Since 2010, the Balboa Park Online Collaborative (BPOC) has been working with 10 cultural institutions to build a shared digital asset management system (DAMS), digitization rigs, procedures, and a public web portal of images. Over 300,000 objects—photographs, paintings, and videos—have been digitized. This session discusses what a DAMS is and provides tips for selecting and implementing a DAMS, digitizing collections records, and creating large online visual databases for educational use. Moderator: Nik Honeysett, Director and CEO, Balboa Park Online Collaborative Presenters: Perian Sully, Project Manager for Digital Asset Management and Online Access, Balboa Park Online Collaborative Katrina Pescador, Director of Library & Archives, San Diego Air & Space Museum Joaquin Ortiz, Director of Education and Innovation, Museum of Photographic Arts

1. Perian Sully for Balboa Park Online
Collaborative

2. What is a DAMS (Digital Asset
Management System)?
• Used for managing digital assets

3. DAMS capabilities
• Helps organize messy file structures

4. DAMS capabilities

5. DAMS capabilities
• Derivative generation
• Staff access
• Copyright management
• Sharing
• Web publishing & e-commerce
• Metadata management
• Findability
Properly integrated & managed, a DAMS
becomes a core business practice

6. Selection process
Core features:
• Access rules
• On-the-fly derivative creation
• Metadata creation, indexing, & searching
• Thumbnail-view client
• Asset organization

8. Selection process - additional
features
• Web services and API
• Web-based or desktop client
• E-commerce
• Staff workflows
• Metadata management

9. Selection process – additional
considerations
• Budget
• Database
• Physical infrastructure
• Staffing
• Vendor relationship & reputation

10. Care & feeding
• Server and storage maintenance
• Asset maintenance
• Ongoing licensing and upgrade fees
• Staffing…

11. Staffing
Who’s going to…
• Review requests?
• Manage metadata?
• Review server needs?
• Enforce access?
• Run reports?
• Load assets?
• Perform ongoing training?
• Encourage usage?
• Determine sunset policies?
• Manage copyright information?
• Develop controlled vocabularies?

12. Resources
• SPECTRUM DAM -
http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/spectrum/sp
ectrum-digital-asset-management
• MCN Listserv - http://mcn.edu/mcn-l
• Leala Abbott’s DAMS overview list -
http://bit.ly/1Ei60bC

13. Welcome to the
Katrina Pescador
Director of Library & Archives

14.  Increase and improve user accessibility
 Preservation
 Connect various databases
 Standardize and improve consistency
 Improve efficiency and productivity

18.  Online catalog, AeroCat
 Public online cataloging site (OAC)
 Public photo and video sites (Flickr and
YouTube sites)
 Museum website
 Balboa Park Commons

19.  Rapid Capture Station

20.  Alternative to flat bed scanner
 Canon EOS 5 Camera
 Can be used with most computers
 Digital Photo Professional Software
 Produces CR2 files which are converted to Tiffs
and DNGs
 Total cost approx. 4K

21.  Master File 600 DPI Tiffs
 Prior: 60,000 images digitized in 10 years using a
flatbed scanner.
 Used Rapid Capture Station to digitize 90,000
images in 2 years.

22.  175,000 images now online at 200 DPI 5 inches across
(more or less)
 Copyright: Public Domain, own or “should be ok”
 Link back to our “Image Use” web page
 Used “Sammu” Flickr Application to upload (no
longer works)
 Eventually put images into Flickr Commons

23.  80 million views!
 Crowd sourced information very reliable.
 Aviation community very engaged.
 One person added 50,000 tags!

24.  Sniper 16mm Hi Def Film Digitizer
 AVI files
 Captures slower than real time…50% speed

25.  YouTube Non Profit Partnership: no time limit
on videos
 Over 1500 videos placed on YouTube
 Over 1 Million Views
 Adsense? $100 per year. Worth it?
 Atlas Film Collection

26. It is difficult for me to concisely summarize how much I enjoyedwatching this. It brought tears to
my eyes, honestly.
Beautiful history of aviation.
This is pretty cool stuff for any of u aviation / history / gear head grease monkey types out there.
The "youth" that built this glider is my daddy!! He was born to fly...absolutely fearless. That grin at
1:41, I have never seen him smile like that except when I watch this video.
Unfortunately, my father, LCDR James A. Smith, did not survive....this is a very tough video to
watch. But thank you for sharing this video, and thank you to all that fought this fire and saved a
countless number of other men.
My dad was on this carrier and thank you to whom ever put this footage on here. I've heard this
story many times since I was young. I also saw him in this footage. Very sad incident. Glad he lived
to tell it.

27. Houses the “master” metadata and digital files

28.  How to get the Crowd Sourced information
from Flickr to Piction????
 Tried to do it by hand….no fun! Could transfer
some information from comments, but very
few of the multitude of tags.
 Would all of this information be lost forever?

29.  Upload images to Piction directly to Flickr
 Retrieve tags from Flickr and store on Piction
 Upload films from DAMS to YouTube
 Download comments from YouTube to
Piction?????
 Connect to EOS online catalog?

30.  Prior Flickr uploads and Piction setup done
independently.
 Flickr changes the file names. Difficulty to
connect tags and associated filenames.
 Comments proved to be too problematic to
store in the DAMS. Flickr users now urged to
make relevant tags to the images.
 Moving forward, tags automatically stored in
Piction, crowd sourced and are searchable.

31.  YouTube comments not informative. Decided
not to download crowd sourced info.
 Video files enormous: filled up the Piction
server.
 Transferring video files slow process.
 Ability to upload to YouTube once in Piction

32.  Simplification of the process (volunteers)
 Standardizing and being consistent
 Plan in advance (coordination)

33.  Digitizing at a rate of 5,000 images and 100
films per month.
 Research requests have increased three-fold
since our collections went online.
 Received over 80 million views on Flickr in 4
years.
 Received over 1 million views on YouTube in 1
year.
 Top 8 of Museums in the world using Pinterest.

34. Education
meets the
DAMS
Joaquin I. Ortiz
Director of Education and Innovation
Museum of Photographic Arts

35. Why education?

36. What we learned while
selecting the DAMS

37. A better system
 Backup and store digital media
 Distribute digital media

38. The power of metadata
 Collections access for educators
 Cataloging collection by teaching
subjects

39. The Commons
 Educators reaching educators
 “Curating” selections

40. What we learned after
implementation

41. Get the right trainer
 Collections managers aren’t the best
educators
 The staff needs individualized follow-up
training

42. Metadata isn’t free
 There were unexpected development
costs
 Getting what you want takes a lot of time,
energy, persistence

43. It needs to be built into jobs
Whose responsibility is it?
 What’s the plan for updating content?

44. What’s next?

45. Searching for funding
 Researching grants to get consultation
and development

46. Access through metadata
 Developing taxonomy for education and
beyond
 APIs to access the collection metadata

47. Launching technology
 Collection search access
 Curated selections from the collection
 Natural information seeking behaviors

48. Education
meets the
DAMS
Joaquin I. Ortiz
Director of Education and Innovation
Museum of Photographic Arts