Recent Developments in Cultural Heritage Image Databases: Directions for User-Centered Design

Library Trends, Fall, 1999 by Christie Stephenson

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Tools for Use

Most of the functionality provided by the MESL university participants was constrained by their choice of the Web as a delivery mechanism. The state of Web development at the time as well as local limits on available technology support precluded the development of additional functionality such as Java-based tools. Faculty and student users searched the database and used cut-and-paste methods to create class Web pages or include images and descriptive text in papers or presentations. At the University of Virginia, very simple templates were developed to facilitate the creation of side-by-side image comparisons and online Web exhibitions (http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/inote/index.html), but they, too, depended entirely on the use of cut-and-paste methods (see Figure 3).

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At the University of Maryland, however, a variety of factors contributed to the development of a sophisticated software product which simulated the function of a slide library's light table. It supported faculty members in the process of selecting, organizing, and arranging material for delivery in the classroom, mimicking the side-by-side projector environment typically used in teaching art history. Maryland's delivery system, now known as ISIS (Interactive System for Image Searching), was developed by a team of programmers, instructional designers, and the faculty members themselves through an iterative process that continued throughout the duration of the MESL project (Borkowski & Hays, 1998) (see Figure 4). The commitment to this product resulted directly from the early organizational decision to base MESL development in the art department, thereby involving end users in design decisions from the outset. The impact it had on the success of the MESL project at Maryland was remarkable (Promey, 1998).

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RECENT FEDERATION AND EXPANSION EFFORTS

Since the end of the MESL project in July 1997, efforts have been underway on a number of campuses to provide federated access to diverse image collections, allowing users to search individual or multiple repositories from a single search interface. This development is the next step in the effort to provide users with broad access to information about cultural heritage objects held locally as well as those licensed or otherwise made available from other sources. Projects at the University of Michigan Library and Harvard University Museums and Libraries serve as representative examples of these undertakings. In addition, the work begun in the MESL project is being continued and expanded by AMICO, the Art Museum Image Consortium, working in cooperation with the Research Libraries Group (RLG).

University of Michigan

In 1997, the University of Michigan Library began to create an architecture for federating access to image databases through the Image Services component of its Digital Library Production Service (DLPS) unit. Among their stated goals, they seek to "provide to faculty, staff, and departments a standardized, base level, extensible architecture for putting images online" (http://images.umdl.umich.edu/dlps/is.html). The staff of the Image Services group established a core metadata set for visual images by analyzing existing metadata schemes. The Michigan Image Access System merges data drawn from the collection management databases of a number of campus visual resource and museum collections, as well as that provided with licensed image collections. Data are extracted from each of the separate management databases, mapped to the shared metadata scheme, marked up in SGML, and indexed using OpenText. Users are provided with the option of searching any individual collection by the metadata elements in its own data or multiple databases by a more limited number of common metadata elements.