Manager of Visual Resources, Collection Information and Access

Thom Sempere Manager of Visual Resources, Collection Information and Access Interview conducted by Joanna Plattner on 2/5/2001

Broad Goals:

Need to understand and work with the collection. Want people to see the collection. Primarily, his job (MVR) is to get images of collection, organize museum wide processes for utilizing the images, and establish methods for getting access to those images. Encourage pro-active access (a great resource that is under-utilized).

The museum hasn’t prioritized this work up until now. They don’t even have a staff photographer!

Images serve many purposes: identification, advertising, publications – many constituencies. Top priority is getting high quality images of objects in the permanent collection. Once there, there are many uses for it.

There are lots of other needs for photography in the museum (events, exhibitions, press photos, etc.). Eventually want to serve all needs, but not an immediate goal. Expects to eventually strive to enforce a museum standard across all departments.

Digitization of content has several implications. The shift toward use of digital resources has manifested itself in many ways. There are intellectual property implications, etc. This is way the new department was created. Many new questions are raised that the IS department isn’t equipped to answer. “What” should be gathered?

Q1: Tell us about your job? What is your exact job title? How long have you been at SFMOMA? (Education? Training?)

Visual Resource Manager His job is to establish policy around digital image creation, access, and use. (my words) Has an MFA – has exhibited his own photography. Has taught photography. He’s been at SFMOMA for 10 years. Started as curatorial assistant in for the Photography collection. Last 9 years worked in acquisitions, archiving, and exhibitions for the Photography and Architecture and design collections. He used to wear many more hats. Helped archive 7,000 objects in the photography collection. Over years, tried to help streamline processes within the photography department. His goal was to minimize the need to touch an object or its associated paperwork.

He introduced digital photography to the museum (his wife is a graphic designer – early adopter, comfortable with digital media). Was involved in the creation of the first object list that had visual representations of the object along side the text description.

He invented the digitization process at the museum. He was familiar and comfortable with digital and technology.

He recognized that it was silly that embark (a CMS the museum had used for five years) didn’t have any pictures in it! “this is silly”. That’s what its useful for! He used the opportunity to show how useful digital imagery could be.

Recently became manager of new department, which is part of a new department within the museum called Collections Information & Access.

Who are your customers? The curatorial & exhibition departments (people who have to hang things on the wall), the deputy directory, the director, the committees who select the art. But, his primary customers are all in house. He also serves people in the collections department (registration, conservation).

What is your goal? People who work in the arts are visual by nature. “They are image people” Images are a basic tool for them.

To help the people who run the museum do their job. The curatorial & exhibition departments (people who have to hang things on the wall), the deputy directory, the director, the committees who select the art. But, his primary customers are all in house. He also serves people in the collections department (registration, conservation).

He wants the images to be stored in a tool that supports discovery. 1 of 5 (4/5/18) What is your goal when you are retrieving images? Do get as many as you can quickly? Do find the images painlessly?

The ideal way to think about is, if it isn’t me but somebody else. I have most of the collection in my head. (lets focus on you). Okay. The purpose is to be able to shortcut a lot of trouble. So, I am trying to manage images… I teach a course and need images every week. Most of our photography collection is digitized; I can quickly pull up images and quickly decide which objects to pull without going through every box. That is time consuming and can damage the pieces.

With a nice search tool I can also find things I wasn’t looking for. I can look better to my class because it looks like I thought all these things out. Quick access and ubiquity are valuable. To know that it is all available is important.

When people knock on my door in search of images for a variety of reasons, I want to be able to find them easily.

Do people knock on your door, or sheamus’s. My door right now. Sheamus should just be scanning and digitizing. They are knocking on my door because we don’t have tools to give them. Embark does work to some degree; we just need to continuously educate people to use it. There are more images in it now, so it is getting more useful. Oftentimes, you rely on a tool and it only gives you half of what you need to know, often times better off not using it at all than to think you’ve gotten it all.

How do you measure how well you serve the people who come knocking at your door? Speed? Completeness? Yes – I try to give everyone what they need. Could be quickly. They want it when they need it. We would like it to be thorough and reliable.

Some people need images as an access point to an artist or object. Other people need the digital image itself. They need to apply it to print or an electronic medium. They want to use it for more than just their own information. Two different delivery issues. Right now its easier to find an image than deliver a serviceable surrogate. We have a very long list of clients who potentially need to use images. From general public, to scholars, other institutions.

Would you describe yourself as a creator or users of digital images in the permanent collection? I am in charge of both. I hope to not create too many.

So – you don’t perceive yourself as a creator? No – I perceive myself as the person setting up all the standards and the new methodologies for other people to implement.

What do you use dig images for?

We use them to identify an object? (we?) For us to photograph it, we have to identify it. Let see, Me? I would use them to The slight difficulty I have is that the position I have now I’ve been wearing for a very short time. The other position I’ve done for 9 years. I have a different relationship with the objects. I don’t handle them as much as I used to for exhibitions or things like that.

