Introduction

Museums large and small are investigating digital asset management systems (DAMs). Museum technology conferences offer workshops and sessions about digital asset management; our email lists buzz with chatter about how to select a system and questions about working with vendors and implementers. The Metropolitan Museum of Art—now at the start of the second year of a planned three-year digital asset management implementation project—was in the vanguard of American institutions choosing to invest heavily in digital asset management, and our team is consulted frequently about the Met’s project. Colleagues from other museums ask about our budget, about software and hardware selections, and about staffing and scheduling. We talk to them about the data model, and the relationship of asset information to collection information. Absent from the discussions we have had with these colleagues, however, are inquiries of a more fundamental nature—questions about the rationale, the motivation, and the policy framework that informed the Met’s decision to acquire and implement a digital asset management system. These issues, hotly debated by Metropolitan Museum staff and trustees in the years leading to the decision to acquire a digital asset management system, were, in fact, in the foreground of our institutional discussions. The thinking that resulted from the internal debates shaped the Met’s digital asset management project—now named Met Images—into an unusually effective collaborative effort, buttressed by a comprehensive understanding of the technical requirements for the project, but also by a broad institutional acceptance of the changes in policy and practice that will be brought by the work.

The Met Images project, in planning since early 2002 and under discussion long before that, is one of the most expensive non-construction projects ever undertaken by the Met. The three-year system implementation will, barring unexpected delays, be accomplished in a shorter period than the planning and discovery that led to the approval of the project by the museum’s executive staff and Board, reversing the more common ratio of planning-to-project years. The lengthy planning period was due, in part, to the Met’s commitment to asking and answering a series of questions not always built into the development process for digital asset management activities in the not-for-profit world. Our questions included quantitative ones such as: “How big is the collection of assets?” and “How much storage will be required?”  We asked questions about proprietorship and access: “Who uses the assets?” and “Who will manage them?”  We wondered about the quality and value of the assets: “Should images that are made available to the public be color corrected?” and “If the object’s descriptive record has not been reviewed, may it be distributed along with the asset?” and finally, “Are existing descriptions adequate to support successful searching at all?”  We also asked a number of questions that forced the Met’s staff and executives to think through fundamental intellectual property policy positions: “Who decides who may use the assets, both inside and outside of the museum?” and “Is the Met’s goal to profit from the licensing of images, or to support an educational mandate for broad distribution?”  All of these questions needed to be considered in light of a process that would, inevitably, seek to automate the answers. Processes and policies that had heretofore been entrusted to individuals within the organization would need to be formalized so that a system might manage them; decisions that had been made on an ad hoc basis now needed to be seen as patterns that formed policies. And as we found answers to our questions, the scope of the project inevitably grew.
   
Making the Argument: The Business Case

Research for the Met Images project began in late 2002 with a review of systems already in place in museums in the US and abroad. Knowing that a number of museums in the US, the UK, and elsewhere had completed or nearly completed the conversion of their photography studios to fully digital operations, and recognizing that several institutions had launched sophisticated e-commerce image licensing storefronts, we had assumed that at least a few organizations would boast end-to-end, fully integrated, automated systems for creating, storing, managing, cataloguing, and distributing images—perhaps integrated with collections management databases for object information. We were surprised to discover that though many institutions boasted a few of the elements of such a system—a robust front-end for licensing or a well-organized, fully-populated image database, for example—none of the organizations we talked to had achieved a complete end-to-end solution. Only a few other institutions seemed even to aspire to such an integrated system, perhaps because in most organizations no one department or individual bore responsibility for all of the functions of a system such as the one we envisioned. Nonetheless, at the end of about a half-year of research, the Met team had determined that such a tool set was, indeed, our goal. We knew from the start that the project would be expensive and thus would require the allocation of capital funding by the museum’s Board of Directors and Finance Committee. A request to the Board requires—at the Met as at most museums—a detailed financial request accompanied by a “budget justification.” The Met Images team considered several budget justification strategies in the course of our needs assessment planning and research. We began by crafting a budget justification based on a return-on-investment rationale: the system costs would be paid for through the revenue and efficiencies that the new tools would generate.

