| Main website: | http://hearstmuseum.berkeley.edu/ |
| POC collections: | The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology (PAHMA) has a vast collection of physical objects and associated paper documentation that we are striving to digitize. Of the 600,000+ catalogued items (comprising over three million physical objects), we have digital photographs of approximately 50,000 items (a number which increases by about 1000 each month). In addition to this growing collection of object images, we have begun two large-scale digitization projects. The first project (DigitalCat), already underway, is systematically scanning all of the Museum’s catalog cards (300 dpi, jpg, 24-bit color) at the rate of 8000 cards per day. We have just passed the 200,000 cards scanned mark. The second project, projected to begin in January, will scan all of the Museum’s bound ledgers. This will add an additional 50,000+ images to our collection.By the time of the scheduled end of the POC (at the end of October?), PAHMA will have between 400,000 and 600,000 (target: 500,000) digital images that we’d like to include in the POC.
My best estimate of the space these assets would require is 650-700 GB. This estimate is considerably less than I had at first projected, due in large part to the unexpectedly small size of the catalog card images (only 300-700 KB per image, amounting to only 52 GB for the 200,000 cards scanned so far). |
| Primary contact: | Michael Black |
| Museum description: | The mission of the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology, an organized research unit of the University of California, is to present to its audiences the processes and findings of anthropological interpretations of its collections; to illuminate the diversity and particularity of ways of being human, both past and present; and to explore how different ways of being human are made possible by the creation, modification, and use of material objects. The Museum’s collections span the world and document several thousand years of human culture and prehistory. |
| Goals for POC: | The PAHMA’s objectives for the MVP POC are three-fold (in order of importance):
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| Success criteria: | Our digital assets would be safely located offsite. They’d be managed and backed up in a way that would safeguard against digital rot so that we wouldn’t feel it was necessary to keep a mirrored copy here in the Museum. We’d feel confident that either nothing would be lost, or that if it were lost, it could be recovered reasonably quickly.We would know what we’ve got, in what format(s), and there would be sufficient metadata associated with most of the images so that they could be found easily.
Museum personnel would be able to quickly and easily find images they’re looking for, and would be able to download full- or reduced-size versions at will. The archived versions stored in the Media Vault could not be altered or deleted by Museum personnel without administrative rights. Museum personnel would have confidence in the system and would find it easy enough to use that they’d start using it to store the digital assets they produce, rather than maintain personal, off-line caches. |
| Users: | During the Proof-of-Concept phase, only two users are expected to contribute content to the Media Vault:
If the Media Vault persists beyond January 1, 2008, this number would greatly increase, as we expect to hire a Digital Asset Manager late this year, and registrars (2), collections managers (3), surge staff (4), conservators (3), and visiting researchers (?) would also be encouraged and/or expected to add content to the Vault. During the Proof-of-Concept phase, as many as 40 users would be expected to view content in the Media Vault:
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| Timeline: |
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