The Davison Art Center developed an open access image policy to make their collection of 24,000 works freely available online. They leverage existing university infrastructure, including an image search site, content management system, and web servers, to deliver high-quality TIFFs and JPEG images with one-click downloads. Analytics are limited but provide some metrics on image downloads and usage. Their approach keeps friction low for users while allowing delivery through robust, reliable systems.

1. Minimal Friction, Maximal Use: Optimizing Open Access Image Delivery MCN 2013
Open Access Image Delivery at the Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University
[show: Title]
The Davison Art Center holds Wesleyan University’s collection of some 24,000 works of
art on paper, chiefly prints and photographs. We have a very small total museum staff,
with just two full-time and one half-time employees; so this presentation will show
how one really small, institutionally nested museum is delivering open access images.
For us, implementation involved thinking through a key question: “How can we do this
with the affordances and constraints of existing infrastructure?”
[show: Policy]
As background, we developed the DAC Open Access Images policy in 2012 for three
main reasons. First, it was simply the right thing for us to do in service to our mission
regarding the collection and people who use images of objects in it. Second, in at least
a modest way, it could help contribute momentum to the wider movement toward
such policies in museums, by showing that even small institutions can enact them.
Third, it would have net operational benefits behind the scenes: time previously sunk
into one-off permissions agreements, with fees we typically waived for scholarly use,
could be freed up to do more useful things.
If you're curious, you can find a PDF of the full policy by shooting this QR code:
[show: Policy PDF download QR]
After legal vetting and approvals, we put the policy into effect in December of 2012.
In brief, it says that if a digital image is of suitable quality and represents an object
we’re believe to be in the public domain, we make it freely available for all uses, noncommercial and commercial, and state that it has “no known copyright restrictions.”
We make each open access image available as a fairly serious TIFF (4096 pixels long
dimension, 24-bit sRGB, no output sharpening) and as a lighter-weight, presentationready JPEG (1024 pixels long, 24-bit sRGB, some output sharpening). We encourage
people to download a technical ReadMe with tips about how to use these images.
[show: ReadMe with QR]
All images have an embedded ICC profile and basic embedded metadata, consisting
chiefly of a description-field caption, which is concatenated from tombstone data
elements in our collection information system, plus DAC open access boilerplate.
This minimal approach is what works with our production workflow for now.
[show: Bridge Metadata]
We may embed richer metadata into more image fields in the future. Because we
know many users may not look at metadata, and could lose track of where they found
an image, our filenames provide a top-level clue by starting with ”DAC” and including
a string transformed from the represented object’s accession number, making that
visible even on a desktop covered in image downloads grabbed from all over.
Rob Lancefield, Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University
MCN 2013 speaking notes p. 1 of 4

2. Minimal Friction, Maximal Use: Optimizing Open Access Image Delivery MCN 2013
Open Access Image Delivery at the Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University
So, on to the technical systems and flows underlie delivery of these images to users.
As a tiny museum operation at a small university, we leverage Wesleyan’s general IT
infrastructure whenever possible, and we always do so for public-facing resources that
require 24/7/365 uptime. In this case, an underlying architecture that looks like this:
[show: Diagram]
(don’t worry, we’ll come back to it!) enables a user to interact with just this:
[show: Search Object OA box]
Once a person using DAC Collection Search finds a record for an object with an open
access image, this box displays on the page, and all she has to do to get that image is
click a link for a JPEG or a TIFF.
[show: TIFF Download]
There’s no login or web form to submit. What actually happens under the hood is this:
[show: Diagram again]
Three pre-existing servers are in play.
dac-collection.wesleyan.edu runs EmbARK Web Kiosk, which is to say 4D Web Server,
for public-facing collection search. That machine supports discovery and live web
viewing of navigable images, but isn’t a good fit for delivering big image downloads.
The best tool for actually serving the files is Wesleyan’s instance of the Xythos content
management system, which goes by the name wesfiles.wesleyan.edu. It’s great for
actually delivering image files from a directory made world-readable, but there’s no
particular guarantee that its machine name will (or, won’t) persist over the really long
haul—and we want to present the most durable URLs we can for these images.
The most durable Wesleyan base URL will surely be www.wesleyan.edu; and our
main web presence lives at www.wesleyan.edu/dac, where we’ve long relied upon
Apache Rewrites for all kinds of things. So, we base our canonical URL for each open
access image on www, where Apache intercepts and rewrites it to point directly to
the actual image in Xythos, where all these images live in a public directory like this:
[show: Wesfiles directory]
A typical user never sees this, which—although it is “public” in a permissions sense—
generally would be seen only due to a browser configuration hitch or an inquisitive
user poking around in a place where that kind of exploration is, in fact, just fine.
[show: Diagram again]
Rob Lancefield, Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University
MCN 2013 speaking notes p. 2 of 4

