Now that your organization has finally gotten the funding to digitize your collection, what are you going to do with all those hi-res image files that are being generated and saved to your network?
Not to mention video. Doesn’t it seem like everyone in the museum is going around filming every event that holds even the slightest bit of interest, and leaving it up to you (I.T.) to decide what to do with the stuff? Craziness! How do you decide what to keep and what to discard? And how do you decide what you keep long term or short term, hi-res or low-res, locally or off-site?
Everyone knows that supporting technology is a “money pit”, but surely (“don’t call me Shirley”) there had to be a “best practice” solution for dealing with this madness. Or is there?
This is the story of how the DMA’s I.T. and Library staff went about trying to come up with a sensible way to deal with the Digital Asset Management explosion, and the solution (liquid as it may be) we came up with..
It was on a brisk April morning when the head of Development came into my office to happily inform me (I immediately knew this was trouble) that she “had met a gentleman at a league dinner the previous night that was very interested in supporting our DAM initiative, and “would I mind giving him a call”. OK, I can deal with that.
After a short and pleasant conversation with the gentleman I discovered that he owned a local Hosting facility that was right across the street from the museum, and it was decided that I should meet with his head of operations. So far, so good.
Good looking place with lots of flashing lights, racks, AC units, and of course very noisy. Nice guy too, looked to be about 16, maybe a little old by today’s standards, but still had great command of his skate-board as he rounded the isles. I’m joking!
He was actually 20 and wore roller-skates.
After a short tour of their very impressive facility it was agreed that “he, and their sales team (uh oh), would pay us a visit to discuss what our needs were and how they could help”. OK…, great.
After the meeting, in which they took lots of notes as we explained our short and long term DAM goals, they agreed to send us a “quote” in a day or two.
After about 6 weeks of playing phone tag we received the quote for the “help” they were offering, which came to around $25K a month to store our digital content.
Surely (say it) this had to be a mistake, a typo, a misunderstanding!
What it was was a rude awakening.
We took the obvious next step…Happy Hour at the local watering hole!
“What to do…”
I decided to rely on my years of experience and training in the field of Technology and Networking to guide me through these uncharted waters…so I opened up Google and started searching. Oh, come on, like you’ve never done it!
It quickly became pretty apparent that there was no clear cut answer to DAM. Everyone has their individual needs and vision that they need their DAM solution to provide.
There were not going to be any short cuts on this trip, and so began the endless barrage of meetings with Storage Providers. The pricing curve was quite steep, and many clearly were used to dealing with for-profit companies that had budgets for these things. I even met with companies that didn’t do this kind of work offer to “develop” something that would fit our needs. But again, the costs were out of scope.
We decided to do a needs assessment so we could get a better understanding of what we’re looking for. Here were some our “gotta haves”.
a. Because we had a backlog of analog material queued for conversion we knew that we needed a solution that would accept portable hard drives as a delivery platform because, for the first year at least, we would be sending gigs and gigs of stuff at once. This was not a typical delivery method for most companies. Most suggested a dedicated T1 or some other high bandwidth delivery path. We don’t live that long.
b. Next we needed “smart hands” (I love this term) to load the files onto their servers and send us back the empties, if you will, for reuse.
c. And finally we needed to be able to manage and access our files any time day or night remotely from home or the office.
With this information in hand we were able to cut to the chase with most companies and eliminate time consuming interviews that lead down a very wide road.
Finally, we met with a company that met all the prerequisites and also provided Streaming for fast video downloads. Internap, a company that specializes in Internet services, collocation, and Content Delivery, was able to put together a package that was affordable and met all our requirements, for now. Two things you can’t ever say in this field are “never” and “always”.
To be continued.
