Hi John,

A few thoughts...

One of the main things you want to avoid is the need to maintain the
same data twice in parallel, but slightly different databases for
collections management and image management. 

Much of what you need in terms of text for searchable content, at least
for multimedia files relating to museum objects, will be held in your
collections management system already. Make use of this. It should save
you work, and will mean that you don't need to separately maintain this
information within your IMS.

Obviously some images (eg of museum activities or events) won't relate
to individual museum objects and will need independent means of
describing content, and your image management will have additional
requirements which will not be met by most collections management
systems.

There are several approaches which can help:

(1) Use your collections management system to administer your images.
May or may not be feasible depending on the system.

(2) Have your IMS connect to tables in your collections management
system, and dynamically access the data within for relevant content.  As
these are likely to be specialist object data, it makes sense for the
curaotrial object specialists to only have to maintain these data in one
place. Your IMS would then only be used to maintain specialist IMS data,
rather than basic object data.

(3) As (2) above, but design an automatic export of relevant data from
the collections management system which contains the text content you
require, and schedule this to run regularly (eg nightly or weekly) so
that the content needed for the image system is automatically generated
and/or imported as necessary. This way, basic object information is kept
up to date in one place, but can be used by your IMS as well.

AS to how you store the content, that's a different issue. Most
standards suggest extracting metadata embedded in binary files, and
recording them (or at least copies of them) externally in databases, or
XML files etc. I'd probably go along with this. Some formats of
multimedia files would allow you to programmatically add
content-descriptive metadata (eg imported from a database table
generated by (3) above) to your binary files, but this seems extra
complicated to me. You know where you are with external metadata...

Cheers

John

Dr JW Faithfull
Hunterian Museum
University of Glasgow
G12 8QQ

Tel: 0141 330 4213
Fax: 0141 330 8001

Email: [log in to unmask]
Online catalogue: http://www.huntsearch.gla.ac.uk
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
John Williams (NMC)
Sent: 06 March 2007 14:59
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Image Management Software

My colleagues in Photography are seeking an image cataloguing and
management system that will enable them to catalogue and retrieve images
from a collection that currently numbers around 10,000 images and is
expected to grow to several times this number over the next few years.
Additionally we want to be able to extend the system to classify
additional multimedia files such as audio and video.
 
We assign a wide variety of different characteristics to the images
reflecting the interests of the many curatorial departments in the
Museum. This enables us to retrieve images that may for example be of an
axe head of flint found in a particular location relating to a
particular culture from a particular time period. Each department has
its own particular set of preferred descriptors and while there is some
commonality many of the descriptors are specific to particular
departments. 
 
This creates a wide range of possible identifiers which makes recording
- and maintaining - the image descriptions difficult and time consuming.
 
We have been considering the possibility of using metadata embedded in
the images to enable us to classify and store the images and would
appreciate any comments about how practical this might be in a museum
context? The software we are currently considering is called Fotoware
which conforms to IPTC standards though I'm not sure how well this maps
onto the data we might need to store. 
 
If anyone has any comments that they could share - either on or off list
as appropriate - I'd be delighted to hear from you.
 
 


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