3. Minimal Friction, Maximal Use: Optimizing Open Access Image Delivery MCN 2013
Open Access Image Delivery at the Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University
For ordinary users less prone to peeking under the hood, this adds up to a one-click
process—one backed by servers running on three virtual machines in Wesleyan’s Data
Center. If we’d built that from the ground up just to enable one-click downloads, it
would be (to use the technical phrase) absolutely nuts—a kind of insanely heavy
overkill. But since those broader-purpose systems were already in place, using them
as existing infrastructure was a lightweight and cost-effective approach. Our delivery
process constitutes a teeny-tiny slice of the total load they handle, making it an
efficient way to combine an easy experience for users (on dac-collection), with image
URLs that should be really durable over the long haul (on www), and actual delivery
from a tool suited for that (Xythos, a.k.a. wesfiles).
Depending on whatever may happen over the coming years—and decades—with the
University’s content-management infrastructure and related subdomain names, this
abstraction layer may or may not turn out to have been necessary for durable image
URLs; but it’s a useful kind of low-overhead future-proofing in a technical environment
where we have no control over how certain key architectural factors may change.
In balancing the desires to make user experience as frictionless as possible, but also to
capture metrics, we’ve made UX the first priority, with no login, no form, and one-click
downloads—and then tried to capture what we can. All pages in DAC Collection
Search carry Google Analytics snippets, so we have those standard ways of seeing
what goes on there. The URL rewriting on www doesn’t load any pages there to
trigger analytics, but immediately points off to the third server, and we don't have
access to Apache logs on www; but we don't really need that anyway. As soon a
rewritten request hits Xythos, that system has its own logging of files served out. And
for now, I also have it set to fire off an email notification to me shortly after it delivers
one or more images. Those notifications shoot right into a dedicated mailbox.
[show: Wesfiles notification]
This is super low-tech, but it works well for now. If email flow becomes a nuisance as
user activity grows, I’ll shut it off and just check Xythos logs instead.
[show: Diagram again]
Along with these actual, minimal metrics from the back end, our policy encourages
users to carry a standard credit line, which will have the side effect of enabling us to
find that string out on the Web if they do. The policy also notes that we’re grateful to
receive a copy of any print publication that uses DAC Open Access Images, and that
may yield some qualitative, anecdotal examples of use.
So, to wrap up:
Rob Lancefield, Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University
MCN 2013 speaking notes p. 3 of 4

4. Minimal Friction, Maximal Use: Optimizing Open Access Image Delivery MCN 2013
Open Access Image Delivery at the Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University
This approach is working well to date. The number of images is not too large, with TIFF
and JPEG pairs representing only 1,942 objects as of now. Based on our photography
scenario (which you can hear about in a session tomorrow if you're interested), we
anticipate adding images of between one and two thousand more objects annually;
so the total number of images to manage for delivery should scale on a broadly
predictable and manageable path. If activity on the download side ever ramps up so
much that we have to serve images in a different way from a different space, the
middle abstraction layer would make it easy to repoint all requests for open access
images by tweaking a one-line Apache Rewrite Rule.
The main thing I’d like to improve is our analytics, even within the data-gathering
constraints entailed in placing user experience first in the ways I’ve discussed.
And with that, on to Stanley.
Rob Lancefield, Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University
MCN 2013 speaking notes p. 4 of 4