Early discussions with institutions that had invested heavily in digital asset management tools usually led to a conclusion that the initial investment in tools had been made on the basis of the definitive need for such tools to fulfill requests to license images to paying customers. Museums in Europe—with image licensing operations that functioned as part of the “commercial” arm of the museum—were, in some cases, equaling or bettering the Met’s licensing income with smaller image collections and smaller staffs. In addition, at around the same time as research into Met Images began, the Met’s image licensing operation was itself undergoing review, and the Image Library—the group responsible for circulation of the museum’s collection of transparencies, prints, and slides—had challenged itself to increase efficiency by responding to more requests, and by answering those requests more quickly. By adding to this challenge a strategy for licensing the museum’s images more aggressively to a more commercial audience, we calculated that we might increase both revenue and efficiency. The implications of this argument, however, were significant. A commercial image licensing agency is a demanding customer, requiring high-quality inventory, well-catalogued (and catalogued in a way that is meaningful for its intended uses) and available for searching online. To support the return-on-investment argument that we were—at that point—developing, we would need to strengthen the quality and quantity of available images and their cataloguing, in addition to providing the Image Library with tools to quickly receive, review, track, and fulfill requests. Planning for an return-on-investment business case forced the project team to create a project plan that included inventory development and cataloguing as parallel (and equally expensive) parts of the digital asset management strategy.

The Met’s Board responded to the initial project proposal by asking two questions that significantly reshaped the project plan and justification. First, they asked the team to consider whether the project might be staged in phases, allowing for a review of the requirements and goals at the end of each year. Second, they wondered whether return on investment or profit were in fact the right drivers for this project. They suggested that the project’s goal might, instead, be about essential investments in the museum’s assets and infrastructure that would support core mission objectives: to research, document, and educate. With this guidance in place, the project was re-structured into three phases: the first primarily about the acquisition and deployment of the repository; the second about the broadening of access to staff throughout the museum, integration with other museum applications, and the implementation of more sophisticated security structures; and the third about enabling access to assets through a self-serve, Web-based front end. Despite the shift from a return-on-investment to a mission-driven rationale, the project retained its inventory and cataloguing elements, building into each phase activities intended to develop additional inventory and enhance cataloguing. The decision to maintain this emphasis on content development has helped the project to achieve widespread support throughout the institution.

New Directions and Unexpected Consequences

Recasting the project as one about the museum’s mission forced the project team to consider some new directions for the work. The project, for which funding would now be approved in phases, began with a first stage that was broadly labeled “Preservation.” The team developed an argument for the importance of creating a system for the protection of museum assets, for the development of a shared standard for cataloguing of assets that would enable successful retrieval, and for a centralized database that would streamline management of the assets. We also discussed the digital preservation procedures and strategies that might be enabled to support ongoing management and “permanent” storage of our assets, but agreed that the landscape of digital preservation—both costs and procedures—was, as yet, too hazy to allow us to commit to a strategy. We felt comfortable with the position that, in a later phase of the work, we would revisit digital preservation questions, and that the implementation of the system would buy us time to monitor developments in the preservation domain.

The project’s new direction also allowed the group to ask some useful questions about the costs and value of enabling broad access to museum assets. A system such as the one we proposed to build would contain tools that would support access to and distribution of museum assets at a far lower cost than had been possible in the previous system—which combined a high personnel cost (human beings had to review, research, and respond to each individual request for access to assets) and a high material cost (analog images, in particular, had a limited “shelf life” and were easily lost, damaged, or worn out). When it became clear that the new tools would significantly reduce “transaction” costs associated with fulfilling individual requests for images, we asked ourselves whether it was appropriate to continue to offer the same fees that we had previously—charges that had been largely based on recouping the museum’s costs for fulfillment. The group felt strongly that for scholars, a class of users that the museum seeks actively to support, any savings realized by the implementation of a system that would reduce costs should be passed on.

