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----------------------------Original message---------------------------- VRA/CAA Session: Sat 2/13/99 11:00-1:00, LA Intercontinental Hotel "The Cost & Use of Digital Images: Results from the Mellon Study of the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project" Please repost to other lists. Details of the report and where to get it follow: SPECIAL REPORT ON DIGITAL IMAGE DISTRIBUTION STUDY IS NOW AVAILABLE This press release looks better viewed on a web browser at http://sunsite.Berkeley.EDU/Imaging/Databases/1998mellon/99press-release.html A special report examining the costs of distributing digital images to the university community has just been released. "The Cost of Digital Image Distribution: The Social and Economic Implications of the Production, Distribution, and Usage of Image Data" is the result of a 22-month UC Berkeley study of the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project (MESL), supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The MESL Project, sponsored by the Getty Information Institute, was the first attempt to create a collection of images and descriptive information from a variety of museums and deliver it digitally to university users of campus networks. The two-year experimental collaboration among seven museums and seven universities succeeded in distributing approximately 10,000 images for classroom use and individual research, primarily in the areas of cultural studies, art history, history, and photography. The Cost of Digital Image Distribution identifies, defines, and explores MESL's primary cost centers in the digital network distribution of images and accompanying text. It examines the processes and costs of analog slide libraries, and compares the analog and digital distribution systems. It also considers the intangible factors that can lead to the success or failure of digital distribution schemes, such as learning curve, ease or difficulty of maintenance, and faculty attitudes towards teaching with digital images. The findings presented in this report should be of interest to anyone contemplating image digitization or distribution, particularly to a scholarly audience. It should be of particular interest to those involved in funding and/or planning activities involving either analog or digital image distribution. Major findings include: -It will be a long time before digital image repositories will be able to deliver the critical mass of images needed for instruction and research. Analog slide libraries and digital image repositories will necessarily coexist for many years. -The higher education community is enthusiastic about providing access to digital images and information from cultural heritage repositories. However, many impediments to widespread adoption must be dealt with--ranging from lack of comprehensive content and the absence of necessary tools to facilitate use, to inadequate recognition and support for faculty who adopt new technology in their teaching. -The anticipated shift from analog slide libraries to licensed digital images represents a shift from ownership to access through ongoing subscription. This shift is analogous to the changes that have taken place in university library collections. University administrators are concerned about controlling content costs and faculty are concerned about ongoing access to the images they use and need. Those university positions are at odds with those of museum image distribution consortia, who seek a consistent revenue stream and are reluctant to assure ongoing access without ongoing payment. For such image distribution schemes to work, both museums and universities have to see their common goals as outweighing their individual concerns. "The Cost of Digital Image Distribution: The Social and Economic Implications of the Production, Distribution, and Usage of Image Data" Howard Besser, Principal Investigator; Robert Yamashita, Project Manager A report to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation--A Study of the Economics of Network Access to Visual Information: The Museum Educational Site Licensing Project, Published by the School of Information Management and Systems, U.C. Berkeley, 1998 Available online at http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Imaging/Databases/1998mellon in both html and PDF format Paper copies of this report may also be ordered c/o Howard Besser, School of Information Management & Systems, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, California, 94720-4600 ------------------------------------------ Mellon Study of Cost and Use of Images School of Information Management & Systems University of California, Berkeley [log in to unmask]