First, its my job to fill in all those blanks. We’ve got to get images of the objects that we have. We want to use them for exhibitions, for education purposes.

Do you hand the images off to education? This week we have three big projects we are working on. The education dept. has about 150 objects that are going to be part of a multi media exhibition. 2/3 of the objects didn’t have a digital image. No picture. We had to create new pictures so that they could put them into an electronic form, which will go into the gallery. We have amico. We need to contribute 500 objects to a digital library. We give them text and metadata too. There are new acquisitions coming into the building that need to be documented (text and image).

Would you describe yourself as a conduit? You get the images to other people who actually use them? Yes. I think the role of this department is essentially yes, that role. We are providing the access. We are providing the structure.

Do you work with images alone or with others? Both – I have worked with them so long. This morning I found out someone needed photos about grids. I just happen to know which artists take pictures of grids. There’s no other way to find photos based on that description.

2 of 5 (4/5/18) When we create master files we lock them up.

How do you find out whether or not a particular image exists? Well, what we try to do is put them into embark. That’s the primary place for pictures of objects of the permanent collection.

Do you go straight to embark? If I think that it is there, yes. There are pictures that I have been managing and working with that are NOT part of permanent collection objects. What I do there is use some very ad hoc processes of either using clear folder names, …. I documented some of the installations. We thought that down the road we would want to attach larger wall images to the individual object images, and have the illustrated checklist shown as part of the installation shot. We have folders full of shows. I have either image access or some other off the shelf little thumbnail toolset that we’ll use to create folders of the pictures so we can see them laid out. There are thousands of those images floating around outside of embark. The way you would find them is to remember that they existed. There is no common look up.

Are there other experts in the museum you consult when you are looking for a digital image? Lots of other people have their own image stash. There are some 1500-2000 images that education has done on their own to create multimedia resources. They might have gotten them from the artist studios. Or went out on their own and got their resources.

For amico purposes, we went to education in search of images.

In that case, were the images than put into embark, since that’s where the amico files are generated from? Yeah – what we are trying to do is centralize all this. Since this is relatively new, this working together kinds of things, the idea is to pool all

What is good about the current system? In the case of multimedia education, the strength is that they are the ones creating the images, so they know the images are correct for a particular use. Weakness is that they can’t reuse any of these things, or if they do it is uncertain that they will match the next situation, and no one else can reuse them because they don’t know they exist.

There are a lot of the working methods to choose from. The education department has some very good ones. It is kind of futszy and particular for their own needs in terms of vetting the quality of the images based on the kinds of people they are working with. They have interns and layering of staffing so they have to go through this rigorous checking/approval process. If the person making the image can approve the quality, we don’t need all of that.

Let’s track, and understand the process… that makes sense. They are the area that has thought this through the most. Everyone just makes pictures and that’s it. Our servers are filled with images created this way.

Are images that exist every inadequate? Yes – that happens all the time. Some objects that come into the museum on loan and until there is a staff photographer or until our digitizing center is up and running there will be a lot of opportunity (access points) for people to put pictures into the system that are not of professional quality. People can just stick stuff in. All the curatorial assistants working on exhibitions scan their own pictures and put them into Embark. For years registration took snap shots and all of those were scanned and put into embark. “Something is better than nothing”. At least half of out collection system images are populated with really bad images. No standards, no source, no training, no copyright understanding. Just bad news. There is a good chance that one will find bad images in embark.

Do you ever modify unsatisfactory images? Adjust color, etc. Is this part of your job? Not central to my position, but I have done that. If it’s already bad, we’re not going to adjust it. What we need to do it create good pictures from the beginning. Having said that, I have adjusted images using every conceivable method. (He wants to be responsive to customers even though the entire collection isn’t digitized yet, and they aren’t all of high quality).

Open ended – is there anything else you think we want to know? We haven’t touched on the broader goal to make these images available to the general public. This will change the way people interact with the of museums. Even people that work here think they know the collection, but they don’t. When you see suddenly have access to the other 40 pictures, when you are only familiar with 25, its like finishing the story.

3 of 5 (4/5/18) Do you have a need to measure productivity and expenses? Let’s talk about managerial needs. Have you thought about the information you want at your fingertips? I am the one that needs to construct that logic. We create a lot of pictures, and we’ll be creating a lot more. What I need to know is to be able to quantify those aspects. We are also spending money on peoples needs outside of digitizing. There is still analog photography happening. It’s always been a mystery as to how much money we are spending for what purpose. We need to have tracking tools to understand who is using those images, and what the corresponding costs are for us to do it. We are going to grant proposals, there are outside constituencies that want to quantify what it costs. If we are asking for money to do these things, we have to be able to answer “for what”. How many people utilize the pictures? This is how much the project cost, and this is how much we have saved. Digital is cheaper, but it doesn’t sound like it when you hear it will cost $100,000 up front. I don’t know if the system will do it, but we need to this information.

What about assigning cost center codes to the images? (he showed me billing example). It doesn’t show “what” the $900 is for, beyond a note that says it is for multimedia education. We definitely need to be able to prove outcome based situations.

