Hello,
I was recently hired as a summer student in the Vancouver Art
Gallery's Photo-Imaging department and have been asked to do some
research into the types of metadata standards and image management
software the photo departments of other galleries and museums are
using. This information will help us in developing a plan to improve
the way our images are currently stored and organized, so I'm hoping
that some of you can help me out.
The Vancouver Art Gallery is a mid-sized gallery with approximately
9500 works in the collection. The Photo-Imaging Department maintains
about 4500 digital reproductions of the gallery's works and uses
Extensis Portfolio to organize the images. This is separate from the
gallery's collections database, Cuadra/STAR.
I am hoping to find out how similar organizations are dealing with the
following issues:
Image Management Software
What image management software are you using? We are planning on
upgrading to the server edition of Extensis Portfolio but are also
open to other options. Any recommendations or feedback about the
software your organization is using would be great.
Metadata
What standard are you using for recording the administrative and
technical metadata of your images? Have the IPTC Core standards been
widely adopted? Are there other standards being used or that should
be used in museum photography?
Our main concern is that the metadata is preserved should we decide to
migrate the information to another system and/or consolidate the two
databases. In the meantime, we are also hoping to set it up so that
STAR can read or import metadata from the image database and vice
versa. Another issue is finding standards that allow us to relate
multiple images to one object in the STAR database, particularly of
objects consisting of multiple parts.
Thanks for reading! Your responses will be very much appreciated.
Yours,
Rowena Koh
Photo-Imaging Assistant, Vancouver Art Gallery
[log in to unmask] 750 Hornby St., Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2H7
T (604) 662 4700 x 616 F (604) 682 1086 www.vanartgallery.bc.ca
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