Department of heritage makes digital history
Department of heritage makes digital history
The South Australian Government's Department for Environment and Heritage has agreed to use Interwoven's MediaBin Digital Asset Management system to store, index, search and retrieve 50,000 digital images from the department.
DEH hopes that this move will mean that staff will spend less time searching for images and will allow the department to protect and preserve valuable digital assets.
The digital images are created from many different activities, including images taken by park rangers for visitor services, asset management or plant identification; maps and charts for planning and education; images used for fire management; pictures used as evidence by enforcement officers for legal prosecution or use by scientists for research.
Andrew Kay, the IT policy manager at DEH, said: "We primarily were looking for a proven technology that gave us a central repository of digital image files, a facility for entry, update and indexing of files and metadata, and a web-based retrieval facility.
"With over 50,000 digital images held across a wide number of teams and the potential for that to grow to over 300,000, we faced a challenge.
"Currently various groups within DEH have developed their own repository systems for images, but many simply file with no metadata at all, making it near on impossible to find images let alone share with others across branches. Restrictions exist on the publishing of images and content by the complexity of security, copyright and ownership arrangements.
"Regional staff also have bandwidth issues as thin-client users, preventing the identification of the right image unless all are downloaded."
Currently, about 300 individuals create and edit images accessible by over 1000 staff. DEH is pleased with the outcome of Interwoven's MediaBin because images are now efficiently stored and metadata can be easily added, with quick searches also possible. Regional offices can also search by text keyword or thumbnail without large, and slow, file transfers.
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