Survey of Best Practices in Digital Image Collection Management, 2016 Edition

The study presents data and commentary from 55 institutions that manage digital image collections, including museums, historical societies, botanic gardens, churches colleges and universities, government agencies and others. The study looks at a broad range of issues in cataloging, findability, marketing, revenue generation, technology use, rights, digitization, staffing, budgets, access, preservation, image collection building and many other issues of interest to administrators of large digital image collections. Just a few of the report’s many findings are that: • Only 9.1% of the institutions sampled acquire images from imaging vendors; mostly this was done by college and university collections in the United States. • 10% of the institutions sampled had annual revenues from image sales and licensing that exceeded $50,000. • No organization in the sample chose outsourced vendor scanning as their primary means of building their collections though 14.55% chose it second and 12.73% ranked it third • 43.64% of those sampled use in house developed authority files. Government agencies and “other non-profits” were the most likely to use in house developed authority files while colleges and universities were the least likely. • Google Forms was used occasionally by only 3.64% of survey participants for crowdsourcing though 14.55% of the sample felt that they might use it for this purpose in the future. • More than 64% of organizations with fewer than 70 employees provided access to their digital image collections through Facebook. • We asked the sample to indicate which users that they permit to retrieve image files, first asking about all users. 32.73% allow all users to retrieve image files. This was most common among colleges and universities, of which 53.85% allowed it. • 14.55% were using replication in their preservation policies, including 29.41% of non-US organizations in the sample.