10/21/99besser--sims affiliates 1 social and economic implications of the production, distribution,...

10/21/99Besser--SIMS Affiliates1

Social and Economic Implications of the Production, Distribution, and

Usage of Image Data

Howard Besser

Associate Professor

UCLA School of Education & Information

http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard/

http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Imaging/Databases/1998mellon


The UCB Mellon Grant Studying MESL-

• The MESL Project• The Mellon-Funded Studies

– Comparing User Interfaces

– Museum Study

– University Delivery Study

– Faculty User Study

– Slide Library

• The Study’s Conclusions


The Museum Educational Site Licensing Project (MESL)

• Distribution of museum images and metadata to university community

• Approximately 10,000 image set from 7 museums

• Identical data set mounted locally at each of the 7 universities

• Voluntary participation, each institution paying own way, Getty paying for coordination and meetings


Samples from a MESL Site


Creating New Image Sets (Views)


Teaching Tools


The UCB Mellon Grant Studying MESL

• Grant Team• The Studies

– (Comparing User Interfaces)

– (Comparing Search Discrepancies)

– (Assessing Museum Costs)

– University Delivery Study

– Slide Library Costs

– Slide Circulation Patterns

– Faculty User Study

• Summary & Conclusions


UCB Mellon Grant Research Team

• Howard Besser, UCB Faculty

• Bob Yamashita, CSU Faculty

• Rosalie Lack, SIMS graduate student

• Joanne Miller, SIMS graduate student

• Lena Stebley, SJSU graduate student


UCB Mellon Grant Consultants

• Christie Stephenson, NYU Librarian for Digital Initiatives

• Beth Sandore, UIUC Library Digital Initiatives Coordinator

• Christine Sundt, UO Slide Curator

• ...assistance from MESL participants and staff


UCB Mellon Grant Advisory Board

• Gary Marchionini, Professor of Information Science, Univ of Maryland

• Marvin Sirbu, Professor of Economics, Carnegie-Mellon Univ

• Malcolm Getz, Professor of Economics, Vanderbilt

• Margaret Radin, Professor of Law, Stanford University

• Clifford Lynch, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information


The UCB Mellon Grant-

• (Comparing MESL User Interfaces)

• (Comparing MESL Search Discrepancies)

• (Assessing Museum Costs)

• Assessing University Costs

• Assessing Costs of Slide Libraries

• Examining Faculty & Student Use & Usefullness


Comparing User Interfaces

• Presentation and layout

• Search options

• Image display and labeling


Cost Assessment Methodology

• MESL Technical Report Questionnaire– primarily voluntary self-reporting

• Clarifications and follow-up questions from Berkeley researchers

• Data Analysis by Berkeley researchers


Museum Cost Centers

• Content Selection

• Image Preparation

• Image Transmission

• Text/Data Preparation

• Text/Data Transmission


University Digital Distribution Cost Centers

• Image Preparation

• Structured Data

• Unstructured Data

• Functionality

• Security

• Log Files • Outreach • Usage Training • Technical

Development


Univ Cost Cntr Diagram


Slide Library Cost Centers

• Acquisition

• Capture (equipment)

• Data (gathering information)

• Mounting (data on slide, catalog record)

• Delivery (controlling access and reshelving)

• Maintenance


Examining Faculty & Student Use & Usefulness

• What Faculty Do with Digital Images

• Major Issues for Faculty

• Faculty Concerns about teaching with Digital Images

• Faculty Concerns about Image Quality and Metadata


Data Examples from University Study-


Overall Time SpentH

ours

Wor

ked

Hou

rs W

orke

d

010002000300040005000600070008000

Year 12938151819233120368427681826Year 221861373847301635151184442AmericanColumbiaCornellIllinoisMarylandMichiganVirginia


Image Preparation

0100200300400500600

Year 180 166 166 90 64 99 80Year 280 208 42 40 48 18 30AmericanColumbiaCornell IllinoisMarylandMichiganVirginia

Hou

rs W

orke

d


Structured Data Preparation

0100200300400500600

Year 1200 166 416 100352.2 69 90Year 2140 208 42 50352.2 59 30AmericanColumbiaCornell IllinoisMarylandMichiganVirginia


Functionality

0200400600800100012001400160018002000

Year 1 1280 42 458 104575.41792150Year 2 920 208 229 208 832 262 0AmericanColumbiaCornell IllinoisMarylandMichiganVirginia


Average Cost per University

YEAR 1—AveragesYEAR 2—AveragesCost Center Personnel CostsPersonnel CostsImage Preparation $2,692.00 $1,324.00Structured DataPreparation $2,978.00 $2,318.00Unstructured DataPreparation $2,560.00 $1,736.67Functionality $24,497.20 $8,955.00Security $114.40 $4,586.40Log Files $1,665.00 $1,745.00Outreach $3,039.83 $1,852.50Usage Training $2,872.00 $2,122.33TechnicalDevelopment $4,190.67 $3,444.50TOTAL $44,609.10 $28,084.40


University Infrastructure Costs

• High speed networks

• Classroom projection

• Workstation labs

• Workstations

• Costs must be spread across the entire campus


Some General Observations: Do costs diminish in subsequent years?

