Phase One has launched a survey of existing Expression Media and iView users.  If you’d like to have some input on the future of the product, take a moment to fill out the short survey.

Writing the filename into the IPTC title field is a really useful practice. It preserves the name in a place that’s accessible, and likely to survive any kind of renaming I typically use it for one of three reasons.

I like to write the name in the title field of all my images after they get their permanent name in the ingestion process. That way, if a client renames the file and asks for the original, I have a breadcrumb trail back tp the original.  All I need to do is look in the metadata of the renamed file.

Another reason to do this is that you are using a service of some kind that needs the files renamed. Pictage is a popular wedding print service that requires files to be renamed or upload.

And finally (and the real reason I made the script), you might want to rename files if your file renaming convention changes. When I started in digital, I used several different naming conventions before I settled on the one I use and promote now (Krogh_YYMMDD_####.ext).  I’ve been working on the deep archive for a project, and decided it was time to rename the older files.  But I wanted to keep the old name, in case someone might refer to the file this way.

I wanted to do this work in Expression Media 2, since that’s the program that manages my legacy archive. There is an existing script for iView, and I’ve made one available free for Bridge here.

This movie shows how the script works.  If you are interested, it sells for $9.99.  Available here.

Here’s another item I picked up at the NDIPP partners meeting – a report by some pretty heavy organizations about the economics of digital preservation.

The organizations included: U.S. National Science Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the U.S. Library of Congress, the U.K. Joint Information Systems Committee, the Electronic Records Archives Program of the National Archives and Records Administration, and the Council on Library and Information Resources.

PDF linked here, for your reading pleasure.

Glossary of the report after the jump

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I spent several days last week at the NDIIP partners meeting.  This is the Library of Congress program that supplied much of the dpBestflow funding. The groups is really an exceptional one, including people from academia, cultural heritage institutions, trade groups and  some companies,  Here are a few of the items I bookmarked from the program.

The NDIIPP website.

THATcamp – The Humanities And Technology unconference (like O’Reilly’s FOO Camp).  This is a yearly event where humanists and technologists work together. They happen all around the world.

Digital Pioneer Dan Gilmore has a blog on Salon.com

Serious 3-D geekery at the Metaverse Roadmap.

Andrew Turner (whom I met at the Foo Camp 2008) spoke about the future of geospatial data integration with digital collections. He’s now CTO of Fortius One.

Cathy Marshall from Microsoft did a hilarious and enlightening talk about personal archiving.

Pergamum is an energy-efficient file storage protocol that uses disks rather than tape.  The disks spend most of their time at rest, and spin up periodically to self-test.

Andrew Maltz spoke about The Digital Dilemma, an ongoing project from AMPAS (the Oscars people) that looks at the issues of archiving motion picture data. They have some great research to be published soon, under their NDIIPP award.

David Ferriero, Archivist of the US, gave a great presentation.  He’s both smart and funny. Here’s his blog.

I also got to reconnect with Howard Besser from NYU film school. I met him while I was at the archiving conference in Den Haag. Howard’s an unbelievably productive guy, working in motion image preservation.

The IPTC released the new Extended Schema two years ago.  Photoshop CS5 and Lightroom 3 support the schema natively, but users of CS3 and CS4 can’t read the new fields. Last week, new panels were released that add this capability to these older versions of Photoshop.

Download the toolkit here.

New from John Beardsworth, a plug-in that lets you copy the metadata from one file to another one of the same name (From a JPEG to a NEF for instance).  John’s hard at work on Lightroom Plug-ins, which is good for people who want to use the program and need extensions to the file or metadata handling capabilities.

From his blog:

My latest plug-in Syncomatic is uploaded and available.  Syncomatic is not a plug-in everyone will need but is designed for circumstances where you need to copy the metadata between two groups of files and can use the filenames to match up pairs of images. So imagine you have lots of raw files with metadata, and TIFs of JPEGs whose metadata should match the raw files from which they were created. Syncomatic simply runs through the two groups of pictures and makes the metadata of 1234.jpg the same as 1234.raw, makes 6789.jpg match 6789.raw…..

Here’s the last post about the new Camera Scanning content on dpBestflow. Richard Anderson outlined how he used the process to digitize 20 years of work for Center Stage in Baltimore. Richard outlines the strategy behind the project, and then Matthew takes you through the workflow. To see the whole page, click here.

Here’s Richard’s part:

In this movie for dpBestflow, we further examine camera scan workflow for black and white film. This workflow outlines the optimization of a single image, including custom use of the curve, dust removal, local corrections, and more. You can go to the whole page here.

This movie from the dpBestflow website shows how to batch-adjust black and white negatives from camera scans.  You can read the whole page here.

Camera Scans for B&W Negatives from ASMP dpBestflow on Vimeo.

We’ve added quite a bit of material n the dpBestflow website describing the process of Camera Scanning (using a digital camera as a scanner for film originals). There are two pages that have been created. the first is a Best Practice page that outlines what the choices are for hardware, as well as the software for image manipulation.

The second page is in the Workflow section, and describes a case study from Richard Anderson’s studio.  He worked with his production assistant Matthew Yake to digitize more than 50,000 images from 20 years of work for Center Stage in Baltimore. the page describes the project approach and details.