0.5 Approaches to distribution of fee-free images: case studies  (Page 4/13)

• Support the museum’s core mission to research, document and educate through an essentialinvestment 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 processedfor distribution and licensing to both internal and external customers. Oberoi, “Doing the DAM.”

Initially, a third goal had been identified— increasing revenue streams for licensing of museum images. However, museumadministration provided early feedback that this did not occur, urging that thestaff team focus less on revenue generation and more on the value of preservation of, and access to, the digital assets being created throughout theinstitution.

Once Met Images was approved, work began on selecting the appropriate digital asset management system (DAMS). Interwoven’sMediaBin Interwoven MediaBin: (External Link) . 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, andother 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 SQLServers).

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 inTMS, 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 andaddition of new acquisitions. Loading the digital images into MediaBin was also complex. The photography studio had approximately four thousand CDs and DVDscontaining two hundred thousand images. Accompanying spreadsheets provided the link between the images and the objects, but the task was laborious because thedata lacked consistency. After the data and image files were loaded in MediaBin, a script was run to establish the association between images and records fromthe TMS extract data file. This simplified explanation belies the months of planning, learning, data clean-up, and collaboration that led to the operationallaunch of MediaBin at the Metropolitan Museum in fall 2007.

Commercial image licensing

As the staff at the Metropolitan Museum planned the centralized storage and management of its growing collection ofdigital images, they were also considering new opportunities for licensing images. Exploring ways to derive more income from commercial licensing led staffto examine the options offered by third-party image distributors. One successful model was the photographic agency of the Réunion des musées nationaux Réunion des musées nationaux: (External Link) . (RMN) that has an online image base of nearly 450,000 images of works of art from Frenchregional 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 licensinginitiative. After considerable deliberation and study, the Metropolitan Museum of Art decided to outsource commercial licensing, announcing an agreement withArt Resource Art Resource: (External Link) . in January 2007. Subsequently, additional distributors have been added: Scholars Resource, Scholars Resource: (External Link) . Scala, Scala: (External Link) . (Note: Scala is a sub-license of the Metropolitan Museum’s license with Scholars Resource.) and RMN. The images and information are now exported from MediaBin and sent several times per year to thedistributors.