Museums

Piction’s award winning Museum Digital Asset Warehouse is a purpose built solution for the cultural institution sector. We have spent many years working with institutions to ensure our platform addresses institutional core requirements of:

• Digital Asset Management

• Integration with key systems

• Metadata Management

• Museum specific Workflow

• Content Distribution

Digital Asset Management

Centralised repository for all collections and non-collections based digital resources including object photography, exhibition and installation photography, video and audio archives, event images and videography and publications. We make life simple for each department in the museum to manage their specific digital content. Some key features for Musem’s include:

• Management of archival masters vs working masters.
• Support for many types of digital media including :
  • Images (DNG, RAW, TIFF, JPEG, GIF, PNG, PSD, EPS).
  • Video (MP4, MOV, WMV, AVI, FLV).
  • Audio (MP3, WAV, AAC).
  • Document (DOC, PPT, INDD,HTML).
• Automatic transformations.
  • Generate image derivatives such as thumbnails, web preview, low quality formats on ingestion or on the fly.
  • Watermark images and videos.
  • Create video snippets based on time codes.
  • Create cover thumbnail from a specific frame in video.
• Job scheduler to automate ingestion of digital media.

Integration

Piction integrates with key museum systems including Collection Management Systems, Web Content Management Systems, Library Systems, Membership and Financial Systems. Piction provides many methods for integrating with systems ranging from out of the box data mapping through web services and database level APIs. We have integrated with systems such as:

• Collection Management Systems – TMS, MIMSY, KeEMU, Vernon, ReDiscovery
• Web Content Management Systems – Drupal, WordPress, Zend, Cake, .NET, Django
• Other systems – Raiser’s Edge, SAP, Oracle Financials

Metadata Management

The Piction metadata engine supports many standards including Dublin core, XMP, EXIF, IPTC, CDWA, and VRA. More importantly, institutions are able to dynamically create their own schemata and mix with other standards. We support many metadata types including variable characters, dates, keywords, spatial, numeric, scientific, multimedia and direct query links. Additionally, we support museum specific metadata such as accession number, repeating fields, and object relationships types.

Museum Specific Workflows

Piction’s workflow engine provides significant benefit, which enhances the museum’s digital workflow. Through the many years of working with museums, we have templates that support core workflows for museums including:

• Object photography request
• Rights clearances
• Event Photography request
• External Media Asset request

These supported workflows are completely end to end and are designed to span multiple sections in a Museum. Each section involved within the workflow have their own dashboard which enable a view of assigned tasks and due dates.

Content Distribution

With Piction, museums are able to distribute content of any type to different channels and easily publish content to the web, mobile applications, or social media. Piction can distribute the correct data set and digital file type. We also provide an overarching method for relating disparate sets of data for publication.