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On October 20 2000, HATII interviewed Scott Sayre, Director of Media and Technology at the Interactive Media Group of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and Robin Dowden, Director of Integrated Information Resources at the Walker Art Center. The Integrated Arts Information Access project had as its aim, the creation of an accessible interface for a standards-based information framework. The digitization process would lead to enhanced access to the permanent collections, archives and libraries of both the MIA and the WAC. It was intended that the resources could then be accessed for educational and other non-commercial purposes on the Internet. The interviews were conducted simultaneously and their responses have therefore been consolidated.
The program and policy developed from the project on integrated art information access. Both the Walker and MIA distributed this through the web. They followed the AMICO course to digitize and structure information in line with standards where the standards existed. Both institutions have the same strategic goals. In MIA the digital media standards evolved quickly during the 1990s through the development of a series of multimedia projects.
In MIA the curatorial staff select approximately 125 items quarterly for digitization that have a scholarly or public interest.
The WAC has different criteria based on the smaller size of its collections — approximately 9000 objects as opposed to the 100,000 + objects in MIA. The visual arts creators identify an A-list of the top 25 or top 100. These are the “cream”, either for public or scholarly use. The photography and the digitization of the items are done in parallel, very often for a particular exhibition, for example, 100 years of sculpture.
The priorities are established by the curators, rather than being driven by the digitization process in both institutions.
For both MIA and WAC the main obstacles are the movement of the art, either from storage, on loan or from the galleries. The scale of the work can also be a significant factor. Copyright is also recognized as an obstacle.
The main drivers for the selection of material for the WAC and MIA are, in order of priority: teaching and learning potential, enhanced access, improved functionality, social inclusion, potential to reach disadvantaged groups, and historical and cultural value. These are the main incentives and while other criteria may be a product of the digitization process, they do not influence the selection process. The WAC identified research significance as a further criterion of importance in its selection process.
These processes have not changed significantly over time.
The co-operation that took place in developing the digitization program was with museums and academic institutions. Most significant was the co-operation between WAC and MIA and with AMICO. The co-operation was local, regional, national and international mainly through the dialog with AMICO.
The WAC and MIA would encourage any institution to speak to other similar organizations before starting any digital program.
The current status of the project is ongoing with no anticipated end date. Both programs started in the early 1990s.
The main purposes in creating the digital deliverables for both WAC and MIA are to provide teaching and learning resource, public access, and wider access. For WAC, research and experiment are additional factors. MIA has identified cost savings as a long-term factor, where it is anticipated that the digital objects will be repeatedly usable for any purpose.
The program produced an explicitly informative statement of intent for the whole project, not specifically for the digital process. See http://www.walkerart.org/IAIA/ for all related documents.
The type of source material digitized includes:
The last two are only ever done through intermediaries.
The nature and format of the materials digitized are extremely varied and include all sizes of photographs, original artworks and various sizes of documents.
Both MIA and WAC intend their digital objects to be used again in a variety of projects including online multimedia exhibitions.
The following standards, guidelines or tools are used for representing content:
The following standards, guidelines or tools are used for describing content:
The following standards, guidelines or tools are used for controlling data values:
The following standards, guidelines or tools are used for representing structure:
Both MIA and WAC looked at standards and guidelines closely before starting the program. AMICO was the main tool used to develop the digital objects. Many of the standards available were not necessarily suitable for their needs, or else the time and expertise were not available to them.
The projects were aware of the possible guidelines and referenced them but developed their own for specific uses. They did not reject any guidelines as such. They advise an awareness of the larger community, which is often academic in nature, but also to be aware of the reality of the project and not to expect to find easy answers to problems.
Intended audiences for the digital deliverables include:
The WAC and MIA identified the K-12 group as their primary audience. The education sector as a whole is a high target with the other groups being more of an additional audience. They have produced material to support teachers’ use of the online materials.
Evaluation reports based on usability labs have been produced. These can be found in the http://www.walkerart.org/IAIA/ site. They have no idea what the profile of the actual users is as this is an extremely difficult concept to measure.
There are no limitations to the use of the digital deliverables. However, they did not consult the W3C’s Guide for accessibility for disabilities.
Advice on managing the project was obtained from both in-house and external sources. MIA’s digital program has had an impact on the photography department in the organizational structure, as it now has responsibility for the digitization process as well.
Both MIA and WAC have elaborate project management procedures including various committees with working groups, for example education, technical and project management. These procedures are in place through the IAIA program across both institutions. They have adjusted these procedures over time to be more inclusive.
