Our Readers' Digital Imaging Effort

For the past six months, we have been collecting data from our readership about their image collections and their efforts to digitize them. The goal was two fold: to survey our readership and to identify trends.

We had assumed that most of our readership were from our current client base and thus offered Building and design, Culture-history, or Education as the choices for an organization's primary concern. 75% of the respondents were evenly split among these concerns. However, a quarter chose the other category and listed their concerns as: Art, Industry, Nonprofit, Preservation, Public Library, Photo organizing, IT. Most people saw their organizations as Lean (43%) while the rest were split between medium and large, with only one ­ one-man shop.

One surprise was the diversity of individuals managing digital images. While a majority of the respondents came from similar sized institutions from three major fields, no more than two had the same job title and they spread over diverse categories: archivist, visual resource curators, photo editors, librarian, marketing managers, information specialist, editor, photographer, partners and registrar. In other words, those involved with digital imaging are coming from a diverse background with different strengths, Most saw themselves as creative innovators with only less than a third calling themselves unseen support. Their Staffs also reflected this diversity of skills including: librarians (31%), curators (10%), marketing professionals (14%), publishing professionals (3%) and digital technologists (3%) as well as archivists, architects, information systems, public affairs, paraprofessionals, student workers, various museum staff, photographers, graphic artists and Registrar. A third of the respondents¹ teams would be interdepartmental and include outside consultants. In addition to their staff, they would include: Network cataloger, creator, taxonomists, database programmer, metadata, vendors, web design and engineers.

Another interesting characteristic was that most (72%) were primarily serving their only own organizations as opposed to the public. Most also were providing access to images either for viewing or for use, Only 7% were part of a publication production system. Those using the collection were considered familiar with the collection.

For the most part, people were managing primarily photographic (80%) collections, but there were also some managing documents and other artifacts such as fine art, correspondence, maps, photographs, newspapers, slides, transparencies, and maps. Almost a quarter of these collections were being stored in file cabinets and more than a third were maintained in the curatorial work area. Of those who had digital files, only 14% were saving them on the organization¹s server. This is the preferred method for secure reliable backups and ease of migration, so I hope that is not a trend, but merely an indication of then beginning of a move from prototypical efforts to permanent collections utilizing professional practices and procedures. The storage for the remainder was evenly split between CD, computers and dedicated servers. Next time we will ask about plans for digital obsolescence, security and back ups.

The growth of the collections is evenly spread between a range from 100 ­ 24,000 images a year. The 24,000 images may be a one-time effort as it was submitted by someone who described himself or herself as a marketing manager for a lean organization. That collection¹s focus was on building design though, and architects do take many photographs. Otherwise, the spread is as follows;

Most people (80%) are storing their files as TIFs and JPGs, though not necessarily both. Some (21%) are saving only JPGs. A few are also using other file formats including JPG 2000 and PDF (20%). One museum, which deals primarily with maps, is using only the GIF file format.

Almost half the people are using database software to mange their collection, while a third are using a DAM. One group is using a Content Management system. The remainder are either using a Library system or just a list (10%). Even with the high rate of DAMs, more than a third did not use keywords as descriptive metadata even though for many DAMs' keywords are the preferred search method. This makes me wonder if they are effectively using the DAMs. Indeed, most did use fields for storing their information (metadata) about the digital files. While people are more often using database structure, almost half did not respond to the more complex field descriptions such as related or child parent fields. This could just mean a lack of familiarity with the term, as while we had a several job titles present, database developer was not significantly represented.

In terms of data captured, some areas indicate a need to continue to educate the diverse people managing digital images in professional practice and procedures. While 50% or more of the respondents were from Cultural/History or educational fields, only a small number who were using the cataloging assists of Dublin Core - a catalog organization standard - (16%) or a standard Thesaurus (32%) in their data entry. 21% do not have a copyright policy, 11% do not have copyright information for their own collections. Also, the fact the almost a third did not have a file naming convention was discouraging.

We were somewhat surprised at the diversity of job descriptions of our respondents and their proposed team components. We think it is an accurate reflection of the diverse skills needed to create and manage a digital collection. We just had not thought that the process had been developed to that point. Several other areas indicate that the collections are moving from prototypical developments in pockets of an organization, to enterprise or institutional wide collections. We hope that concerns about data collection, copyright as well as digital obsolescence catch up.

4/24/04