Does embark track cost centers? Yes – there are billing modules. There is a place for ….it is sort of two different things. The module we are building right now is the creation of this stuff, which is probably somewhat external from the “who asked for it”, but then there is the utilization of it after it is created. That is certainly, the requesting, etc. that is worth tracking. I don’t think that is part of the first iteration, but the ability for these surrogates to get attached some of that information is a need.

What do you see yourself doing when you sit down and fire up DAM? Photographers need to know what they are expected to be working on. We haven’t figured out yet with the workflow, especially when it comes to the naming structure, who will do the naming. The photographer? Or will someone else pick the exact file names in advance?

I am so sick of these piles of pages of the same print outs from embark, and we don’t have work orders for any of this stuff yet, so when someone asks “how are we doing with those 500 images?”, its like – well that’s 500 different answers. So, I have to ask Sheamus –“how are we doing?”, he can simply print out a list of what’s there with file names, there are 134 in the list so he knows he has that many done. That is the kind of information we need to know. We need to be able to track along and go to the system and pull it out. This is really great, I can see the workflow of what he’s done by looking at his “done list”. The pulling out if that information is important. You can see here, Susan writes an introduction “do we have transparencies of these or not?” ” We have some of this information in embark, but it is ….we have work-arounds. We have work-arounds to do all of this. We don’t have a system in place.

Give me an example of your day to day, non visionary, work - Transparencies, jpegs, or photography.

I would like to understand this part of your job better. Do you know what is on the schedule from week to week? Are you the one who is responsible for making sure the images get created? We are still wrestling with getting on the field, so to speak. This department is unique. It is like a mixed family. It is no traditional. This is pulling people from other departments, we are just constructing it and getting to know each other. We don’t know what our workflow is. We haven’t sat down and established the agenda. Over the last 3-4 months we’ve been trying to get a sense of what’s out there. This is true somewhat of the whole organization. It has grown so quickly.

Do you know what Sheamus is doing? He often works on images I don’t know about. He’s a nice guy and I have to stop him sometimes. “we are photographing the photography collection!”. That’s how this whole place works. Sometimes its just quicker to do ad hoc work. What we are really trying to do is professionalize it. We want to know the education department’s needs during the next 6 months. If we ask them and they can’t tell us ahead of time, they may be on their own. We can anticipate some of our work load. We know we will acquire 300-400 objects in a year. We know there is an annual report that requires images that is created once a year. The imaging coordinator is going to be coordinating that stuff. “this is what we want”. What she will do is let me and the photographers know on a weekly basis what the upcoming schedule is like. She will be the first line of defense to determine if we have enough resources.

Will she be the one to evaluate quality of images you already have in embark? I want that to be automatic, by the filename convention. You should know that right up front. Yes – she would be the one to discover that. We already have that system right now.

4 of 5 (4/5/18) Will she need a reporting interface of some kind? What we need is an electronic work order that shows who has ordered the work, and how far along it is. That is the second phase of the system. The first phase is “I don’t want to have to read this, and I we have so many thousands of times had to go back and revisit an image and rename them and the only way we can rename them is to retrieve them from the box itself and be sure the picture matches the object. We need to set up these relationships at creation time. It has to be somewhat infallible and secure. The photographer shouldn’t have to make all those decision; they should only have to make the pictures.

What percentage of your time will you be using the system – interacting with it. 20%. I still think there is a shifting of heads. Susan won’t always be available to answer question. Work will always come in the “side door”

We don’t plan to limit digital photography to the permanent collection. We want to identify best practices for those other uses and discover how the tool set could be utilized. True, the primary idea is to create images of the permanent collection.

What are your most important goals when creating digital images? Do it correctly so that it can be utilized by others. Use proper lighting conditions; make sure everything is square, etc.

You can make the picture, but moving it from the flash card to a permanent place is critical. There is no simple way to do that.

This is where we will have our most mistakes. There is a machine name. There is an interpretation that humans make between the image file and the picture of the object. That is full of problems. There is no …we don’t have a tool set to do that. The only thing we have is that when people first download, they rename the picture file. Everybody does it differently.

How do those get reconciled with Embark? What if I have a vase and I want to know what it looks like on all sides. Are the different images named? How does embark handle this? Embark has a grid and assumes that you are putting the detail images in the proper place. You are free to put a name in a date field, in that case its obvious you have messed up.

Files are named according to acquisition number. If there is more than one picture related to the object that we are up the creek. People kind of come up with their own conventions. Those names may make more sense when they are stored in a file structure with a meaningful file name.

If an object has two sides, and you want to pictures, are there two masters? Yes. Master references the image, not the object. There is a main record that describes what it looks like (e.g. a picture of a book). We probably aren’t going to go down that road. We will probably just have one picture that describes the whole thing. There are cases where there is a labeled object. Is the main object the image without the text? Its up to the person creating the image.

Documentation How do you keep track of where you are in the file creation process? We all do it different. We are about to professionalize a process that has been fairly ad hoc.

5 of 5 (4/5/18)