Digital Asset Management at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Even though RLG does a fine job of publicizing its own efforts, it never hurts to highlight important articles -- particularly when they come out of your own 'shop'. The most recent issue of their RLG DigiNews (Dec. 2006) features Why Digital Asset Management? A Case Study, by Susan Chen and Michael Jenkins, both of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The article is a comprehensive overview of the decision making that surrounded the establishment of a museum-wide Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, now christened Met Images, and the concomitant reorganization of museum resources required to implement and sustain such a system. Of particular interest for an insider is learning what steps were necessary to get institutional buy-in from all the parties affected -- senior management, curatorial and research staff, and the image support staff.

One intriguing assertion appears in a box-out two-thirds of the way down the article, reproduced here on the left, in a section headed Cataloguing. (Evidently the image community clings fast to that interstitial 'u'.) When I first read it I thought the suggestion was that cataloging works of art was significantly different from cataloging 'sneakers or pickup trucks'. On its face this seems eminently arguable. Some institutions have wasted much time and energy in developing elaborate and idiosyncratic DIY systems that try to mimic pre-existing cataloging paradigms (with all their inherent flaws) rather than taking advantage of systems that employ industry-standard input and output.

But in the context of this section of the article, the statement is only meant as a caution: The complexity of cataloging works of art may not be sufficiently recognized by DAM vendors in the design of their products. The authors seem optimistic that "tools will be developed that are more appropriate to the needs of museums, libraries, and archives." From my perspective I hope that the tools are both appropriate to the museum's needs and practically implementable.