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Has this ever happened to you? It’s happened to me and always just at the wrong time too. I just knew that I had completed a picture some time in the past and wanted to recycle it for another job. I sometimes think my backup system is a write-only access medium.
Actually finding the pictures you want to use can be an absolute nightmare on any project. It can take two days or more to scour through all the CD-ROM collections of images you have. It’s almost easier to re-cut an image again from scratch sometimes.
For a small company, you simply cannot afford the overhead of someone whose job it is to just be a media librarian. I would suggest though that any company bigger than about 50 people should be prepared to set one person aside, at least part of the time to make sure that the asset base archives are properly organised and easily accessible. In fact I think this could very well be a full time job and someone with qualifications as a librarian or bibliographer would probably be well suited to the task.
For a small company, there is no alternative to putting together a computer-based solution instead of recruiting more staff. I still don’t have a properly automated system for this. That’s mostly because I cannot easily afford the downtime from generating revenue to be able to assemble the necessary bits. It is getting critical though and I have begun drawing up specifications for what facilities I need in a system like this. If I can get a little break between projects next year, I might be able to put together something that will do the job for the time being. It’s a big problem though. Not least the importation of the existing asset base. Check out a recent IEEE Multimedia journal for some interesting ideas on how a media base can be constructed and searched. The query mechanisms for finding pictures can be quite a challenge to implement.
Check out the whole list of Cliff's pithy tips for Web developers.
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