The project management is part of the larger more formal organization. It is independent of any project and has layers of advisory groups, which report back to the institutions. This is not specific to the digital process.
The project carried out a sort of pilot study, a prototype that was used to identify user needs and technology forecasting. However, the whole program has been more of an organic process with each step taking into consideration the lessons learned from the previous steps. The prototype allowed the team to change the user interface, the display content, and the structure to accommodate the K-12 audience’s needs. They did not undertake any benchmark studies.
There were no real Gantt charts or similar planning aids. The work is allocated based on the relationship to the existing job although some staff have changed jobs.
The digitization is carried out both in-house and is outsourced; the method depends on the materials. If material is fragile then the process will be carried out in-house. MIA outsources transparencies. This is to free up labor time and equipment. In-house methods enable further training of staff and control over the material and process.
Both institutions bought in equipment for the digitization process. The process is dictated by the nature of the material. Original artwork is photographed and the 4x5 slides are digitized. Flatbed scanners, film scanners and high-end digital cameras are used, a Phase One in particular. The film scanners tend to be Nikon Cool Scan and the flatbeds are either Agfa Duoscan or Lynz. Both MIA and WAC used gray scale and color charts, as well as Mac color sync profiles and Adobe gamma calibrator. Both have guidelines for the capture procedures.
Both MIA and WAC are aware of the copyright status of their materials. The institutions do not, on the whole, own the original materials. They are owned by a variety of individuals or bodies, such as the artists or the artists’ estates. They declare the copyright on the web page. WAC and MIA will generally get the owner’s permission to use the original object, usually without formalities. WAC will digitize objects that are not in copyright and not use them, but to avoid disrupting the digital process they digitize until such times as the materials may be cleared for copyright.
The commercial usage of the material is strictly not permitted and there is a usage statement on the web page. Educational use is permitted.
In some cases, users can download RTF, PDF and Proprietary Word Processed documents; these tend to be project documents and not actual objects. The users can only view thumbnails and lower quality images. They can listen to 30-second samples and compressed sound as well as video samples and lower quality video clips. However, this will depend on the project.
They do not use watermarking as this is considered to be ineffective and costly and as yet there is no system that actually works well. There is no recognized standard format and using any system now would mean using a proprietary system.
Both institutions have a preservation or conservation procedure for original material, established by the conservators in the museums. They do not investigate the condition of the original materials nor do they undertake any conservation procedures specifically as part of the digitization process.
The risks identified to the material are handling and movement. Materials are not digitized if the process will cause significant risk. Intermediaries are used to reduce risk although this is less frequent with the purchase of the Phase One single shot camera. Cold lights are used for all photography, digital or traditional, with a variance in exposure for different materials. The conservation procedures used for photography are applied to the digital process.
The MIA curators will monitor and prepare the materials for the digital process. In WAC this will vary from department to department. Neither institution will restrict access to original materials but the long-term goal is to encourage users to access the digital surrogate and it is hoped that this will be an organic process.
An in-house catalog is shared with registration, archives and libraries. The program used the ID information, the accession number, the description and other information from the catalog. The MIA had the relevant materials before starting the digitization process while WAC enlarged the record as part of the process, locating some source materials to complete the record.
The WAC altered some objects before digitization as did the MIA, for example de-glazing artworks for photography. The tendency was not to reject material before digitization, although some objects were postponed until improvements in the technology decreased the risk of damage. Both institutions used intermediaries and original objects. The material has never only existed in reproduced form.
Both institutions reproduce their material mainly as 4x5 transparencies for images; audio is reproduced on digital CD or DAT and video copies from film. MIA also uses digital video and there is a growing number of born-digital objects.
The registration departments catalog both institutions’ original objects. They have a different system for the digital surrogates based on VRA, MARC and EAD. They use Filemaker Pro software to build this catalog system. They have their own controlled vocabulary within their system. They record details about the digital object, the digitization process, technical details, staffing details (e.g. who scanned the object) and administrative details. The digitizer or photographer records these details.
The metadata are held in a separate catalog that is connected to the main catalog. It is available on the intranet server and available on the internet through AMICO. They are currently working on a new collections management system that will include digital objects in the main catalog.
Both institutions use XML, word processed files and TXT for retroconverted text. WAC uses HTML as well. They do not digitize non-Latin characters and do not use OCR. They use keying-in to convert their textual materials.