This discussion led eventually to the development of the museum’s “scholars’ license” program, a fee-free licensing initiative (pdf) announced in 2005. Under the program, a limited number of high-resolution museum images (those already prepared for distribution) will be distributed via third-party image distributors for a range of scholarly uses, including print publication in low-run quantities, free of charge. The program seeks to streamline requests and distribution activities, reducing the administrative burden of fulfillment on both the museum and the requestor.

Finally, discussions initiated within the project team about the requirements for broadening access to the assets led to the development of a major new initiative not originally foreseen by any of the Met Images team members. Believing that a number of users—including those requesting images for licensing, but also Web visitors, internal staff, and others—searched the collection using descriptive terms not contained in our existing cataloguing, the project team began a discussion with staff in a number of departments, including the libraries, education, and curatorial—about meaningful ways to collect subject terms, or keywords for retrieval. The group examined options ranging from engagement of permanent staff for keywording, to data mining of existing content. Every solution appeared inadequate; some were also expensive. Inspired by the work done at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco to deploy volunteers with index cards to describe works of art in “lay” terms, the group eventually turned to a plan that anticipated the blossoming of interest in “social tagging”—the employment of Web users to provide keywords (or tags), to label content. The Met’s internal discussions led to a broader discussion within the museum community at large and ultimately to the formation of the steve collaboration, a consortial development and research project that is investigating the usefulness of social tagging to describe museum collections and developing open-source tools for collecting and processing tags.

In 2005, nearly three years after we first began our research into digital asset management, the museum’s board approved the project plan, funding the first one-year, phase of the project, for the acquisition and implementation of Interwoven’s MediaBin digital asset management software. The first phase of the project also included funding for scanning and cataloguing the museum’s archive of large-format transparencies as well as preparing a decade’s worth of digital images for loading to the new digital asset management system. The project, largely on schedule and under budget, has continued into an approved second phase and year. In the months that have followed the approval of the project plan, many of our expectations about the challenges of successfully initiating a digital asset management project have proved correct; many additional issues and questions, large and small, have surfaced in the day-to-day work of the project. A few of these matters are addressed in the second half of this paper.

What is the Content? Taking Inventory

The content that can be managed by digital asset management systems is voluminous and includes, but is not limited to, image files, sound files, video files, desktop publishing files, pdfs, and presentation slides. Because of the significant resources required to make assets available within a digital asset management system, institutions must evaluate assets and asset collections to determine whether (or when) they will be included in the system. Evaluation of these assets should include careful consideration of a number of attributes, including uniqueness, image quality, cataloguing quality, replacement costs, and centrality to the institution’s mission. Ideally, inventories should probably be taken on a recurring basis and concurrent with efforts to load identified collections to the digital asset management system. Though the inventory process can be labor intensive, it is an essential stage in minimizing redundant activity, identifying at-risk collections, and setting priorities for digitization, cataloguing, and ingest into the centralized digital asset management system. At the Met, we have created an inventory questionnaire to elicit information about “local” collections—the uniqueness of the materials, the size of the collection, the characteristics and format of the files, the extent of cataloguing, and the frequency with which staff members access the collection items. This inventory work has already served to identify departments managing valuable content with institutional or long-term value and also departments unaware that their material is derivative content duplicated elsewhere in a higher-resolution or better-catalogued version.

Having identified images of works in the collection as its highest priority assets, the Met resolved to load into the digital asset management system the entire digital production of the Photo Studio (more than 200,000 digital files, captured in a decade of digital photography and scanning) in the first phase of the Met Images project. We would also load electronic records of analog images and negatives stored in both the Photo Studio and Image Library. Collating these images and their data in a useful format proved to be a challenge. High resolution images had been stored on optical media with corresponding metadata in Excel spreadsheets. A first task was to move these images and their metadata to a medium more suited for networked communication. A disc publishing robot was reprogrammed from its intended use as a high volume DVD copier to a more benign use: grabbing and dropping discs into a computer to be copied to a network attached storage device. Once the files and data were copied, we began the process of normalizing the Excel sheets and evaluating the usefulness of the files. A significant amount of work was done to massage the data and files to ready them for ingest into the digital asset management system. And, although the assets have now been ingested, a great deal of cataloguing work remains before the assets will be catalogued to a level that will support reliable access and use by the public.

