Tips, Tools, and Workflows for Managing Digital Content

The Visual Resources Association Foundation (VRAF) is pleased to announce that registration is now live for Tips, Tools, and Workflows for Managing Digital Content, to be held on April 28, 2017. This workshop is co-hosted by the Boatwright Memorial Library at the University of Richmond and the Library of Virginia, and will be held at the University of Richmond—Downtown, with the option to tour the nearby Library of Virginia as well.  This opportunity is open to cultural heritage professionals, the information and educational communities, and to anyone interested in launching or improving their own digital project. Tips, Tools, and Workflows for Managing Digital Content is one of four workshops being offered in the second year of the VRAF Regional Workshop Program.  The VRAF is grateful to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation for their continued support of this exciting opportunity to partner with cultural heritage and educational institutions.

Whether you’re just starting to envision a digital project, or are experiencing challenges with an existing one, a thorough understanding of best practices is essential to a successful outcome. This day-long workshop will provide you with the background and tools to effectively organize, catalogue, and distribute your institution’s digital assets by introducing you to the core concepts of managing digital content.  Participants will receive an overview of metadata standards, as well as how to manage, share, and publish digital content.

Topics covered will include:

• Best practices for metadata cataloging, crosswalks and controlled vocabularies; Linked Open Data (LOD), Resource Description Format (RDF), International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) and other preservation metadata and authoritative taxonomies; data migration; and the importance of metadata for search and discovery.
• Workflows for successfully managing collaborative digital projects, including intellectual property and rights assessments, content distribution, and long-term archival storage.
• Content distribution and digital delivery platforms.
• Standards for digital capture, including images, audio, video and other ISO formats.
• Leveraging collaboration tools
• The pros and cons of crowdsourcing.
• Assessing rights and reproductions, and other copyright considerations that may impact digital distribution.

Tips, Tools, and Workflows for Managing Digital Content will be taught by Shyam Oberoi. Shyam is the Director of Technology and Digital Media at the Dallas Museum of Art, and oversees the museum's IT, website, multimedia production and application development, including the museum’s first mobile app.  He is currently managing a multi-year project to comprehensively digitize every object in the DMA’s collection, and publish the entire collection online with extended scholarly content.  Before joining the DMA, Shyam worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as the General Manager of Collections Information Systems, where he oversaw a team responsible for the archiving, cataloging, licensing and digital content distribution for the museum’s 2 million works of art.  Notable projects there included the creation of Open Access for Scholarly Content (OASC), a platform for providing over 400,000 high-resolution digital images of public domain works.  Shyam is a frequent presenter at museum and technology conferences, including SXSW, American Alliance of Museums, and Museums and the Web, and has led a number of cross-institutional collaborative technology projects, most recently Building for Engagement: Participation at Scale in Art Museums funded by a National Leadership Grant from the IMLS.  He has a B.A. in Computer Science from Manhattan College, and an M.A. in English from New York University.

To register for Tips, Tools, and Workflows for Managing Digital Content and to learn more about the workshop, visit https://tinyurl.com/zkpzntz. The fee for this day-long workshop is $125. If you have questions about registration, feel free to contact Betha Whitlow, VRAF Director, bwhitlow@wustl.edu. For questions about the venue, please contact Jeannine Keefer, Boatwright Memorial Library, University of Richmond at jkeefer@richmond.edu.