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10 Museums, 12 Months, 1 DAMS: Adventures in centralized systems at Balboa Park
Howard Goldstein, HR Goldstein Consulting, USA; Perian Sully, Balboa Park Online Collaborative, USA
Abstract
Digital asset management (DAM) can be difficult, expensive, and time-consuming for a cultural institution to implement, yet DAM has become a central process to everyday workflows within cultural organizations. For ten small and mid-sized museums in San Diego’s Balboa Park, the Balboa Park Online Collaborative (BPOC) undertook a project to rapidly deploy a Digital Asset Management System within the space of twelve months. This paper will provide a blueprint by outlining the process and steps BPOC took to analyze user needs, choose an application vendor, and implement the system, with special focus on the opportunities and challenges of providing centralized solutions to institutions with localized or parallel interests. This model can be of use to large organizations with disparate departments, colleges and universities, and collaborating organizations.
Collaboration and Dark Fiber
The Balboa Park Online Collaborative (BPOC) was created to lead technology-focused cooperation between 20 Balboa Park institutions. One of the challenges BPOC quickly uncovered when it began, was a serious limitation to supporting collaboration caused by the lack of IT infrastructure necessary to network the institutions together.
Accelerating in Flight: Access to a Collection via Flickr
In an effort to get more of the Balboa Park Museum’s collections online and accessible to the public, the Balboa Park Online Collaborative (BPOC) has been leading an effort to efficiently and quickly digitize the wealth of media in the Park museums collection.
Installing the Collaborative Calendar
Like most cultural institution Web sites, the sites from BPOC member institutions have a significant emphasis on events – exhibitions, lectures, classes, tours, performances, etc. Commercial calendar products are often not flexible enough to meet the specific needs of the cultural heritage field, forcing many museums to make do with inadequate calendaring systems at great expense.