BPOC Express: Shared Digital Asset Management in a private cloud in under 6 months | Balboa Park

BPOC Express: Shared Digital Asset Management in a private cloud in under 6 months.

Check out the great work Balboa Park in San Diego has done in developing a collaborative DAM in this write up which they did.


BPOC Express: Shared Digital Asset Management in a private cloud in under 6 months | Balboa Park:
Overview

A DAM great list of Sources

The Museum Computer Network has been having an interesting discussion on Digital Asset Management systems. Among the information posted was some from, Leala Abbott, who has a blog on just this topic and is permitting me to post her suggested list of "great resources" here:

• DAM Foundation (LinkedIn): http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=1952873
• a cross-disciplinary, professional organization, devoted to standardizing and making sense of the world of DAM which would be useful to join and follow. I recently created the DAM List (links below) which is a community contributed list of technical specs on DAM products (which are actually tough to get without jumping through vendor hoops).
• The Real Story Group (leading content technology analyst group): http://www.realstorygroup.com/
• Digital Asset Management (industry Blog): http://digitalassetmanagement.org.uk/
• Createasphere (DAM Conference Series): http://createasphere.com/En/explore-expos-conferences.html
• Henry Stewart - Digital Asset Management Conference Series: http://www.hsconferences.com/dam.aspx
• Early and Associates: http://www.earley.com/
• AIIM: http://www.aiim.org/
• The DAM List (Product Tech Specs): http://lealaabbott.com/wp/archives/423

If you like those check out Leala at her blog Lealaabbott.com

A New Image Site - Ookaboo

Recently I was contacted  by a Paul Houle about some broken links on the site Dig-mar.com which I maintain. I guess I might as well announce here that that site is no longer being maintained and will be closed completely this summer. I am focusing my energies on this blog and the Imageminders.net site of the ICCoop.. However, I am grateful to Paul for his reminder and would like to pass on the resource which he was attempting to post on that site. Ookaboo

His group  Ontology2, has created the Ookaboo website, which contains digital images that they claim  are either in the public domain and or under Creative Commons licensing terms. It appears to be a collection of harvested images from the web, in particular Wikimedia, where people place images that they wish to share with the world, so the free access is probably correct. 
The interesting part to me, and I think to many of you,  is how they are indexing the images , which is by means of the semantic web. 
Here is their description of what that means.

Images on Ookaboo are indexed by terms from the semantic web, the web of linked data. Although you're free to find images through the human interface, automated systems can quickly find and use images through the semantic API.
Ookaboo has two goals: (i) to dramatically improve the state of the art in image search for both humans and machines, and (ii) to construct a knowledge base about the world that people live in that can be used to help information systems better understand us.

Semantic Web, Linked Data
In the semantic web, we replace the imprecise words that we use everyday with precise terms defined by URLs. This is linked data because it creates a universal shared vocabulary.
For an example, in conventional image search, a person might use the word "jaguar" to search for
    •    the animal
    •    the automobile brand
    •    the Jacksonville Jaguars (NFL team)
    •    the game console from Atari
    •    ... and nearly 30 other things that are listed in Wikipedia.
Note in the cases above, there are pages in Wikipedia about each of the topics above: it's reasonable, therefore, that we could use these URLs as a shared vocabulary for referring to these things. However, we get some benefits when we use URLs that are linked to machine-readable pages, such as http://dbpedia.org/resource/Jaguar, or 
http://rdf.freebase.com/rdf/biology.itis.180593

Pages on Ookaboo are marked up with RDFa, a standard that lets semantic web tools extract machine readable information from the same pages that people view.

Named entities
Ookaboo is oriented around named entities, particularly 'concrete' things such as places, people and creative works. With current technology, it's more practical to create a taxonomy of things like "Manhattan", "Isaac Asimov" and "The Catcher In the Rye" than it is to tackle topics like "eating", "digestion" and "love". We believe that a comprehensive exploration of named entities will open pathways to an understanding of other terms, and hope to extend Ookaboo's capabilities as technology advances.

The above information is from their About us page, which I highly recommend you check out.

Oh and yes their images are pretty good too, especially for those interested in buildings. and other "concrete" things.

