Survey of Best Practices in Digital Image Management

Report Highlights

The study presents the results of a survey of the image management policies of 64 organizations: colleges, museums, government agencies and private businesses, with data broken out separately for each. The exhaustive study covers a myriad of issues including: cataloging and metadata, marketing and distribution, use of image management software and services, revenues and sales strategy, promotional uses of images, use of images on social media sites such as Facebook and on image sharing sites such as Instagram and Pinterest.

The study also looks at the type of images maintained and how these images were acquired, through, for example, in-house scanning, outsourced scanning, digital creation at the outset, or purchased from a commercial vendor or other means. The report describes the type of digitization standards used, the use of crowdsourcing, spending on rights and licensing, methods of image retrieval available to end users, permissions protocols, discovery and access tools, digital preservation policies and more.