digital asset management inside the City of Toronto #TOcouncil #opengov



The Digital Asset Library is a an application for managing images inside the City of Toronto


Recently, David Eaves' post on the future of academic research got me thinking again about the benefits of openness and collaboration.  Eaves praises a British Columbia scientist, Rosie Redfield, for blogging her way through an ongoing experiment.  In the process, she's encouraged international feedback and provided rare insight into her thought processes as a scientist.  Redfield stands out because she is breaking with protective scholarly publishing traditions that dampen collaboration. 


While I'm not an academic or a scientist, I still believe there is real value in sharing ongoing updates about City of Toronto projects related to my area of practice, information management.  In the last year, I've taken on a new project which has added some significant new responsibilities.  I've still been writing, but mostly for an intranet blog at the City of Toronto.  Eaves' post was a good prompting to get back to regular posts to the wider world as well.

Since March of this year, I've been managing the implementation of a digital asset management system within two divisions, City Clerk's Office and City Planning.  The project is designed to enable better internal management and reuse of graphic assets, including photographs, designs and logos.  The origins of the project were in the City Clerk's Office, Protocol section, which has a small photo/video unit documenting City of Toronto events, ceremonies and official visits.  The manager of this unit recognized that it was becoming more difficult to manage and find their content internally.  From there, she built relationships with other units that had a similar interest in image management and developed an RFP.  I came on board to assist in developing the required metadata profiles.  When the existing project manager needed to return full time to her previous position, I applied to take over the project.

Over the last year, we’ve made very good progress getting a handle on better management and reuse of images around the City of Toronto.  When I began my secondment, storing images on a shared drive was often the only option available to staff.  Sharing photos meant asking coworkers, making phone calls, exchanging emails, sending attachments (under 10MB please) and burning CDs.  We haven’t eliminated the need for these ad hoc approaches (yet), but we have reduced them.  Participating groups now have a shared internal web tool for image storage, sharing and search. We’re well on our way towards a better, more comprehensive model of image management. 

We are now providing participating staff with guidance and tools to help manage their own content.  The Digital Asset Library, as we branded it, is being used consistently by four units in City Clerk’s and City Planning to upload and share final images, graphics and designs.  It is important to note that these assets haven’t just been uploaded – they’ve also been tagged with crucial metadata that will enable us to find, reuse, report on and manage our content in ways that were not previously possible or easy.  We’ve made a huge step forward in collaboration and sharing resources. Check out our numbers below – pretty good considering we’ve only been live since July 25th.

Digital Asset Library by the numbers (as of Dec 13th):

• Participating units: 4
• Locations where staff training took place: 8
• Registered users: 60
• Searches: 1432 queries
• Downloads: 5664 files

Content uploaded:

City Clerk’s Office

• Protocol Photo Video unit: 9 484 files
• Information Production (Design, Pre-Press and Print): 2 313 files
• Archives: 10 312 files

City Planning

• Urban Design, Graphics & Visualization: 814 files

Total files uploaded: 22 923 files

Next post: Managing Images in 2012