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[NOTE: This section is based on interviews with the following staff members at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on July 14-15, 2008: Doralynn Pines, Associate Director for Administration; Barbara Bridgers, General Manager for Imaging and Photography; Andrew Gessner, Chief Librarian of the Image Library; Peggy Hebard, Senior Financial Manager for Images and Publications; Billy Kwan, Associate Museum Librarian in the Image Library; Shyam Oberoi, Manager of Met Images; Julie Zeftel, Museum Librarian in the Image Library.]
In March 2007, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced a “pioneering initiative to provide digital images to scholars at no charge.”[40] What background research, infrastructure enhancements, financial analysis, and internal discussions led to this decision?
The Metropolitan Museum was one of the first major museums to recognize and embrace the potential of electronic management of collections information. Working with Gallery Systems, the commercial vendor of The Museum System (TMS) software,[41] the museum created a fully automated inventory of objects in the textile collection that was launched simultaneously with the 1995 opening of the Antonio Ratti Textile Center. The records, many of which were accompanied by images, provided the staff and public with virtual access to all the textiles, including those rarely on view due to their fragility. With this momentum, the remaining curatorial departments were brought online one by one as separate TMS databases. While this aided management of the individual curatorial collections, the goal of a museum-wide database was unfulfilled. Rather than attempting to merge all the rich but non-standardized information from the separate curatorial TMS databases, the Met ultimately created one additional database and mapped into it only basic descriptive information from the sixteen TMS databases. This centralized collections database represents the collections information that the respective curatorial departments have approved for public access.
At the same time the museum was investing in collections management, it was also developing its capacity for digital imaging, thereby transforming the capture, management, and storage of object, event, education, installation, construction, and renovation photography. For over twelve years the museum has employed digital imaging consultants to steer planning and equipment purchase and to train and support staff.[42] This investment in outside expertise has helped alert the staff to industry trends and developments that may have an impact on imaging operations.
Outfitting each of twelve photographers with a digital studio requires a capital expenditure of $150,000–$165,000, but museum staff members are convinced about the return on investment. Using a film camera formerly took up to four days to photograph a three-dimensional object. Today, using a digital camera, the same work can be shot in less than one day.[43]
It is not uncommon for less than 20 percent of any museum collection to be photographed, although museum professionals agree that object photography is a critical means of documenting and publishing the collection. The photographers at the Metropolitan Museum are now producing six to ten photographs of three-dimensional objects per day and an even greater number of photographs of two-dimensional works. This dramatic rise in efficiency helps balance the cost of digital equipment and results in increased photographic documentation of the museum’s treasures.
The price of film and processing for analog photography continues to rise, but direct digital capture eliminates most of those expenses. Furthermore, some pre-press costs associated with publication are reduced or eliminated when working digitally.[44]
Simultaneous with the conversion of analog to digital capture, staff initiated a retrospective scanning operation in the image studio. Selection criteria prioritized photography of works being included in the Collection Database and the highly acclaimed Timeline of the History of Art portions of the museum’s website.[45] Photography for these works had the added advantage of descriptive captions recently written and/or vetted by the curatorial staff. Scanning was also undertaken on photography slated for publication in upcoming collection and special exhibition catalogs. The most recently produced color transparencies were favored over older photography in hopes of avoiding the need for extensive digital touch-up of film marred by particulates and scratches. In between color scanning projects, slow but steady progress has been made on converting the one-hundred-year-old archive of black-and-white negatives to digital format. The 35mm film is not being scanned at this time.
The digital imaging initiative benefits the museum in multiple ways. The number of digital images available for the website, publications, and internal use has been dramatically increased. It ensures access to images on film that celebrate the museum’s own history, a story covering almost 140 years and told by the visual documentation of people, events, gallery installations, special exhibitions, building construction and renovation, and educational programs. Digital surrogates reduce the handling of negatives and transparencies that have been moved to climate-controlled cold storage, thus increasing the longevity of these unique film masters.
