Hello Nancy and all,
The Brooklyn Museum headed out on this road recently, too. We spent last
winter and spring on a museum-wide survey, planning process, and evaluation
of digital asset management software packages. Established a new,
centralized department, Digital Collections & Services, on July
1st pulling together the photo studio, rights & reproductions, and scanning
projects from various departments under the Deputy Director for Art (the
Museum division responsible for collections).
The mission of the department (short version!): to make images more
organized and accessible, establish technical standards, provide training,
and increase productivity by breaking up any existing logjams in creating,
acquiring, and using digital images. We have staff of 6.5 (all existing
staff members with new or revised job descriptions): photographer, asst.
photographer, r&r coordinator, DAMS image & data tech, DAMS implementation
asst/archives project tech, image acquisition & rights clearance person
(PT), with myself (former archivist) as head and DAMS implementation leader.
The photo studio recently went 100% digital with the purchase of a digital
back for our large-format camera and we ve established a Digital Lab with
scanners, printers, and workstations in the renovated former darkroom.
The department is committed to collaboration: with Information systems on
infrastructure, technical standards, and software selection/support; with
curatorial and collections departments to deal with the caches of collection
images out there; with libraries/archives/curatorial staff to identify
research collections and get them digitized and accessible; with various
departments to identify and smooth out procedures. Any imaging production
projects will be done in the Digital Lab, with content provided by the
source department and technical standards and supervision by Lab staff.
We re just about to implement the DAMS we selected (ActiveMedia from
ClearStory Systems) after looking at many candidates, from library/archives
packages to commercial systems. Open source and home grown were not
considered viable options for a variety of reasons. The commercial systems
offered much better workflow capabilities (museums are businesses, after
all, not simply research institutions making resources available, like
libraries) that will serve our Design, Public Info, and Publications
departments; security and permissions were also much more robust critical
when you need to control which images to release & to whom.
The plan is for a 3-part database: object collections (ours and others);
research collections from the libraries, archives and curatorial depts..;
and what I ve been calling life of the Museum : events, donors, PR
materials, the building, and other images relating to daily life. For
descriptive metadata, we ll be mapping TMS descriptive metadata to CDWA; the
research & LOM collections will probably be extended DC, mapped to CDWA
where we can, for searchability. Tech. metadata will be the draft ISO
standard, I think. Much of the administrative metadata will most likely be
home-grown, to support local workflow needs. There will be one image server,
with the images and their structure/interrelationships managed by the
DAMS.We're hoping that we'll be able to make a fairly seamless link between
the DAMS, TMS, and the library OPAC (Voyager).
It was time for this project in any case, but the urgency is being driven
(and partially funded) by our Mellon Costume Documentation Project, with
74,000 images generated over the next 3 years and a commitment to providing
images and data to ArtStor.
I ll be at MCN and at the NEDCC symposium and would welcome comparing notes
with other art museum staff in similar situations. After working through the
DAMS demo process, it s pretty clear that there s a critical mass of museums
building out there each vendor would drop hints that they were talking to
other museums. Who knows maybe the competition will be productive (a canned
TMS link, perhaps?)!
Looking forward to it!
Best,
Deborah
Deborah Wythe
Brooklyn Museum
Head, Digital Collections and Services
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, NY 11238
tel: 718 501 6311
fax: 718 501 6125
email: [email protected]
----Original Message Follows----
From: "Nancy Pinn" <[email protected]>
Reply-To: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Digital Imaging
Date: Mon, 3 Oct 2005 16:22:31 -0400
The Walters Art Museum is preparing to move into the digital imaging
age!
One of our major stumbling blocks is how to store our images. Do we
have two image servers -- one for the photo studio and one for
everything else -- or do we have one image server. What software do we
use to manage the images -- collection and non-collection.
We have three major types of images
authorized collection images taken by our photographer
images taken by our conversation division
non-collection images which includes
images of our buildings
images of social/development events -- gala, parties, etc.
images of educational events -- family day, seminars,
lectures, etc.
We are using Argus for our collections management system.
I would appreciate being able to correspond and/or talk with any of you
who are in the midst of this process or have a digital imaging plan in
place.
Thank you,
Nancy
Nancy Pinn
The Walters Art Museum
600 North Charles Street
Baltimore MD 21131
410-547-9000 ext 339
www.thewalters.org <http://www.thewalters.org/>
Palace of Wonders: The New Galleries of Renaissance and Baroque Art
opens October 22
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