TIFF file format is used for capturing and preserving, as is Photo-CD in MIA. GIF, JPEG and Flash-Pix are used for delivery. The projects have standards on resolution and bit-depth.
Both MIA and WAC compress in JPG and FlashPix. Compression is for reducing cost, improving access, enhancing usability, decreasing storage and reducing theft of digital resources. It is the biggest method of risk management for security of images and controlling the artists’ license.
The project retains images in uncompressed form and carries out post processing color correction, cropping, and batch processing using PhotoShop. The average capture and preservation file size is 210MB and 10MB for delivery. The dynamic range of the equipment is checked using the built-in software of the equipment.
They would recommend capturing the greatest amount of information at scan time.
Both MIA and WAC digitize sound. MIA uses mainly QuickTime and WAC uses RealAudio. The details of the sampling rates and compression are forthcoming in a document to be sent to HATII.
Both MIA and WAC also digitize moving images. The details of these formats, sampling rates and compression are also forthcoming.
MIA and WAC have no formal quality control process but at image processing time each image is checked as part of this process, therefore 100% by hand. There is no real quality control process for metadata either, other than checking as part of the full process.
Access to the digital objects varies with the audience. External users have limited access to lower quality images. In-house users have access to the entire catalog and objects. Users can search across category, indexing for educational materials. Users can run unstructured queries and they can search on the associated metadata. Usage estimation is forthcoming. Users do not need any other software or hardware to access the materials. They can annotate, create sets and create detailed derivatives.
Users do not have to pay for the use of the digital deliverables.
Potential users of the digital deliverables are informed about their availability through website announcements, press releases, articles in print media, print and broadcast media coverage, conferences, meetings and electronic and conventional mail shots. The project believes that conferences and articles have been very successful in disseminating the information to the academic community but want to make efforts to have greater success with the K-12 audience.
No front-end evaluation has been done as such.
Formative evaluation took the form of questionnaires on paper and online, focus groups and observations of users interaction in a Usability Lab. This was video-recorded for later reference.
They changed the project from the ground up based on this evaluation. The structure, the descriptive vocabulary, display content and the user interface were all altered radically.
No summative evaluations have been undertaken as all activities are ongoing.
The projects realized that users’ skills vary dramatically depending on the age and skill ratio. The evaluation allowed them to differentiate from their own ideas to those of users. Evaluation should be done as early as possible to allow feedback in the process, if possible true front-end evaluation. It should be remembered that users’ needs and understandings can be difficult to gauge.
The funding for IAIA comes from the State department of education in a sizeable grant, approximately $2 million. While they have adequate funding it would be helpful to have a longer-term budget to ensure longevity and development. They agreed that using standards has saved money in the long-term as it allowed the collaboration between the WAC and MIA, sharing standards as well as ideas and staff.
There are quarterly reports on the IAIA website that are written for the funding organization.
MIA and WAC will continue to add new materials, update metadata and the user interface. They have plans to document formally the digitization process for the long term. They want to move into areas as yet untouched, such as the archives at the WAC.
There is no real preservation strategy other than as part of the larger organization’s disaster recovery plan. WAC stores images on two CDs. They archive in TIFF and ASCII using CDs, and DATS.
They intend to keep the digital deliverables available for as long as possible and indeed the loss of this material would matter greatly.
It is the intention of the project to ensure that the digital process becomes part of institutional culture, to ensure that the resources are used day-to-day by all types of user. They wish to educate the staff to identify and use the objects in everyday work.
The WAC is bounded by the size of the collection, and wishes to move beyond the visual arts, which is only one track of the arts center.
From the press release on the project:
“The Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) and the Walker Art Center have embarked on an ambitious joint project that eventually will bring their considerable visual and educational resources to classrooms and homes in Minnesota and the world via the Internet. A $1 million grant from the State of Minnesota Department of Children, Families & Learning launched the project in September 1997. Called the Integrated Arts Information Access project (IAIA), the multiyear effort will integrate the collections and archives of the two institutions in digital form.
The scope of the IAIA project will require an ongoing commitment from both the Walker and the MIA. During the initial phase, July 1, 1997, to June 30, 1999, both museums will concentrate on converting their collections and related resources to digital form. In addition to images, audio, video, and software, materials such as catalog records, curriculum, manuscripts, and print publications also will be converted. This work will pave the way for future development of online exhibitions, curriculum, and other activities aimed at local and remote K-12 students and families.”
http://www.walkerart.org/IAIA/12press.html