This document discusses the Cleveland Museum of Art's efforts to create a digital archive of its collection assets using cloud storage and open source repositories. An interdepartmental team conducted an inventory of the museum's digital materials and selected appropriate standards. They chose a cloud-based storage platform with in-house archival management software administration. After 9 months of ingesting content, they have made progress uploading editorial photography, artwork photography, and conservation photography. However, challenges include limited staff time and an upcoming loss of their developer.

1. Art in the Clouds
Creating an Archival
for Museum Assets
using Cloud Storage
and Open Source
Repository
JaneAlexander & Niki Krause
Cleveland Museum ofArt

3. Looking at the Big Picture
DIGITAL STRATEGY

5. Archival Repository
in Collection-information
and Scholarship Backbone

6. Bruce buried by DVDs
INCEPTION

10. Inception
Photo Studio’s artwork photography•
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uncropped, high-res masters
three sets of 3800 archival DVDs
manual lookup / pull to use
long-term viability of DVDs
gold DVDs = $$$$$$
= 11,400
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ditch the DVDs, move to online
but, it’s archival in nature
storage

11. Interdepartmental Team
CIO + Applications Services Manager (leader)•
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Museum Archivist + Digital Archivist
IT network+infrastructure+storage duo
Library Applications Analyst / developer
Photo Studio Assistant Manager
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Photographers
Collections Management / Registrar
Conservation staff
Performing Arts, Music, and Film staff

12. Approach
inventory digital materials
identify appropriate standards
storage platform+management
map metadata
define workflows
ingest+iterate
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software

13. Inventory & Projections
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artwork photography
conservation photography
editorial photography
business documents
AV of institutional history
AV of lectures, performances
artwork in time-based media
= 20TB now, 35TB by 2018

14. Standards
OAIS reference model
preservation file formats
PREMIS
descriptive & technical metadata
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• schemas
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Dublin Core (DCMI)
IPTC mapped to DCMI
local metadata needs = local schema

16. Storage Platform Options
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onsite hardware/storage + AMS
SaaS/hosted solution
cloud-based hardware/storage,
with in-house AMS administration
…but there were concerns!

17. Performance

18. Virtual Data Center on same ISP trunk

23. 5 years = $500,000+

24. Archival Management
Options considered:
Systems
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DSpace (open source/SaaS, MIT)
CONTENTdm (SaaS, OCLC)
Fedora Commons (open source, Cornell)
Archivematica (open source)
Invenio (open source, CERN)

27. Ingest Progress @ 9 Months
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editorial photography — ⅔ ingested
artwork photography — ½ staged, mapped
conservation photography —
file name review+de-duping underway
business documents — scripting xformations
AV — detailed inventory, analog to digital
artwork in time-based media
– 10 works accessioned so far
– team working on in-house standards
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28. Challenges
• developer is leaving
TOMORROW
staff time
– DigitalArchivist
the museum
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– Conservation and PAMF staff availability
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network storage running high
demand for more DSpace installs