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Digitization Coordination�at The Yale Peabody Museum

Nelson Rios

Head of Biodiversity of Informatics Research, Information Science

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Patrick Sweeney

Senior Collections Manager, Division of Botany

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10 Divisions

14 Collections

14+ Million Specimens and Artifacts

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Digitization Activity

Digital Media

(images, videos & documents)

Cumulative growth

Annual growth

Another 110K images awaiting ingest from TCNs

951,352 Images

27 TB

2D

5,261 Assets

17 TB

3D

    • Transcription
    • Georeferencing
    • Annotation
    • Imaging

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Importance

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  • Digitization is valued by YPM from Director to Curators to staff and plays a central role in the activities of each division�
  • At University level, leadership, from the highest level, values digitization and mobilization

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Importance - University level

  • Open Access Policy
  • Cultural Heritage Information Technology (CHIT) partnership at Yale
    • Sponsored by Vice-Provost for Collections and Scholarly Communications (Susan Gibbons)
    • Museums, Libraries, and ITS
    • Cross Collections Discovery platform - LUX
    • Shared metadata framework (Linked Data model, based on LinkedArt/CIDOC-CRM)

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Coordination - YPM

  • No overarching strategy at YPM

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  • Informal, but shared data management through Collection Management Systems (EMu) and Digital Asset Management Systems (Preservica & NetX)�
  • Priorities set by divisions, often driven by grant funding (e.g., NSF - ADBC & Capacity, ILMS)�
  • During pandemic, some remote work focused on georeferencing, which was centralized

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Coordination - University level

  • Cultural Heritage Information Technology (CHIT) partnership at Yale�
  • Mellon grant for metadata reconciliation across Yale cultural heritage collections�
  • LUX�
  • IIIF, Preservica, NetX

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Challenges to coordination

  • cultural/social issues
    • giving up autonomy
    • aligning goals
    • other priorities
    • unfunded mandates
  • lack of centralized funding
    • priorities set by grants, grants clade specific
  • technical
    • objects variable across collection
    • different metadata standards
    • expertise often divisionally specific
    • equipment unevenly distributed (bottlenecks)

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Benefits of coordination

  • economies of scale
    • e.g., georeferencing, shared equipment
  • shared standards
    • picklists & taxonomies, sharing duplicates, interoperability
  • shared workflows
  • shared expertise
  • shared training
  • shared staff
  • shared informatics infrastructure

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…Benefits of coordination

  • Motivations for digitization surface at a global level
    • addressing pressing questions & concerns (pandemics, emergency response, repatriation)

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