Who Owns and Manages a Digital Asset Management System?

A digital asset management system is a technology tool, requiring support or management by technical staff. It is also a content repository, and responsibility for content must be given to content creators and managers. And a digital asset management system is a catalogue, providing tools for cataloguing work that is performed by the institution’s cataloguing professionals. Finally, as an ongoing institutional investment with storage or management requirements that may be restricted by budget or human resources, decision making and prioritization of what is managed, catalogued, and stored in a digital asset management system needs to be made by those with responsibility for organizational policy and resource allocation.

These varied and sometimes competing management responsibilities did not readily fit into the existing structures of the Metropolitan Museum. For the project to succeed, management of both the images and the image repository needed to be distributed among staff from different areas of the museum, and new working relationships had to be developed between areas of the organization that had not collaborated closely before. The museum’s senior administration did consider whether any single department might head this effort but decided instead to create a project team, headed by the Director’s Office and Information Systems and Technology and advised by members of the Image Library, Photo Studio, Counsel’s Office, and Finance Department—collectively, the Met Images “Lead Team”—to manage the Met Images initiative while in its implementation phase.

The Met has hired a project manager in a three-year temporary appointment to facilitate the many aspects of the project. The Manager of Met Images is assisted by staff responsible for technology, content, and the cataloguing and circulation of images. Together, these staff members are defining new tasks and workflows for content creation and management, as well as forging cross-departmental relationships for developing, utilizing, and managing the system. Defining the new tasks and workflows in each of these areas has also illuminated institutional policy questions requiring decision making taken in concert with the project’s Lead Team. When the system and its policies and procedures are in place, the new tasks and workflows will be ceded to their appropriate permanent administrative areas, specifically: technology to Information Systems and Technology; inventory and content creation to Photo Studio; and cataloguing and circulation to Image Library. What follows is a more detailed description of a few of the tasks, workflows, and issues considered by the three administrative areas and the Met Images Lead Team.

Some Key Issues and Concerns

Technology

A well planned and managed IT strategy is central to digital asset management. Managing a digital asset management system requires contributions by IT staff with a range of different skill sets, including networking, database administration, Web server administration, storage and backup strategy, and applications support. The Met Images Lead Team believed that an experienced information technology generalist to coordinate the efforts of the various IT staff working on the project implementation would be needed; as soon as funding was secured, a dedicated analyst was hired to coordinate the day-to-day technical aspects of the project.

For most institutions, implementing a digital asset management system signals a decision to begin storing larger files on the network in order to improve access to files that have traditionally been stored on less accessible and less secure media such as optical discs or external hard drives. The storage implications of a digital asset management solution can be significant. At the Met, we moved from a storage capacity of about seven terabytes of data on our entire network, to a capacity of 60 terabytes—expected to be adequate for about two years. While our storage needs are greater than those of most art museums, even at a small- to medium-sized organization the prospect of needing to increase storage on this scale in a short time can be sobering. 

Image Creation

The museum’s content creators perform the essential function of populating the digital asset management system with assets. Imaging staff in the Met’s Photo Studio are responsible for creating images and contributing them to the digital asset management system. The key members of the imaging team at the Metropolitan Museum are digital photographers, scanning operators, and post-production staff. In their creative role, this staff is responsible for producing images of a very high standard. In addition, they support the administrative functions of the digital asset management system by producing a minimal level of cataloguing, capturing metadata specific to the image creation and editing process and also validating or creating the data that also allows the digital asset management system to match images to their corresponding object record from the collections management system.

