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1.1 Project Members 
Margo
Dunlap,
Thoreau Lovell, Joanna Plattner
1.2 Background
The
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is undertaking an effort to
systematize the digitization of images within its collection. Specifically,
they plan to establish a "digitizing" center within the museum by August
2001.
The
goal of the center, which is being created at the direction of the Collections
and Information Access (CIA) department's Visual Resource manager, will
be to ensure the cost-effective creation of digital surrogates, both images
and metadata records, that meet minimum format and completeness requirements.
This data will be combined with metadata from an existing collection management
system (CMS), called EmbARK, and will be made available through a new
digital asset management system (DAM). DAM, in turn, will be accessible
via either a web interface or an ODBC compliant database such as Filemaker
Pro.
The
design and implementation of DAM is the final project of two team members,
Thoreau Lovell and Joanna Plattner. For SIMS 213 we will be working with
Margo Dunlap to design, test, implement and evaluate the digital asset
management user interface.
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1.3 Problem Statement
Easy
access to digital cameras and scanners, combined with a growing demand
for digital images for administrative, educational, and promotional purposes,
has led to a chaotic proliferation of digital images at SFMOMA.
Numerous functional areas throughout the museum create and manage their
own digital image collections. There is almost no coordination between
the various departments in terms of image source, quality, metadata structure
and content, and file and/or directory naming conventions.
In general, SFMOMA's current decentralized approach to digital asset management
is inefficient and costly at best, and threatens the museum's ability
to fulfill its mission at worst. Specific problems that can be
attributed to the existing process include:
1)
Rampant confusion about which permanent collection objects have digital
image surrogates.
The discovery process can take days or weeks because there are up to seven
different places to look.
After
a digital image has been located, the
searcher's work is not done. Usually he or she also needs answers to the
following questions:
1.
where is the digital image file located? what is its file name?
2. how do I get access to it?
3. if
the art object comprises several sub-objects, where are the associated
digital surrogates?
4.
does the quality of the digital surrogate match my need?
5.
where did it the digital image come from?
6.
what has it been used for?
7.
who owns the copyright?
2) The lack of a museum wide digital image creation technical standard
(image size, bit depth, etc.) means low quality digital images are commonplace.
Some objects must be photographed or scanned multiple times to meet an
immediate need.
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1.4 Constraints
The
primary constraints affecting the DAM project are resource driven. The
project sponsor, (Collections Information and Access department) has a
limited amount of funding for the project, most of which will be used
to pay for new imaging equipment. The museum's already understaffed Information
Technology department got even smaller
recently
when the only staff programmer with SQL expertise left his job a few weeks
ago.
The museum is understandably reluctant to implement our original technical
design, which called for a web accessible, sql server database with read-only
connectcivity to the existing CMS. The most widely used
database system at SFMOMA is a commercial product called Filemaker Pro,
which is similar to Microsoft Access in terms of funcionality and scalability.
To better integrate with SFMOMA's existing technical environment, our
technical design has been revised to feature a Filemaker Pro database
in place of SQL server
The
manager of visual resources has also made it clear that although a web
interface to the system would be nice, there is no immediate need for
it because initially the system will only be used by a handfull of staff
people.
One
of our immediate challenges is to persuade him to stay focused on the
big picture, which includes users throughout the museum who do not have
access to Filemaker Pro.
Update (2.20.2001)
Last week our project sponsors at SFMOMA made the welcome announcement
that their earlier decision against SQL server had been reversed. Steps
are being taken to acquire funding for a SQL server programmer and we
received instructions to proceed with our initial SQL server /web interface
architecture design.
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1.5 Suggested Improvements
Digital Asset Management System (DAM)
Our preliminary system architecture design for DAM consists of a database
that has connectivity to the Embark system.
The new system will supplement, not replace, Embark, It will directly
address four major issues:
1. it will be easy to use, even
for the infrequent user,
2. it will support detailed digital
image metadata capture and retrieval , and
3. it will serve as a centralized digital image standards and guidelines
repository.
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1.6 Preliminary User Characteristics and Goals
New acquisition committee member:
a. View images of objects presented at next meeting.
Manager of visual resources
a. Know what images have been made and what need to be made
b. Know what images have been archived to CD-ROM or DVD
c. Impress his boss with amount of work his staff can do
d. Impress museum staff with the number of new images available for their
projects
Imaging specialist
a. Know that she is creating, naming, and storing images correctly
b. Be able to quickly input the required metadata
c. Be able to easily produce lists of images she's created.
Museum web designer & Education department multimedia developer
a. Have a lot of cool images that can be used on the museum's Website
or in multimedia projects
b. Quickly be able to tell if he or she has permission to use a particular
image;
be able to quickly preview images at different resolutions;
c. Get technical specs on how image was created;
d. Know how and where to get a copy of the image file;
e. Know how to create their own "master" images that conform to the museum
standards.
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1.7 Finding Users
Contacts at the museum may provide
us with the 10 users necessary for this class; if not 10, then almost
certainly 5 or 6. Beyond that each of us will commit to finding 2 user
subjects.
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