Internal discussions about the Met Images project began long in advance of the official launch in fall 2007. Planning involved a team of staff members from Information Systems and Technology, the Photograph Studio, the Image Library, and curatorial departments working together to define and implement an enterprise-wide system for managing digital images. Shyam Oberoi, formerly manager of the Met Images project, describes the goals as twofold:
Support the museum’s core mission to research, document and educate through an essential investment in the museum’s assets and infrastructure.
Strengthen the quality and quantity of available object images and cataloging information so that images could be quickly located and processed for distribution and licensing to both internal and external customers.[46]
Initially, a third goal had been identified— increasing revenue streams for licensing of museum images. However, museum administration provided early feedback that this did not occur, urging that the staff team focus less on revenue generation and more on the value of preservation of, and access to, the digital assets being created throughout the institution.
Once Met Images was approved, work began on selecting the appropriate digital asset management system (DAMS). Interwoven’s MediaBin[47] was ultimately chosen as the system that could:
Support centralized management of digital media.
Scale as a digital archive for object images and, ultimately, the museum’s historic photography, images from archaeological expeditions, and other rich media such as audio and video.
Provide security consistent with role-based profiles already implemented across the Metropolitan’s other IT applications.
Generate image derivatives dynamically to reduce storage of duplicate images of varying resolutions.
Integrate well with existing museum applications (both TMS and MediaBin run on SQL Servers).
Staff determined that MediaBin would be the repository for images, including data about the images and rights information; and object information, including artist name, nationality, life dates, object basic description, title, date, materials, and dimensions.
Certain work-arounds to MediaBin’s data structure were required to support the complex data relationships inherent in TMS, such as repeatable fields and whole/part relationships. TMS object information was ultimately exported into a data file that contains a non- relational, flattened record for each museum object. Nightly uploads from the data file to MediaBin were scheduled to capture edits to existing records and addition of new acquisitions. Loading the digital images into MediaBin was also complex. The photography studio had approximately four thousand CDs and DVDs containing two hundred thousand images. Accompanying spreadsheets provided the link between the images and the objects, but the task was laborious because the data lacked consistency. After the data and image files were loaded in MediaBin, a script was run to establish the association between images and records from the TMS extract data file. This simplified explanation belies the months of planning, learning, data clean-up, and collaboration that led to the operational launch of MediaBin at the Metropolitan Museum in fall 2007.
As the staff at the Metropolitan Museum planned the centralized storage and management of its growing collection of digital images, they were also considering new opportunities for licensing images. Exploring ways to derive more income from commercial licensing led staff to examine the options offered by third-party image distributors. One successful model was the photographic agency of the Réunion des musées nationaux[48] (RMN) that has an online image base of nearly 450,000 images of works of art from French regional and national museums and other European museums available for both educational and commercial licensing. Colleagues at the Victoria & Albert Museum also met with Met staff to talk about their growing image licensing initiative. After considerable deliberation and study, the Metropolitan Museum of Art decided to outsource commercial licensing, announcing an agreement with Art Resource[49] in January 2007. Subsequently, additional distributors have been added: Scholars Resource,[50] Scala,[51] and RMN. The images and information are now exported from MediaBin and sent several times per year to the distributors.
Traditionally, museums charge less to supply an image (and the permission to reproduce it) for scholarly publication than for commercial publication or product development. The Metropolitan Museum had different rates for commercial and non-commercial licensing, and the unofficial policy was to supply fee-free images to Metropolitan curators writing for non- Metropolitan publications, to professional colleagues at other institutions, and to former Met colleagues. Museum staff wanted to formalize this practice by making fee-free images more widely available for scholarly publication.
Doralynn Pines, Associate Director for Administration at the Metropolitan Museum, describes some of the factors influencing this decision:
Change in Internal Environment: Previously, curators had access to the TMS records for their collection only. With the advent of the DAMS, a new era of sharing was coming; access to basic information about objects would be museum-wide. There was growing acceptance of digital over analog photography and greater use of images by staff throughout their daily work.