Long before the Met Images project was launched, a well-defined strategy for conversion to an all-digital photography studio was underway. However, the studio was forced to engage with a series of questions not previously considered as preparation for the Met Images implementation moved forward. As the museum’s staff at large embraced the concept of a searchable, centralized repository of images, they began to wonder about the relationship of the repository to new photography ordered in support of museum programs such as exhibitions and publications. Often produced on a rush basis, such programs would be well served by up-to-date information about the status of photography orders and, better served still, by the ability to access and download new material as soon as it was ready. The existing photography workflow needed to be overhauled in order to integrate it fully with the digital asset management system and tools. This project, related but separate, constituted a major initiative in itself, and because many of the same staff members who were already working on Met Images would be involved, the work has been scheduled to occur during the second phase of Met Images.

In addition, the Photo Studio’s digital imaging standards—already well documented and tested—required revisiting since questions about the nature of an image file prepared for broad distribution were identified. The Studio’s post-production staff worked with the Met Images Lead Team to develop processes for cropping, color-correcting, and finishing image files and to institute standard descriptions for the quality and post-production state of the images.

Cataloguing

While creation and storage of high resolution digital images is at the center of discussion of many digitization projects, an issue of equal scale and complexity is the development and maintenance of high quality metadata cataloguing. The relative breadth, depth, and accuracy of a metadata record determine whether an institution will be able to answer the questions “What is the content?” and “Who may access it?” With the promise of collections of digital assets made available online through the Web comes the responsibility of developing and maintaining the documentation to make those collections most useable. A carefully constructed metadata schema can determine the true value of a digital asset management system to an organization’s internal staff and also to its external clients, users, and aggregators.

Metadata about digital assets related to collections of museums may be thought of in three categories: information related to the physical museum object depicted in an image, metadata related to the image itself, and data related to the rights and restrictions. In each of these areas, museums should look to existing and developing standards. Creating our metadata schemas based on these standards and creating crosswalks to them will allow us to better communicate with one another. Metadata is also an area where museums should proceed cautiously. DAM vendors and implementers are relatively new to the cultural heritage space. Cataloguing information about assets related to works of art is different from cataloguing information about sneakers or pickup trucks. The permanent and archival nature of our digital asset collections may require different functionality and data structures than those offered by most large commercial digital asset management vendors. The full relational content of our catalogue records from our collections management systems is not easily searchable in the flat file context of many leading systems. Nonetheless, as DAM vendors come to understand the requirements of our community better, we believe that tools will be developed that are more appropriate to the needs of museums, libraries, and archives.

At the Met, the requirements for the systematic management of metadata will result in a significant shift or growth in the cataloguing work of the museum’s Image Library, the department that has provided access to images of our works of art for nearly one hundred years. Knowledge about the rights and restrictions related to an image—previously implied by characteristics such as file location in the library or gift history of the work it depicts—now has to be made explicit as data. The Met’s Image Library will now assume responsibility for the task of ongoing metadata population, review, and augmentation. While the introduction of the digital asset management system will streamline some processes for discovery and circulation of images by Image Library staff, it will add a set of new cataloguing responsibilities to the work of the department, with attendant impact on staffing and training. Concurrent with the launch of the first phase of Met Images, the Image Library decided to hire its first Systems Librarian, a staff member responsible for training staff in using the new systems, documenting workflows, and participating in discussions about system and interface development.

Conclusion

The many and varied tasks that make up digital asset management represent a significant change to the way that the Metropolitan Museum goes about creating and sharing images of its collection. Although the management tasks are complex and sometimes unfamiliar, successful creation and adoption of them—paired with new technologies and platforms for communication of information about our collections—will expand the reach of our institution in a profound way. This much is probably true for most of the museums and cultural heritage institutions now considering the implementation of a digital asset management system. However, for each of these institutions, decisions about how to implement a digital asset management system, who will do the work, when to begin, and what assets to manage will certainly be based on informed choices at the institutional level. The decisions will, in the end, shape each organization’s digital asset management strategy into something that is distinctly its own, based on a process of institutional self-discovery that is likely to give birth to new alliances and collaborations, build new skills, and produce some outcomes that may reshape institutional policy and procedures in unexpected and fundamental ways.