Williams College Management of Digital Image Collections

A highly de-centralized image management system exists and is also under development at Williams College. Academic Commons published the interview between AC and Henry Art, Biology/Environmental Science, Williams College. Also participating was Jonathan Leamon from Instruction Technology.

Art has thousands of Kodachromes and scans these as needed. He admits that he finds the slides better images but likes the convenience of modern digital images. Prof. Art does his own metadata tagging. Leamon says that Instruction Technology will help faculty with setting up a system for their images. He describes the image management system thus

The way we’ve organized it is as a collection of collections. Each individual faculty member owns their collection and is responsible for it. If they deem it useful, then the Office of Instructional Technology will support it, we’ll design metadata schema so information can be retrieved afterwards and we’ll help digitize and design an interface--but the faculty member provides images, copyright clearance if necessary, and metadata. We aren't the Library in the sense that we aren’t building a collection for the college, we’re assisting the faculty in developing their collections.

While most collections exist at the individual faculty member level, Leamon notes

So it’s not an institutional collection but a way for individual faculty to have their collections on a central server. Is there any kind of an institutional collection?
[Jonathan Leamon:] No. The closest we have is the art department slide collection, but that is a departmental collection, not an institutional one. The Archives also has a couple of collections up here. But while the material belongs to Williams, the project is still an Archives project--it's very decentralized.

The article also deals with copyright, ownership, and other issues. Well worth a read for those dealing with image management.