|
Thanks, Janice. I really enjoyed that meeting. Your questions make
excellent subject headings, so I just filled in some responses below! Janice wrote: The plan at Brooklyn Museum was to force images into the new DAMS. Saving of TIFF, etc., to the network drives was to be disabled. In the IT SIG meeting, someone (forgive me, I didn't see you again afterward!) mentioned that she saw this as a loss. I see the point, but I don't think so. You're not just reducing duplication, you're encouraging people to go to the primary image store and reuse the better images that are already there. It saves people time, it results in them using better images, and it should encourage adoption and expertise in the DAMS, which will ultimately have benefits we can't predict today. There's a positive feedback there that will result in a net gain for all the staff, I'm pretty sure. Not to mention the simplification on the storage side. We had quotas on the network drives, and as you'd expect, when people needed to make room it was all images taking up the space (and Powerpoint files). Everybody hated the quotas, including those of us who had to enforce them, but what else can you do? Running out of space for real would be worse. I hope that moving to a DAMS and getting images off the network drives will minimize this problem for them. Brooklyn Museum reorganized a new department, from Rights & Repro, Photography, etc. to handle the DAMS. I think it's a profession unto itself, so if you can do that it's the right thing to do. Photography was already going all digital, which made it a lot easier (inevitable?), and we had an excellent staff member (Deborah Wythe, formerly the Museum Archivist) ready for new challenges, who was the right person to take over. Everything won't come together like that in every museum, and there are some places that are opting to keep DAM in IT. The plan at Brooklyn was to use nightly disk-to-disk, which may be the only method fast enough to keep up during the intense parts of the initial project, and then to back up the disk backup to tape (which I think was LTO3, if that's the newest kind of LTO). Generally we preferred differentials to incrementals, since they can make big restores a lot easier, so the tape backup would probably be nightly differentials and weekly or bi-weekly fulls. All this adds up to a ton of cost--the equipment, the time, the tapes. I was just pricing Internet live backup. US Data Trust is among the better ones, but is expensive (http://www.usdatatrust.com/service/pricing.asp). It might be worth it, if you could really put a price on the time (in addition to the materials & equipment), and if you can therefore avoid paying for some other off-site storage. But they don't even list prices for the quantities an average museum would require in a DAMS. And bandwidth is a problem, I think--it's live, over-the-Internet backup, which is fantastic, but when you're taking 100MB files with a fancy camera just 50 pics a day would eat up about 9 hours on a T1. Basically, they seem like they're about backing up regular files, not high-quality images. Museums can usually do well with being a little bit behind the technology curve. Not so, apparently, when it comes to image storage and backup. Unless, of course, we switch to JPEG2000 or become more comfortable with other kinds of reversible compression. Given the high cost of the commercial DAMS solutions, who's interested in a more low-key (but still high-tech) open source or anyway very customized approach? I think that actually relatively little separates the $15K products from the $100K products, and there's room for low-cost products to do all the important things right, while maybe leaving out some of the glitz. --Matt |
"matt.vcf" (missing attachment)
--- You are currently subscribed to mcn_mcn-l as: [email protected] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [email protected]
