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 ========================================================= Important Subscriber Information: The Museum-L FAQ file is located at http://www.finalchapter.com/museum-l-faq/ . You may obtain detailed information about the listserv commands by sending a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "help" (without the quotes). If you decide to leave Museum-L, please send a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "Signoff Museum-L" (without the quotes).