Securing Digital Image Assets in Museums and Libraries: A Risk Management Approach

Library Trends, Fall, 1999 by Teresa Grose Beamsley

Risk management is the sum of all activities directed toward acceptably accommodating the possibility of failure in a program. Risk management is based on assessment; every risk management assessment includes a number of tasks: (1) identification of concerns, (2) identification of risks, (3) evaluation of the risks as to likelihood and consequences, (4) assessment of options for accommodating the risks, (5) prioritization of risk management efforts, and (6) development of risk management plans (http://www.airtime.co.uk/users/wysywig/risk_1.htm). This article examines existing practices within museums and archives and provides suggestions on the creation of such plans as they apply specifically to the stewardship of digital assets.

DEFINING CONCERNS AND IDENTIFYING RISKS

Responsible individuals become concerned when a valuable possession is placed in jeopardy. The value of collections-related digital assets to museums and archives has been established. What are legitimate concerns regarding objects of value? Would these concerns be applicable to digital assets? It is possible to identify two obvious concerns. The first is fear that the asset itself will somehow lose value. The second is that the steward (in this case the institution and its professional staff) will somehow lose the asset or control over the asset.

How is value embodied in digital information and what would constitute a loss of value? The charier of museums and archives includes a mandate to preserve the information embodied in their collections. It seems reasonable to propose that the value of digital surrogates for collections items lies in the relative ability of the surrogates to convey as much original information content as possible. The integrity of the digital image is judged as the degree to which it accurately represents its subject. If the information content of the surrogate is compromised, the surrogate is devalued.

There is a case to be made for the creation of very high quality, very high-resolution digital surrogates. These files are used as archival versions of image information, but reality intervenes when their content is put to practical use. High quality, high-resolution files are very large and therefore costly to store and transmit. The generally accepted rule is that the needs of different uses and users are best met by digital content presented in a variety of formats or resolutions, tailored to the situation. Accurate representation is in the eye of the beholder; the resolution and file size limitations dictated by intended Web use are not the same as those demanded by activities such as conservation assessment (Frey, 1997) (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/formats.html). As a result, every variant form of a digital file can and should be evaluated for integrity based on the use to which it is put.

Control over the asset is somewhat easier to describe and evaluate. The most obvious manifestation of control of image surrogates is the ownership of copyright and the ability to assign or to withhold assignment of use rights to others. There are other manifestations of control that are uniquely related to the museum or archive's responsibilities toward the public; these may in fact be more significant than copyright ownership. Nonprofit 501 (c)3 charters and ethical responsibility dictate that it is not enough for institutions to own and care for objects. The legal definition of a museum includes the directive "to exhibit to the public on a regular basis" (Malaro, 1985). This has been interpreted for the last two decades as a mandate to educate by providing members of the public with meaningful and useful mediated access to collections. Control of the collections implies control of access to the collections in a proactive way. It is the job of museums to encourage and facilitate the use of collections and the information that they represent. Loss of control in this sense would mean an inability to effectively mediate the collections-related educational experience.