VRA Conference Minneapolis 2024

Decades of Digital Asset Mismanagement: The Good, the Bad, and the Depressing
Bonnie Rosenberg

The Art Institute of Chicago’s digital asset crisis began with the advent of digital photography. As dark rooms were converted to digital photography studios, files started to pile up. Images lived on servers, discs, hard drives, and bespoke—often broken—repositories. The migration effort born from this backlog is both a cautionary and laudatory tale. When given an expanse of time to right the wrongs of the past, we did so with skill. But what we really needed to fix this problem was a time machine.

Rethinking Access and Discovery for Large Digital Image Collections
Rachel Jaffe and Sue Chesley Perry

As we approach another digital asset management system (DAMS) migration, the UC Santa Cruz Library is taking a look at our past practices and strategies in order to find more sustainable methods to managing legacy content and providing access to our new digital image collections. In this session, we will explore alternative strategies for discovery and access to these collections, with a focus on sustainability, usability, and the needs of our users. We will discuss the pros, cons, and unintended consequences of the three different approaches to access and discovery we’ve employed over the years: Comprehensive and custom description Mass digitization with iterative description Hierarchical metadata with a highly structured model By shifting our view of migration as just another step in digital object life cycle, and rethinking our access strategy to be more proactive, questions of sustainability and value arise, including: How much of these collections get used? Who are they being used by and to what end? Are they serving the needs of our patrons? Is the descriptive metadata work sustainable? Who is going to do all this work? We will share the ways we’re now approaching discovery, such as employing user testing, designing metadata and files that meet user needs, and being more selective about what we make accessible.

Museums and Libraries: A Roadmap for Collaboration
Jill Kambs and Peter Gorman

The Chazen Museum of Art and the UW-Madison Libraries have collaborated to extend the Libraries' digital collections infrastructure to meet the discovery, digital management, and preservation needs of the museum. With a grant from the Mellon Foundation, we were able to incorporate new kinds of resources and workflows into our digital library platform, and implement the Libraries’ digital preservation service. Altogether, the resulting workflows and preservation service can now be offered to meet the needs of future external partners. The Libraries' existing architecture was key to the project’s success: a single digital ecosystem built from loosely-coupled components. We will demonstrate how this ecosystem ensures that 1) new features developed for this project automatically become available for future collaborations, 2) project partners can take advantage of selected components that best suit their needs, and 3) sustainability features of our core infrastructure are automatically applied to new partnerships. Standardized, flexible project management also contributed to successful collaboration. Using existing procedures for onboarding new project partners, focus groups to gather requirements, and an iterative, agile development process to show progress early and maintain momentum, we were able to quickly begin work and stay on track to meet grant milestones.