Project Publications
Please visit our publications page to download various publications from our project activities. The final report is now available there.

Project Purpose
This project was designed to uncover the state of digital imaging practices at museums, archives and libraries and to design techniques for evaluating these systems. It included the following components:

Project Description
Many museums, archives, and libraries are engaged in direct digital image capture of cultural heritage. Many more are considering the move. Artifacts to be imaged in this way encompass works on paper, paintings, manuscripts, sculptures, photographs, and many others. This project concentrates on practices of digital photography as they are used for reproducing and documenting paintings and 3D works.

Within the field there is a range of technology used for digital image capture, a range of operator expertise and many potential final destinations of the digital images. Some systems use re-purposed components. Some photographers are new to digital technologies and the majority of equipment and software are fairly new to the market. As a consequence of all these factors, there is a wide range of quality found within and between image databases.

This research project has the goal of determining the status of direct digital imaging practices as used in artwork reproduction workflows of American institutions. The benchmarking includes a survey, on-site case studies documenting current workflows, and a new test method to quantify image quality.

The online survey was launched in October, 2003 and took its last response at the end of September 2004. A total of 52 American institutions completed the survey. From the list of respondents, six institutions were selected for on-site studies. Each was visited by members of the research team several times.