Opening museum collections digitally to the public can be a very complex task. From rights research to digitization, processes need to be established to make the move to digital seamless. The IMA recently utilized a cross-departmental team to bring digitization, rights clearance, and technology together, to create the most complete and open online collection the museum has offered. This session will cover the workflows and process designed to make this digital transition as efficient as possible including the utilization of a Digital Asset Management System, Collection Management System and custom software to bring it all to the masses. IMA presenters include Tascha Horowitz (Manager of Photography), Kyle Jaebker (Director IMA Lab), Anne Young (Manager of Rights and Reproduction).

1. PRESENTATION TITLE
Presentation Subtitle
From Object to Access: Digitization
at the Indianapolis Museum of Art
Tascha Mae Horowitz, Manager of Photography
Kyle Jaebker, Director of IMA Lab
Anne M. Young, Manager of Rights and Reproductions

2. The need to find an
efficient way to
utilize and
disseminate
collection images
and data via open
access
The Access Quandry
Edward Hopper (American, 1882-1967), Hotel Lobby, 1943,
Indianapolis Museum of Art, William Ray Adams Memorial Collection, 47.4
© Edward Hopper

3. What Wasn’t Working
• Photography department images lived in 4 places
• Many images were not “ready” or “finished” and no way of
designating if they were
• All image requests had to go through a member of
photography staff
• No way of running reports or statistics related to collection
photography
• No caption or rights information was retained with the images
• Metadata and image syncing was prone to failure
• Reliant on old technology and institutional memory

4. MediaBin
Not all images for a piece are presented
sequentially and there was no search function
so relies on institutional memory

5. Nuxeo

6. • Made it necessary for all image
requests to go through
photography
• No visual searching
• No keyword searching
• Did not support DNG format
• Could only display 1000 files per
folder
• Process for linking an image to its
collection data and assigning a
primary image took about 20 steps
It’s about fit…
• No ability to batch anything:
• Associations
• Linking
• Downloading
• File Conversions
• Not intuitive for average user
• Tried to be both of these:
• Document Management
System
• Digital Asset Management
System
Why Nuxeo Didn’t Work for the IMA

7. Old IMA Collection Pages
Copyright
Notice

8. Moving Forward

9. • Created an IMA specific list of DAM requirements.
• Created an internship with an information science graduate
student to work only on this project.
• Researched what systems existed and who was using them.
• Made the decision to separate document management and digital
asset management.
• Commercial vs. open source.
• Once we narrowed the list, we reached out to known institutions
using these systems and interviewed them about their experience.
• What do we have that we can leverage?
DAM Preparatory Work

10. • Backend/Technical
• Searching
• Organization
• Uploading/downloading
• Permissions
• Vendor Support
IMA DAM Requirements
• Interdepartmental task force
• Institution approved controlled vocabulary
• Cleaning up collection images (still in progress)
• Cleaning up hundreds of thousands of non-collection
images while adding keywords and metadata
DAM Preparatory Work

11. The New DAM is…

12. • “Cleaning up” over 90,000 collection images
– Evaluating for file size and quality, color balance, and
contrast levels
– Standardizing file formats – every approved image
has 3 versions (tif, jpeg, and dng)
– Working cross departmentally to standardizing file
naming (PS_XXXX-XX_v01 and REG_XXXX-XX_v01)
– Ensuring that all approved imagery has a primary
image assigned and designated through proper file
naming
Piction - Preparatory Work

13. Piction Preparatory Work
vs.

14. IMA Licensing Agreement

15. KE-EMu Rights Module

16. Sharing & Tracking Rights in Excel

17. KE-EMu to Piction Field Name Mapping

18. KE-EMu to Piction Field
Name Mapping

19. Piction – Preparatory Work

20. Piction – Preparatory Work

21. Piction – Fine Tuning
• Search functionality
• Metadata ingestion & Imbedding
• Thesaurus terms for collection imagery
• Sorting order
• Permission levels for staff – 4
• Tombstone info on prints
• Caption generation
• Multiple collections require varied import
scripts

22. Piction – Fine Tuning

23. Piction – Fine Tuning
File downloads based on user
group permissions.
Word document export includes
thumbnail image with basic
Tombstone data about the work.

24. CMS-DAM Coordination Results
• Self sufficiency for museum staff for majority of image
requests
• More time for photography staff to document the
collection
• Relaunch of online collection pages with improved
search functionality and image quality
• Ability to obtain accurate statistics of collection imagery
• Increased accessibility to collection has allowed us to
apply for grant support for additional collection
documentation

25. American Art Collection Digitization
Project funded by the Luce foundation
• Received a two year grant to digitize our American Art
Collection
• IMA’s work with Piction and the potential dissemination
of collection images through both our DAM and our new
website was an integral part of the successful grant
application
• Project includes both digitization as well as data research
and clean up
• Goal is to have publication quality imagery of each piece
plus complete and verified basic data sets
• Project includes about 2200 objects over 22 months
• Hired 4 staff members

27. Data Dagwood

28. Mercury
Dagwood
EMu
Piction
MediaBin
Tags (STEVE)
Extended Text
Color Detection
Related Media
Nuxeo
Data Dagwood

29. Static Web Pages
A web page that is delivered to the user exactly as
stored, in contrast to dynamic web pages which are
generated by a web application.
Static web pages are suitable for content that never
or rarely needs to be updated. However, maintaining
large numbers of static pages as files can be
impractical without automated tools.
Any personalization or interactivity has to be run
client side.

30. DESIGN: THE DATA

31. DESIGN: MOBILE FIRST

35. Increased OA at the IMA
• Ability to obtain accurate statistics of collection images
• Benchmarked and amended fee schedule
– Income is no longer the goal
– Still want to know where & when the
IMA collection is reproduced
– Instead seek to disseminate images
and foster scholarly endeavors
• Relaunch of online collection pages with improved
search functionality and image quality
– Collection page high resolution downloads

36. Increased OA at the IMA

37. New IMA Collection Pages
Jump to
Object
Information

38. New IMA Collection Pages

39. New IMA Collection Pages

40. New IMA Collection Pages
Link to the Image
Resources section
of the IMA website

41. THE NUMBERS
• 51,996 Total Objects
• 23,998 Objects with Images
• 33,430 Total Images
• 15,177 Available Downloads
(21,785 Images)
• 23,047 Hi-Res Zoomable Objects
(32,391 Images)
• Approx 3,000 downloads over 3
months

42. • Take the time to get it right:
– Access data, staffing, workflows
• Don’t jump into OA without workflows set:
– Ensure the coordinated delivery of object
metadata and rights information with high-res
image files.
So much more!!!
Final Thoughts

43. PRESENTATION TITLE
Presentation Subtitle
Thank you!
Tascha Mae Horowitz, Manager of Photography
Kyle Jaebker, Director of IMA Lab
Anne M. Young, Manager of Rights and Reproductions