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Quality Control
while sharing Image Information
Trudy Levy with Dixi Carrillo, Edaw
In 1995 the Marketing and Information Technology group at EDAW, an international design firm, had a meeting to discuss how they could improve their use of digital imaging. In the practice of their profession, EDAW integrates community planning, urban design, landscape architecture, environmental planning and natural resource management in 23 offices around the world. Many of their offices were already undertaking some digital prepress projects, but without a consistent goal or approach. It was decided that creating a firmwide standard was important and the best way to do that was to create a library of both visual and text information to which all users would have access.
Three target areas were defined.
- Graphic standards
- Projects and staff information
- Photographic documentation of the firm's work.
Each area has been developed and refined over the past four years, but for our purposes we will discuss the evolution of how they document their projects.
With their goal to provide greater access and maintain a quality standard of material in sight, they launched their Intranet called ED this month. Anyone in the firm can access ED's Imagebank which contains 1200 images of EDAW's work. The day, Dixi Carrillo, EDAW's photographer, was demonstrating the system to DIN: a Digital Imaging Network of which she is a member, an architect with the firm had downloaded several examples of railings to show a client. He was able to demonstrate his concept with examples from EDAW's portfolio. ED had not only provided him with readily available images in digital format, but had also increased the exposure of EDAW's product.
The Marketing and Information Technology group had maintained a quality standard, while providing a useful tool to all the firm. Did they reach the goal overnight? No, The process was made in manageable steps. With the help of Image Integration they established a master plan with intermediary goals.
Phase I
Digitization and distribution of images to offices in the form of PhotoCDS.
Later in the process EDAW would duplicate their PhotoCDS themselves, but mainly they made available to everyone well scanned digital images.
Develop a list of descriptive terms which would assist the user in finding the image.
During this process Dixi, as photographer, had the advantage of knowing what she had been photographing. She was also interested in expanding the current reasons for using images. With Image Integration she created a vocabulary of terms which not only covered project terms and material, but also design concepts. It was decided to restrict the project information to broad categories, but to describe the images themselves with keywords. Next she also began to organize her images using FileMaker Pro, so she could a publish list of images and their locations to accompany the PhotoCDS.Phase II
Create an Image Management System.
The fact that whole project was a slowly evolving project, everyone involved, learned how to use it as each new item cropped up. Before great investment had been made, people became accustomed to using digital images and wanting more, so that when ED launched, they were ready for it. The important thing was everyone – technology, marketing and photographer – had agreed to the direction to take and all worked in their areas to reach the desired end.The first step was to buy an off the shelf software - ImageAxsPro which is now marketed by Caere. Dixi continues to maintain her library in this software, as do those international offices which do not yet have access to ED.
The second step was to develop a system available over the web. As their intranet, ED was developed the Imagebank developed in ImagAXSPro was ready to be folded in. Now the data from ImageAxsPro is exported to Ed's oracle database. The images are located in an image server which is a part of ED. As ED operates on T1 lines it provides very fast access and anyone on the system can download images to be used for projection, in house printing or FPO. At this time each office still receives PhotoCDS for high end printing.
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