Metadata for Digital Content (MDC), Developing institution-wide policies and standards at the Library of Congress

Metadata for Digital Content (MDC), Developing institution-wide policies and standards at the Library of Congress
From the site
Metadata for Digital Content (MDC)
Developing institution-wide policies and standards at the Library of Congress

Over the years the Library of Congress' digital projects have generated many digital objects and these objects have been given various levels and types of descriptive metadata. The Library has assembled several use cases that require a more coordinated and standardized approach to the creation and management of this descriptive metadata. A few examples of use cases are:

* Geographic navigation of Library of Congress digital content
* Temporal navigation of Library of Congress digital content
* Exchange video and audio data with external services

Metadata of varying degrees of richness is necessary to support the use cases.

As part of this effort an institution-wide working group was established and is making the following available for use by any interested institutions:

* A master metadata element list with recommendations on best practices for populating the elements to provide more consistency of new metadata creation throughout the institution, support the Library of Congress metadata use cases, and point to areas where metadata remediation of current metadata might be beneficial.

Check it out

CONVERTING TIFF TO PDF

For those looking to adopt the Acrobat file type pdf PDF as their Archival or Display file type Andrew Stawowczyk Long of the National Library of Australia has recently posted the following to Imaglib listserve.

"I wrote a free image to PDF batch converter. It's a simple application but does what's intended. Have a look at http://home.netspeed.com.au

Just a word of caution - I didn't have time to test it extensively but it seems to be working quite well."

Regards
Andrew Stawowczyk Long
Strategist
Digital Preservation Standards
National Library of Australia
anlong@nla.gov.aua

He graciously gave me permission to repost it here as he would welcome feedback, including any further development one might wish for.

The use of PDF as a preservation file type (Archival) is still abit controversial, but many including Archive.org and some of the LOC's efforts are using it. It is great for Text work.

How to Quantify unauthorized use

There have been some interesting posts on the Museum Computer Network list serve regarding a recent report from the GAO to Congressional Committees entitled

"INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Observations on Efforts to Quantify the Economic Effects of Counterfeit and Pirated Goods"
Here is a working URL:  http://tinyurl.com/piracyreport

Jeff Sedlik, photographer, points out that without being able to quantify the amount of content piracy, which the report indicates is not possible, it is hard to estimate the economic effect.  He then goes on to describe how an Image Recognition technology does seem to be able to quantify the use without attribution or permission of still images.

"I can't speak to piracy in other content arenas, but with respect to photography, advances in technology now allow image piracy rates on the internet to be quantified to an extent sufficient to estimate piracy rates with some accuracy. Image recognition technology may be used to locate instances of known images on web sites, and license data may then be used to determine whether or not each instance is authorized. Not all sites can be sampled, nor can all every instance of every image be identified, but it is possible to quantify estimated piracy rates via representative sampling.

In  2003, PicScout http://www.picscout.com/ (an Israeli image recognition company) searched commercial web sites for instances of images of known ownership. Nine out of every ten published images were found to be used without permission or knowledge of the rights holders.

In 2005, PicScout used a new reference group of 20,000 sample images (on this occasion, provided by a group of stock photographers), and found that 1 out of every 17 copies of these images published on commercial web sites was published without the knowledge or permission of the rights holder.  In the USA, the rate of misuse found in this survey was 64%. In Germany, 23%. In the UK, 13%.

PicScout reports that over a seven year period, it found that 85% of images found on commercial websites were published without the knowledge or permission of the rights holders.

In a recent LA Times article (Sept 9, 2009), Gettyimages reported that it identifies approximately 42,000 examples of copyright infringement per year, while Corbis reported the identification of approximately 70,000 infringements each year. Importantly, these figures represent only the infringements that have been detected. It is reasonable to assume that these figures represent a small fraction of actual unauthorized usages.

I am not writing to encourage or suggest heightened enforcement or penalties for piracy, nor am I expressing an opinion on copyright law, website spidering or digital rights management. I am merely pointing out that the report in question does not indicate that piracy rates are lower than estimated by industry, and that in the photography content industry, technology now allows some quantification of piracy rates. Perfect.   I would not disagree with an opinion that the content industry has used piracy statistics in lobbying for support from legislators.  But any attempt to claim that the figures are overstated will be frustrated by the very same issue identified in the report -- such claims cannot be quantified."

Jeff Sedlick
Check out the GAO report for yourself. - http://tinyurl.com/piracyreport

How to catalog Apples and Oranges?

