty, but I encourage all of you imaging folks to not be shy about posting questions, discoveries, tips, etc on the MCN listserv. I encourage ImageMuse members to cross-post on the MCN listserv. Please put the words ?Digital Media SIG? in the subject line (along with you topic). This serves to alert those interested in our issues know to read this one. Thank you all for a great conference, and I hope to see more of you in Austin next year! Stanley Smith Head of Imaging Services The J. Paul Getty Museum Stanley Smith Manager, Imaging Services J. Paul Getty Museum 1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 1000 Los Angeles, CA 90049-1687 (310) 440-7286
