PRESENTATION TITLEPresentation Subtitle

From Object to Access: Digitization at the Indianapolis Museum of Art

Tascha Mae Horowitz, Manager of Photography

Kyle Jaebker, Director of IMA Lab

Anne M. Young, Manager of Rights and Reproductions

The need to find an efficient way to utilize and disseminate collection images and data via open access

The Access Quandry

Edward Hopper (American, 1882-1967), Hotel Lobby, 1943, Indianapolis Museum of Art, William Ray Adams Memorial Collection, 47.4© Edward Hopper

What Wasn’t Working

• Photography department images lived in 4 places• Many images were not “ready” or “finished” and no way of

designating if they were• All image requests had to go through a member of

photography staff• No way of running reports or statistics related to collection

photography• No caption or rights information was retained with the images• Metadata and image syncing was prone to failure• Reliant on old technology and institutional memory

MediaBin

Not all images for a piece are presented sequentially and there was no search function so relies on

institutional memory

Nuxeo

• Made it necessary for all image requests to go through photography

• No visual searching

• No keyword searching

• Did not support DNG format

• Could only display 1000 files per folder

• Process for linking an image to its collection data and assigning a primary image took about 20 steps

It’s about fit…• No ability to batch anything:

• Associations• Linking• Downloading• File Conversions

• Not intuitive for average user

• Tried to be both of these:• Document Management

System• Digital Asset Management

System

Why Nuxeo Didn’t Work for the IMA

Old IMA Collection Pages

Copyright Notice

Moving Forward

• Created an IMA specific list of DAM requirements.

• Created an internship with an information science graduate student to work only on this project.

• Researched what systems existed and who was using them.

• Made the decision to separate document management and digital asset management.

• Commercial vs. open source.

• Once we narrowed the list, we reached out to known institutions using these systems and interviewed them about their experience.

• What do we have that we can leverage?

DAM Preparatory Work

• Backend/Technical• Searching• Organization

• Uploading/downloading• Permissions• Vendor Support

IMA DAM Requirements

• Interdepartmental task force • Institution approved controlled vocabulary• Cleaning up collection images (still in progress)• Cleaning up hundreds of thousands of non-collection

images while adding keywords and metadata

DAM Preparatory Work

The New DAM is…

• “Cleaning up” over 90,000 collection images

– Evaluating for file size and quality, color balance, and contrast levels

– Standardizing file formats – every approved image has 3 versions (tif, jpeg, and dng)

– Working cross departmentally to standardizing file naming (PS_XXXX-XX_v01 and REG_XXXX-XX_v01)

– Ensuring that all approved imagery has a primary image assigned and designated through proper file naming

Piction - Preparatory Work

Piction Preparatory Work

vs.

IMA Licensing Agreement

KE-EMu Rights Module

Sharing & Tracking Rights in Excel

KE-EMu to Piction Field Name Mapping

KE-EMu to Piction Field Name Mapping

Piction – Preparatory Work

Piction – Preparatory Work

Piction – Fine Tuning• Search functionality• Metadata ingestion & Imbedding• Thesaurus terms for collection imagery• Sorting order• Permission levels for staff – 4• Tombstone info on prints• Caption generation• Multiple collections require varied import

scripts

Piction – Fine Tuning

Piction – Fine Tuning

File downloads based on user group permissions.

Word document export includes thumbnail image with basic Tombstone data about the work.

CMS-DAM Coordination Results

• Self sufficiency for museum staff for majority of image requests

• More time for photography staff to document the collection

• Relaunch of online collection pages with improved search functionality and image quality

• Ability to obtain accurate statistics of collection imagery

• Increased accessibility to collection has allowed us to apply for grant support for additional collection documentation

American Art Collection Digitization Project funded by the Luce foundation

• Received a two year grant to digitize our American Art Collection

• IMA’s work with Piction and the potential dissemination of collection images through both our DAM and our new website was an integral part of the successful grant application

• Project includes both digitization as well as data research and clean up

• Goal is to have publication quality imagery of each piece plus complete and verified basic data sets

• Project includes about 2200 objects over 22 months• Hired 4 staff members

Data Dagwood

Mercury

Dagwood

EMuPiction

MediaBin

Tags (STEVE)

Extended Text

Color Detection

Related Media

Nuxeo

Data Dagwood

Static Web Pages

A web page that is delivered to the user exactly as stored, in contrast to dynamic web pages which are generated by a web application.

Static web pages are suitable for content that never or rarely needs to be updated. However, maintaining large numbers of static pages as files can be impractical without automated tools.

Any personalization or interactivity has to be run client side.

DESIGN: THE DATA

DESIGN: MOBILE FIRST

Increased OA at the IMA• Ability to obtain accurate statistics of collection images

• Benchmarked and amended fee schedule– Income is no longer the goal– Still want to know where & when the

IMA collection is reproduced– Instead seek to disseminate images

and foster scholarly endeavors

• Relaunch of online collection pages with improved search functionality and image quality– Collection page high resolution downloads

Increased OA at the IMA

New IMA Collection Pages

Jump to Object

Information

New IMA Collection Pages

New IMA Collection Pages

New IMA Collection Pages

Link to the Image Resources section

of the IMA website

THE NUMBERS

• 51,996 Total Objects• 23,998 Objects with Images• 33,430 Total Images• 15,177 Available Downloads

(21,785 Images)• 23,047 Hi-Res Zoomable Objects

(32,391 Images)• Approx 3,000 downloads over 3

months

• Take the time to get it right:– Access data, staffing, workflows

• Don’t jump into OA without workflows set:– Ensure the coordinated delivery of object

metadata and rights information with high-res image files.

So much more!!!

Final Thoughts

PRESENTATION TITLEPresentation Subtitle

Thank you!

Tascha Mae Horowitz, Manager of Photography

Kyle Jaebker, Director of IMA Lab

Anne M. Young, Manager of Rights and Reproductions