So you are creating a digital asset system, which will serve a diverse user base. Your institution does not want to build a different management system for each user even if the marketing group may have different needs for digital assets than say the development or curator group. In an educational institution, there may be different subject areas or even in a design studio each individual may have a unique perspective. So, how to build an integrated system that supports all needs?

The key is flexible but clear rules. 
First, define a core group of fields that are to be filled all assets.  You will want that information which will aid in the management of the assets, such as:

• Location of digital file
• Title
• Usage rights
• Owner/creator of digital file

You will also want the fields that will aid users in cross collection searching, which must be derived from a study of your own users' needs when searching digital collection. For example in an art museum, all users would probably be interested in creator of original object, location of original object and possibly its provenance.  Thus a search on a particular object might not only turn up an image of that piece, but if doing a cross collection search, also promotional material about it and possibly informal images of it within an exhibit.  These fields would then be part of the core fields, which all groups would complete for their digital assets.

Secondly, define data standards before you start - i.e. decide what field will be used for which particular information.  You can start with data standards developed for each specialty, but chances are you will also need to create a crosswalk for differing data standards.  The important thing is to have each group use the assigned field for all the descriptive metadata, so that your crosswalks are accurate.

A New Reality

After reading several reviews and seeing an acerbic interview with its author recently on “The Colbert Report,” I have been thinking about the new book “Reality Hunger: A Manifesto” by David Shields and its implications for intellectual property rights in our digital society. Shield’s book consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers, which the author has taken out of context (in some cases, even “revised, at least a little”), and for which he only acknowledges the sources in an appendix, added reluctantly at his publisher’s lawyers’ insistence. Shield’s scorns and is “bored by out-and-out-fabrication” and creativity, and interested in “reality-based art” based on “recombinant” or appropriation art.

Shield’s pasted-together book and defense of appropriation underscore the contentious issues of copyright, intellectual property and plagiarism that have become so prominent in our Internet culture. Even the teaching of visual culture has seen the erosion of the value of intellectual property rights with the ubiquity and ease of finding images of artists’ works with on the Web with the click of a button. With the closure or lack of development of local institutional image collections, many teaching faculty and students are left to forage the Web for images without thought to who produced the art or photographed the object. That digital media are remolding our social landscape, especially arts and entertainment, goes without saying. That they are certainly affecting the methodology of scholarship and research needs is also sadly evident.

It is incumbent on us as part of our consultancy with individuals and institutions over the preservation and digital conversion of image collections not to forget the moral obligation we have to honor intellectual property rights where appropriate. Ignorance is certainly bliss among some faculty I have known, who often ignore basic tenets of copyright (although I suspect that they may be more informed than they let on). Along with technical, preservation, access and metadata issues, we need to educate our clients in the basics of copyright law and tenets of fair use with regard to images. Fortunately, there are very good forums and sites where we can direct faculty and institutions to get the most up-to-date and authoritative information about copyright, especially since major developments and legal decisions affecting academia are occurring with some frequency lately.

The value of artistic imagination and originality, along with the primacy of the individual, is being increasingly questioned in our digital world. So we need to be vigilant where we are able, especially in academic and library settings, as we go about our evangelizing for wider digital access to the fruits of generations of visual artists. Intellectual property rights should also be a “reality” to us, even if the author David Shields would probably disagree. (By the way, I’ve decided that he may be an uncreative minor wacko.)

Ah Metadata...

Jason Roy, at the Digital Collections Unit/Digital Library Development Lab, University of Minnesota had a word of encouragement for all those archivists out there while speaking at the VRA conference this year.  "You don't have to catalog on the item level." 

One of his archives received funding to scan an enormous collection for which they just had finding aids. For those not up on archival cataloging, it is customary to describe a collection by elements within a box, possibly a folder. So, you might have a folder of letters to Mr. Deere over a period of time. Alternatively, you might have a box of the Deere family memorabilia, estimated to cover 20 years of their lives.  The archivist will browse through said folder or box, looking for the item he desires.  The finding aid will give him a general idea where to best look.

Most digital collections have insisted that archivist must now throw some metadata at each item as it is converted to a digital format, so that an item is retrievable. 