Perceived Loss of Control over Museum Content: The time of controlling museum information, text or images, was over. Visitors were producing podcasts of museum visits and thousands of images of Metropolitan Museum objects were already on Google Images. The inferior quality of images in circulation troubled the Metropolitan Museum.
Implementation of Digital Asset Management: Implementing MediaBin enabled the first-ever centralized management of information and images about the museum’s collections. It also opened new possibilities for the sharing of that information externally.
Criticism of Scholarly Community: Museums were being criticized by scholars and publishers for charging fees for permissions to publish images when the underlying work was in the public domain. However, the Metropolitan was already frequently waiving the fee for supplying the image and granting permission for scholarly publication. The time seemed right to change practice into official policy, get appropriate credit for taking this bold step, and, by example, encourage other museums to follow suit.
Reinforcement of Museum Mission: Most important, “it simply is the right thing to do,” stated Pines.
It is one thing to decide to provide fee-free images for scholarly publication, and quite another to commit staff time, and therefore dollars, to delivering those images. Clearly, the Met needed a partner in this venture and turned to ARTstor.[52] The museum had been one of the early contributors to the ARTstor Digital Library when its AMICO records were released in 2005. It seemed natural for the museum to turn to ARTstor to build a delivery mechanism for the Metropolitan’s publication-quality images for use in scholarly publications. ARTstor readily embraced the idea and the partnership was launched. An ongoing stream of high-resolution images would thus be made available for use in the K-12 schools, colleges, universities, and museums that license ARTstor, and images that could be used in publications were made available for both users and non-users of the ARTstor Digital Library. Scholars would be well served by the ability to obtain publication-quality images, without fees, that could be downloaded immediately.
Working closely with the staff at the Metropolitan, ARTstor began to build Images for Academic Publishing (IAP) to meet the museum’s specifications.[53] The project comprised the preparation of image assets and corresponding metadata, inclusion of these assets in the ARTstor Digital Library, and the development of a new protocol for user download of publication-quality images.
The Metropolitan Museum staff decided to express information about their objects using CDWA-Lite,[54] an XML data schema developed as a joint effort between the J. Paul Getty Trust,[55] RLG Programs/OCLC,[56] and ARTstor for describing cultural works and their visual surrogates. CDWA-Lite, based on a small subset of fields from the Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA), represents the minimal set of data fields deemed necessary for describing cultural works and their visual surrogates in preparation for resource discovery in online environments. CDWA- Lite is intentionally “light” to lower the barrier for cultural heritage institutions wishing to share content. The CDWA-Lite schema is designed to be used with the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI- PMH)[57] that facilitates the sharing and updating of information between the provider and the distributor. Once MediaBin was fully implemented, the Metropolitan Museum staff and ARTstor began sharing the information formatted according to CDWA-Lite and harvested in a server-to-server exchange.[58] Depending on number and file size, the high-resolution images can be retrieved from an FTP server or sent by overnight mail on a high-density drive.
ARTstor’s Images for Academic Publishing was launched in March 2007 and functions as follows:
An IAP logo appears under the thumbnail images contributed by the Metropolitan Museum to identify those images available for high-resolution downloading.
After clicking an “IAP” image, users receive a message alerting them to a new “space” governed by the terms and conditions of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, not ARTstor.
Terms and Conditions of Use: educational use and scholarly publications are permitted; The Metropolitan Museum of Art decided that the publication run must be two thousand or fewer; no more than ten images per thirty-day period are allowed for any user;[59] electronic use is permitted on educational websites that do not accept advertisements and commercial subscription websites with no more than two thousand subscribers.[60]
An electronic form appears requesting some information that the Metropolitan Museum requires and some that is requested but not required:
Contact information: name, email address, institutional affiliation, title/role (all required).
