MCN2015

The Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona is one of the preeminent research and exhibition centers for photography in the world. It has an active program to digitize its fine print collection of more than 150,000 items, as well as archival holdings in excess of 5,000,000 items. Its digital content now comprises more than 17TB of archival images, audio, and video files, and is growing at the rate of more than 2TB a year.

Creating, managing, storing, and exposing its digital collections has proved challenging. As part of a change in reporting relationships, the Center has had to look to the central IT organization to help it rearchitecture how it does its business of digital asset creation and management.The presentation will focus on how the Center has been moving its assets from locally hosted storage to a combination of local and cloud-based vendors, including Amazon and others. We will try to lay out the full problem set and explain how the Center is using and planning to use cloud-based services to meet its organizational and collection management goals in service of the University and its customers.

We will look at how the Center addressed a number of issues:content discovery -- how much do we really have content management -- do we know where your resources are and how objects related to each other and the collection vendor selection considerations -- what did the Center need from a vendor? What can you do yourself, what resources are necessary, and what did the Center have done for it? operationalizing the entire process -- we will show how the Center has created workflows that encompass all of these aspects on the basis of digitizing items from the Center's Edward Weston archivecost containment and management -- getting to real costs and long(er) term strategies in using local and cloud-based vendors and rethinking file formats for immediate and archival use