Digital Asset management is helping Biosecurity Queensland is leading the war against the fire ants, which scientists believe could quickly threaten other parts of Australia if the pest is not controlled.

More than $215 million has been invested in the national cost-shared eradication program to find and destroy fire ants, stop their spread, inform the public about their impact, and conduct research on ways to most effectively destroy their colonies.

Biosecurity Queensland is active in the community and industry, working with residents and businesses to ensure people know how they can contribute to the eradication effort by reporting suspect ants and not moving materials that could contain fire ants. The production of accurate, attractive, informative materials is an important element of this engagement effort.

The fire ant fight is just one of the campaigns undertaken by Biosecurity Queensland to protect Queensland from pests and diseases and manage animal welfare standards.

Whether it’s fire ants, locusts or any other scourge of nature, being able to identify and source images for public education and ongoing research is essential.

Biosecurity Queensland is an agency of Queensland's Department of Employment, Economic Development and Innovation (DEEDI), which is involved in a long-term project to manage a vast database of primarily scientific images collected by the former Department of Primary industries.

When a campaign requires a picture of fire ant infestations or a locust plague, it is likely to be found sitting among the many terabytes of images stored on drives across the state, or in a filing cabinet somewhere as a slide or transparency.

DEEDI Director of Information Management, Heather Drummond, initiated a project to manage the department’s vast image resources, and in 2008 implementation of the Cumulus Digital Asset Management (DAM) system began.

Cumulus distributor DataBasics worked with the project team and IT staff to configure the system, streamline the workflow and train users over a period of three months. DataBasics provided consultation for the initial project and ongoing support post implementation. The Cumulus DAM enterprise server installed at DEEDI, one of only four in Australia, offers full read/write access to the Cumulus server via web browser, and is tightly integrated with the Open Text CMS.

DEEDI is now considering an upgrade to the latest version of Cumulus, i.e. version 8, which will be a joint project with DataBasics to validate the new product version with the DEEDI infrastructure and IT departments

“There are so many images we have that can be of value to researchers, and useful for our publicity campaigns, if only they can be found,” said Heather Drummond, Director of Information Management for DEEDI.

“People spend a lot of time chasing images and we often end up commissioning people to shoot images that we already have.

“One of our divisions in Brisbane could have 12 scientists with access to a couple of thousand slides stored locally, but if we can digitise them they could be used by hundreds of other scientists across the state.”

Scientists may also use the images as a part of their diagnostic process – by using the images to identify any diseases that may be found on crops.

Before implementing the digital asset management system the department undertook a series of focus groups which identified the need to have a full scientific taxonomy apply to metadata that describes the images.

Project Manager Judith Turnbull said implementing a taxonomy and setting up the digital asset management system was only phase one of a much larger project. The process of scanning tens of thousands of hard copy images, and transferring digital images from shared drives with the correct metatada, is a massive project that required additional resourcing.

“There was also a risk to the department from not being able to identify copyright with images we used,” she said.

“We are training staff to begin importing images into the digital asset management system in the right way, but most simply do not have the time to go back and apply the process to the huge volumes of historical images that go back to the beginnings of scientific research in Queensland.”

Turnbull estimates the job of transferring that huge archive of images could take several dedicated and qualified staff more than a year to complete.

“Early projects have already shown that the review process will identify a large degree of duplication in images stored. One server that had to be retired had over 75,000 images but we culled that to around 30,000 when we processed it. So we would expect the 4 million images we have across the department’s servers could come down to 1.5 million.”

The import process is assisted by an Excel spreadsheet that is repopulated with the correct taxonomy terms, and then applies these automatically across a folder as it is imported.

To begin the enormous digitisation project, the department has acquired a Hasselblad bulk slide scanner, able to process 50 slides at once. However, this still leaves a formidable task to import thousands of slides.

“We hope to get to the stage where we can begin using more features of Cumulus, including the ability to automate the importation of images with the associated metadata from “Watch” folders on the network.

“Cumulus gives us state-wide access to images over our intranet, which is essential as we wanted to ensure staff working in Townsville had the same experience as those based in Brisbane.

“It also provides the ability to view thumbnails stored with the image which can be dragged and dropped into Adobe Photoshop or InDesign.”

The Cumulus project was started by the Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries, before that department was merged into the new Department of Employment, Economic Development and Innovation (DEEDI).

DEEDI also incorporates mining, energy and tourism, and each has its own approach to digital asset management.

The development of a unified image management strategy across the department is another challenge that will have to be met, in conjunction with the DEEDI network integration, which is already under way.