Publication information: author, title, periodical title, intended date of publication, language of publication, regional distribution, publication format (print, electronic, or video)(all requested, not required).[61]
File size: users select size of image for downloading, either 5MB, 10MB, or 20MB (all required).
The image can then be immediately downloaded and saved.
Initially, IAP was only available to scholars and curators at institutions that license ARTstor, but after several months it was extended to any scholar who contacts either ARTstor or the Image Library at the Metropolitan to obtain a password to access IAP images. As of September 2008, approximately 5,600 images had been contributed to IAP by the Metropolitan Museum. Although this process is under review, the current plan results in additional deliveries of one thousand to two thousand images every four months. The Metropolitan’s Image Library staff monitor the ARTstor-generated usage reports that contain the raw information about users and intended uses.[62]
During the first year of service, 645 images were downloaded from IAP for scholarly publications. Staff members note that the benefits of working with ARTstor include:
Free Distribution of Museum Images: There is no charge to museums for contributing images for distribution in the ARTstor Digital Library and Images for Academic Publishing.
Staff Efficiencies: There is a reduction in the time Metropolitan Museum staff members spend filling orders for scholarly publication.
Improved Service to Scholars: Scholars can select and immediately download images free of reproduction charges.
[NOTE: This section is based on a September 15, 2008, telephone interview with Ian Blatchford, Deputy Director, and email exchanges with Alan Seal, Head of Records and Collections Services, Victoria & Albert Museum.]
The task of implementing electronic recordkeeping at the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) for its collections, numbering nearly 4.6 million objects, represents ongoing work that began more than two decades ago. By the late 1990s, three systems were in place: the Collections Information System (CIS) for inventory control, cataloging, and accessioning museum objects; the Photo Cataloguing System for information about analog and digital photographs of objects, books, events, gallery installations, and staff; and the Image Arena, in which medium-resolution images were stored and made accessible to the other two systems. All three resources were used to extract the data and images that originally fed the collections area of the V&A website. By 2005, the museum began investigating digital asset management systems (DAMS) to replace the Photo Cataloguing system, and ultimately implemented their DAMS, called Vadar (V&A Digital Asset Repository), during 2006. A storage area network, also brought online in 2006, greatly increased storage capacity and now allows the museum to access the high- resolution master images online rather than offline from an ever-expanding collection of CD-ROMs. Since putting the masters onto their storage area network, they no longer save copies on CD-ROM, even for archival purposes. A back-up routine of the online files is in place both for recovery in the event of disk failure and for business continuity.
As the technical infrastructure was growing, staff were also considering the best ways to prepare and openly share data and images on the museum’s website and possibly on other nonprofit educational websites. They plan to support data harvesting giving aggregators a choice of Dublin Core, CDWA-Lite or PNDS[63] file formats, all of which will be generated on the fly from the database outside the firewall. The V&A has already implemented a Universal Resource Indicator (URI) link in the V&A records so the distributor’s site can lead the user back to the V&A website to view the fuller catalog information. This approach will allow the museum to avoid the synchronization problems of preparing different record formats for each distributor. The open-source routines could dramatically simplify contributing both new records and edits to existing records. In addition, the V&A is on the international team of museums working in partnership with OCLC/RLG Programs on the Museum Data Exchange Project, which is testing data exchange processes using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).[64]
New digital photography is being done in concert with the ongoing program of capital improvements at the museum. The renovation of the William and Judith Bollinger Jewellery Gallery, which opened in spring 2008, afforded the opportunity to fund photography of 3,500 objects. Likewise, 35,000 objects from the encyclopedic and global ceramics collection are being photographed during the current redevelopment of the Ceramics Galleries that will be opened in September 2009. This program of thorough photographic documentation is a direct by-product of the refurbishment of galleries. In each case, it anticipates the worldwide scholarly attention that is focused on the museum as collections, long off-view, are returned to the public eye in freshly interpreted, elegantly presented spaces.
In December 2006, the V&A announced that it would drop charges