“3 out of every 4 visitors to the Met never make it through the front door” titled the New York Times on March 29, 2006 [1] in an article outlining the increasing significance of museum websites for the overall museum enterprise. Surveys by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) on technology and digitization [2] reflect the growing importance of digital surrogacy in an upward tick of museums digitizing for access: while in 2002, only 6.1% of respondents identified better access to collections as their motivation, it emerged as the primary reason for digitization with a solid 56% in the 2005 survey.

As museums have learned to value the impact digitized collections make on their audience, they have also come to value the digital surrogate itself as an asset worth tracking and maintaining. This RLG DigiNews Special Issue “Managing Digital Assets in US Museums” shines a spotlight on first efforts to manage the growing number of digitally reformatted collections. Over the last 18 months, an overwhelming majority of the largest US art museums (represented in this issue by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art) have started investigating digital asset management systems, with many smaller institutions (as represented by the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona) joining the quest for the optimal way to handle the output of their digital photography labs and scanning operations.

While digital asset management systems come in many flavors, at their core, they provide the capability of ingesting, describing, tracking, and circulating a digital file. A number of themes recur throughout the articles of this special issue as the authors describe their journey towards implementation:

• the disruptive nature of implementing a digital asset management system, which touches many stake-holder departments and demands a stringent policy framework on all levels
• the motivation of supporting more efficient request fulfillment in-house as well as external access through the digital asset management system
• the necessity of integrating the asset management system with various other key systems such as collections management or digital rights
• the hope that the asset management system may provide a first step towards ensuring the long-term accessibility of the digital file

The last point may bear a little more scrutiny: the discussions around digital repository certification [3] have handily codified the belief that digital preservation is not primarily a function of technology, but a product of institutional commitment and policy. While systems will have to be capable of performing tasks such as file format migration, institutions will have to muster and declare the will to fund and sustain physical collections as well as their digital brethren. Digital asset management systems have raised the hope in the museum community that there may be an easy, off-the-shelf solution to the digital preservation conundrum, but their precise role in long-term retention remains uncharted.

In their early implementation, digital asset management systems have already proven to call the question on a variety of crucial policy and workflow issues. The three articles in this special issue trace the beginnings of these vital discussions in the museum community.

Enjoy!

Günter Waibel, RLG Programs, OCLC
Guest Editor, RLG DigiNews

Notes

1. Vogel, Carol. “3 out of every 4 visitors to the Met never make it through the front door.” New York Times, March 29, 2006, Museums Special Section. Late Edition.

2. Cf. Institute of Museum and Library Services. “Status of Technology and Digitization in the Nation's Museums and Libraries.” 2002 Report. URL: http://www.imls.gov/resources/TechDig02/index.htm. Institute of Museum and Library Services. “Status of Technology and Digitization in the Nation's Museums and Libraries.” 2005 Report. URL: http://www.imls.gov/resources/TechDig05/index.htm.

3. Cf. RLG-NARA Task Force on Digital Repository Certification: Audit Checklist for Certifying Digital Repositories. URL: http://www.rlg.org/en/pdfs/rlgnara-repositorieschecklist.pdf