Image Revolutions

My first study trip to Europe in 1979 was what drove my decision to shoot 35mm slides rather than print film. As an ancient history major on a Classical civilizations tour, I wanted to be able to project the images to groups of people and easily make multiple slide or print copies of my shots. Thirty-five millimeter cameras with their many film choices were the most versatile option for such collaborative activities. I had the coolest technology with a camera that was easy to tote and the end product--a small, high quality, portable image I could easily share.

Time warp, circa 30 years later, I can shoot an image with my cell phone and send it on to multiple people in a matter of seconds. A wide selection of digital cameras are available--no film necessary--for every level of photographer from amateur to professional. Electronic copies of images are shared/stored on computers or prints are easily made at home or processed commercially. Digital technology has revolutionized photography and I’m thrilled to be a part of this transitional moment.

I was about 20 years too late to be part of the change from earlier forms of photography to 35mm slides. But, more and more, I find myself wondering about the similarities and the differences between these two image revolutions. Especially, the issues associated with teaching and sharing images.

Digital technology and social networks are providing unprecedented opportunities to collaborate on building image collections, but ironically, there seems to be a trend in academia of instructors building individual digital image collections that are shared in the classroom, but rarely further. Not to mention all the individual messes we are all quite capable of making with our digital files.

Is this the way it was when 35mm slides made it possible for everyone to easily shoot their own teaching images?

At what point did instructors start to realize that building a slide library everyone could use would be more efficient?

One case has come to my attention that sheds some light, but I’m sure there are more. At the University of California in Santa Barbara, the visual resources curators decided they wanted to add some historic African art material photographed in the 1960s and 1970s to the UC Shared Images project (see http://www.cdlib.org/services/dsc/ucsi/). When researching the copyright issues, they discovered that the faculty member who had donated these slides was not the only photographer they needed to contact for permission to digitize and share the images. It turned out that a handful of art historians who were working on African art 45 or so years ago made duplicate copies of their travel slides and shared them with the group since they couldn’t all get to some of these exotic locales.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to collect other such stories to see if the transitional moment to 35mm slides might shed light on the digital image revolution?

The abandonment of the handy 2 x 2 inch analog object of our affection is still underway. Some were starting to move to digital images only 5 years after my student travels in the 1980s, but it is also true that there are instructors still using 35mm slides for teaching in 2010. The 50-year run of slides as the dominant image format is something worth consideration. As Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Maybe we can learn something interesting to guide us through this and inevitable future transitions?

JPEG2000 here to stay?

For all those studying and debating the pros and cons of the file format JPEG2000, here is an announcement of a blog dedicated to just those issues.
"The Wellcome Library has launched a new blog dedicated to JPEG 2000. The blog charts our progress in determining what type of JPEG 2000 we will use, how we use it, and how it impacts on the rest of the Digital Library infrastructure. The blog is also fed to our new Twitter account, Wellcome Digital, where you can also keep abreast of our news and views on UK PubMed Central and the development of our Digital Library and digitisation programme."

http://jpeg2000wellcomelibrary.blogspot.com/


Get informed!

A metadata renaissance

In her paper “Time Horizon 2020: Library Renaissance,” Susan Gibbons, Vice Provost and Dean, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester, speculates how the next decade will mark the renaissance of technical services and a complete transformation of collection development. Several of her projected changes would seem to apply to the future of visual resource collections as well.

In particular, these two points struck me:

“The emphasis of technical services will change from the acquisition of content to the user’s discovery of content. A library’s success will be defined by whether its users are finding the best materials easily and quickly, rather than by collection metrics…The success of these services will be dependent upon the availability and quality of metadata.”

“The need for all content to have some online manifestation, whether a full-text scan or a metadata record, will force all of a library’s hidden collections into the light, including manuscripts, images and other special collections.”

Metadata associated with images – in the form of shared, structured standards – has always been important to visual resources managers and librarians who sought to make their collections findable and discoverable to an audience. Just think of the on-going efforts of the VRA and other professional organizations to develop standards, schema and crosswalks for image metadata, or the amount of discussion on our listservs devoted to these issues. But today you can hardly talk about digital libraries, data repositories and Web 2.0 without the mention of metadata.

The acknowledgment that metadata is an essential element in the information infrastructure is rewarding. Metadata is ubiquitous, in the sciences, medicine, economics, education, industry, and government, as well as the arts -- in all disciplines which comprise our world today.

In the coming years, the fundamental “what” of technical services and library and visual collections will not change. However, we must be ready for the radical transformation in the “how” and “why” of these activities. Susan Gibbons believes that “the focus will shift from disparate silos of information resources to a mandated expectation that those silos can communicate and interact in ways that meet the expectations of library users.”

It is nice that as visual resources professionals, we are the established experts in developing demonstrable useful information standards for images, and that we have the skills and experience in place to leverage our knowledge with other disciplines, organizations and industries which are increasingly relying on quality metadata.

See “Time Horizon 2020: Library Renaissance”, by Susan Gibbons:

http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/alcts/confevents/upcoming/ala/library_renaissance.pdf

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

Digital Curation

A new term has been buzzing around library literature for the past few years: digital curation. Traditionally, curation was the act of organizing and maintaining a collection of artworks or artifacts. Digital curation, broadly interpreted, is about maintaining and adding value to a trusted body of digital information for current and future use. It is the active management and appraisal of digital information over its entire life cycle. Digital preservation focuses on the actions taken to ensure the accessibility of digital information across time and new technologies.

Digital curation most often refers to the management of open access publishing, or literature that is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. It can include born-digital research, images and projects produced by scholars, students and institutions. Those of us in the visual resources management field have been curating digitally for the past decade.

Most academic libraries have built collections by doing one of two things:

-They have purchased collections to support their local organizations.

-They have curated special collections of unique or valuable items.

The focus for most libraries or collections is changing to concentrate on the second role. In the future, the bulk of what will be curated will be digital. These two highly complementary concepts should take into account the needs of current and future users.

There are several challenges to in this new approach to image collection building: First, the visual resources collection will need to develop the skills and infrastructures to manage collections of open access content, while developing a solid strategy for long-term preservation of digital information. The visual resources librarian will be required to assist the faculty in the creation, evaluation and collection of this digital content. Second, such a strategy will be difficult or dangerous, because in effect it will require canceling or not purchasing vendor materials, or producing visual resources itself, on the assumption that the content will be available in an open access format. This may or may not be true in the long term. It requires a clear collection development policy and budgeting in our visual resources collections and libraries.

Given a definition that ranges from managing to archiving to preserving data along the data life cycle, there are various points were digital curation services can be pursued by visual resources managers: at a point of visual project initiation (articulating the project and pursuing funding); at a point of recent or ongoing visual production; at a point where a larger community needs to be engaged (broadening access); and at a point where time considerations are important (archiving and preserving in a repository).

It behooves us to keep abreast with resources about digital curation; there are many web sites and blogs, conferences and online classes, papers and panels that can be located.

An article of interest: David W. Lewis, “A Strategy for Academic Libraries in the First Quarter of the 21^st Century,” http://hdl.handle.net/1805/953