Hello,

I work in an art historical digitization project for Italian art
photography. Our current digital collection consists of some 20,000
digital images in TIF format (master files ca. 150 MB, working files ca.
25 MB). We want to store these files with a university computer center
who works as a service provider for long term preservation. 

I need some information on the following topics:

- Static or dynamic folders for long term preservation: 
Currently we use dynamic folders which are filled with digital images
sorted by the first 4 digits of the file name. That means, every time we
scan an image it is put into a folder according to the first 4 digits of
the file name. The file name is the image inventary number which is
different from the negative number (not the best solution, but we cannot
change this). As we scan the photographs in sets sorted by the negative
numbers, we can never say that a folder is closed as the file names are
sorted according to the inventory number. 
We were told that this might create problems for long term preservation
and that we should static folders, i.e. folders that are closed and
sealed at a certain time or at a certain number of image files instead
of dynamic folders. Any thoughts or experiences?  

- Check sums: 
We use a freeware product (md5) to create check sums in order to see if
the image files are currupted during the transport or over time. Is it
better to create an individual check sum for each image file or for all
image files in a folder? We can retrieve the individual checksums from
the file check sum but it takes some time. On the other hand it is
faster to create check sums for a folder instead of for individual
files.

- Meta data for images: We want to archive descriptive meta data
together with the images. We plan to use plain XML files that contain
data taken from HiDA-MIDAS, our collection management system. Would it
make sense to create some kind of cross walk to standards such as Dublin
Core? How much effort does it take? Has anybody done this?

- Other things you can think of and we didn't 

We do this for the first time, so any thoughts and information is
appreciated.

Best regards,
Werner Schweibenz

German Institute for Art History in Florence
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz 
Max-Planck-Institut
via Giuseppe Giusti, 44
I-50121 Firenze

phone: 0039-055-24911-39
fax:   0039-055-24911-55

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