Hello, I was recently hired as a summer student in the Vancouver Art Gallery's Photo-Imaging department and have been asked to do some research into the types of metadata standards and image management software other galleries/museums are using. This information will help us in developing a plan to improve the way our images are currently stored and organized, so I'm hoping that some of you can help me out.
The Vancouver Art Gallery is a mid-sized gallery with approximately 9500 works in the collection. The Photo-Imaging Department maintains about 4500 digital reproductions of the gallery's works and uses Portfolio to organize the images. This is separate from the gallery's collections database, Cuadra/STAR. I am hoping to find out about how similar organizations are dealing with the following issues: Metadata What types of metadata standards and formats do you use for describing digital images? We are particularly interested in standards that relate to the technical metadata of digital images. Currently, the metadata for the images are embedded into the files using the IPTC and EXIF formats together with Photoshop's File Info, and XMP ? this consists mostly of technical metadata such as camera/scanning equipment, image processing, as well as photographer name, date of creation, rights information, etc. Is embedded metadata the way to go here? Can they be read by and/or exported/imported to most digital asset management and other database software? Our main concern is that the metadata is preserved should we decide to migrate the information to another system and/or consolidate the two databases. In the meantime, we are also hoping to set it up so that STAR can read or import metadata from the image database. Another issue is finding standards that allow us to relate multiple images to one object in the STAR database, particularly of objects consisting of multiple parts. Image/Digital Asset Management Software Which software do you use to store and organize your digital images? The gallery is planning on upgrading to the server edition of Portfolio but is also open to other options. Any feedback you can provide about the software your organization is currently using would be great. Thanks for reading! I look forward to hearing your responses. Yours, Rowena Koh Photo-Imaging Assistant Vancouver Art Gallery