Well, Jason, upon being confronted with the daunting task of converting this large collection to a digital format in the conventional manner, said no. Rather, they would place digital files in the appropriately labeled folder according to the box / folder information that existed already and would published a finding aid to direct the searcher to the appropriate "holder,"  which the searcher could then browse looking for the desired item.  No promises that it was there.  This is not ideal, but it is as good as the existing condition.  When you also throw in the technical ability to tag digital files with further information as researchers retrieve material, it means it will be a growing evolving catalog.  In addition, if you then embed the descriptive metadata that you have in each file, the digital file will always be identifiable without being bloated.

This approach would free up so many of our archives, if more special collections could accept it.  What do you think?

Bon appetit!

Recently it was reported that one of the most important photographic archives of the twentieth century was being shipped by trailer truck from New York City to Austin, Texas. The entire collection, more than 180,000 images known as press prints, had been amassed by the Magnum photo cooperative, whose members had been among the most important photojournalists of their time. The archive has been sold to the private investment firm for the family of Michael Dell, the Texas computer tycoon. Fortunately, the new owners have reached an agreement with the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin to locate it there, for study and exhibition, for at least the next five years.

Thomas F. Staley, the director of the Ransom Center, said that it planned to scan every image in the collection, of which Magnum itself had scanned fewer than half, in order to order to make them accessible for historical research and exhibitions.

This is just one of several significant archives of vintage visual material, including those of the New York Times and National Geographic Society, which has recently been targeted for digitization. These are invaluable and irreplaceable repositories of our culture and times. This is heartening, especially in light of the expense and labor involved. But it has me worried about the more modest, locally significant collections with which we are all familiar, which are being consigned to the landfills of history, for want of expertise, direction and funding.

For example, an art historian emeritus at the School of the Art Institute had left, as part of his estate, his considerable personal collection of slides, amassed over forty years of teaching. Much of the collection could be found duplicated in any other academic visual resources collection; however, there were pockets of extraordinary images documenting his particular interest in Food, and Food in Art. He was an original foodie, a gourmand, and enthusiastic lover of the sensual rewards of both art and food. He was a popular lecturer locally at culinary institutes, dining establishments and the art school. His slides included photographic documentation of noteworthy meals, the history of food, and the local cuisine found on his many travels, especially in Mexico. There were whole drawers labeled “French Revolution and food” or “Early American feasts” or even “Spam”!

This fascinating collection may never be accessible to the many and diverse audiences that might appreciate it, mostly because of lack of administrative and financial support. Food historians, art historians and other food enthusiasts will perhaps never taste the joys of this particular research and assiduous documentation. Even more frustrating, in a way, is the lack of a way to capture the pedagogy this historian employed, the apposite and humorous observations he made in his lectures. But at least we have the slides as a visual record--for now.

We need to try harder to identify, evaluate and preserve these visual treasure troves close to home. We are in a strong position to be able to advise and direct digital projects to make these images accessible to those who would appreciate them. There is some urgency to this mission, but also the promise of great adventure and astonishment.

To get the Money... do your homework

Now everybody is buzzing, saying it is a great idea to digitize the image collections, if only the money can be found... Grants are a great source for this kind of project, but do your homework first. Write out a project proposal that includes a mission statement which complements the larger organizational mission and includes an assessment of the user’s needs. Always keep in mind the benefits of the project to the end user. All your planning, strategizing, and writing at this point will serve you through every step of the process.

Research the equipment and support needs. Once the costs of the hardware, software, and staffing are determined consider the best strategies for convincing colleagues to “put their money where their mouth is”. The old saying “it takes money to make money” is true. Find seed money to allocate from your own budget then start looking for collaborators. The department, the library, IT, and other departments that use images are likely beneficiaries of the project. Go up the chain, often the President’s office, the alumni association, or Friends groups have funds for special projects. Befriend your organization’s development officers. Use each funding commitment to encourage further contributions by the next group you confer with. Continue to cultivate these contacts even if they do not offer funding immediately. Keep everyone informed about your progress.

It does not matter how small each pledge is, it all adds up! Not only are you raising the money, but you are also raising awareness and building a committed endorsement. When you approach the larger community for funding this demonstration of support will almost be more important than the money gathered from the internal sources.

What are the strategies you have used to get your colleagues involved and committed?

Future posts will discuss types of funding organizations, and provide pointers for writing grant funding requests...