• Technology is changing so fast that development done just a year before can be obsolete

• Costs increase in 2nd year both because year #1 deployment exposed all the interesting things that one might like to do, and because increased size and use necessitated increased security

• One site estimated that their lower year #2 costs were 60% due to learning curve and 40% due to availability of better (imaging) software


Findings -


Digital Distribution is:

• Good for individual usage

• Problematic for group viewing


Content Issues

• Selection will be museum-driven (MESL content selection won’t scale up)

• Sufficient critical mass?

• All the appropriate images needed to teach?

• Transparent integration with locally-mounted images and those from other sources?


• Metadata posed more of a problem than images– Mapping fields– Different vocabularies

Integration of records from different museums


Query and Use

• Users will want more than just query options

• Centralized development of searching, user interface, and tools is much more cost effective than than local development

• Local development can be more quickly responsive to local needs


Storage & Bandwidth

• Technological advances make this less of an impediment

• May still cause bottlenecks in centralized delivery systems


Security

• Universities can exercise sufficient control over initial access to image

• Museums may want more sophisticated protection to prevent copying and reposting


University Issues

• More technology resources for Humanities departments

• Faculty need incentives to teach with digital images

• Resources and tools are needed to making teaching with digital images less difficult

• Universities need to make digital projects a priority and need to find funding to carry them out


Universities and Museums

• MESL showed that universities and museums have common interests in providing images and metadata to users

• Will need to address issues arising when faculty produce new information built on museum information– enhanced content flowing back to the museum– distribution of faculty added-value products


New Audiences

• Potential for outreach to new constituencies within the university community, and new communities outside the university

• New audiences may have very different types of needs– most audiences won’t be able to decipher curatorial

language– K-12 audiences will need added value of thematic

arrangements


Copyright Issues

• In flux

• Too many unknowns

• Very problematic for 20th century works


Value of Museum Info to Universities

• Likely more in authoritative metadata than in images alone


Analog Slide Libraries+

• Perform valuable services that a centrally-supplied source reliably can’t

• Customized for local needs (coverage, metadata, vocabulary)

• Rapid response to local needs

• Departmentally funded (in contrast to likely funding of centrally-supplied information)

• Average size - 280,000 images


Coexistence of Analog and Digital• Many years before we reach a critical mass in digital

form• Many more years before we’ll have the right images

to teach with• Instructors will draw on both slide libraries and

digital collections• But how will universities financially support both?• Responsibility for digital collections is likely to rest

within a campuswide unit (not a departmental one)


Centralized delivery to users& local mounting

• How to transparently integrate both?


Costs• Digital distribution under MESL was expensive

• Costs will decline from learning curves and new technological tools

• Cost will increase with each change to new technologies

• Per-image infrastructure costs will decline as fixed costs are spread over a larger number of images

• New costs will arise as the scope of the project increases

– security becomes more of an issue

• Digital distribution has the potential to reach far more potential users than an analog system


Conflicting Needs

• University administrators want to control costs; faculty want to ensure continued access to the images around which they build curricula

• Museum delivery systems will need an ongoing revenue stream


Similar Needs

• Both universities and museums own content

• Both universities and museums extensively use images in carrying out their mission

• Universities and museums have more in common than differences


Future Research

• Examine real operational systems

• How to integrate information from a remote source with locally mounted information

• What do faculty need in order to begin widespread teaching with digital images?

• How will teaching change as digital image resources become more available?

• What kind of additional tools will users need?

• How will the different vocabularies used by museums be integrated for user access?

• What standards will be needed, and how will the right parties be brought together?

• Pedagogy of using online resources


Some Concluding Remarks on the Study

• Authoritative museum information has great value to universities

• University infrastructure costs for image delivery are very large, and cannot be justified solely for cultural heritage

• Greatest savings for universities are likely to come from digital delivery of authoritative descriptive information about the image

• The university market does not have enough resources to financially sustain the costs of a museum consortium’s digital distribution system, and such a system must be subsidized by the museums or from external sources.


Further Study questions

• Will digital distribution replace slide libraries?

• Will target groups use digitally distributed images?

• Who in the University will contract for digital image distribution rights?


Observations about Study Design

• Studying prototypes, experiments, early stage, etc. is very difficult– staff overworked and touchy

– who performs what function is ad hoc

– does not really resemble a production environment

• Studying complex and/or hetrogenous organizations creates problems– units of measurement

– parallel workflows

• Studying Digital Libraries will be difficult (at least in the early stages -- when it’s most needed)


Social and Economic Implications of the Production, Distribution, and

Usage of Image Data

• http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Imaging/Databases/1998mellon• Spring 1999 special issue of Visual Resources• or order print copy from:

– UC Berkeley Mellon Grant

– Howard Besser

– School of Information Mgmt & Systems

– UC Berkeley, CA 94720-4600

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