John Jones:
Image Archiving at the Smithsonian
On a rainy afternoon in Washington, D.C., John Jones leans back in his chair in an office populated with Macs and watches digital images fly by on one of the displays. “The Macs are doing a lot of work while I’m talking on the phone,” he chuckles softly. “It’s an important part of our approach to archiving.”
Jones began managing images for the Smithsonian Institution when, in 1989, he joined the museum after graduate school to help catalog and preserve the work of Peter A. Juley.
From 1896 to 1975, Juley and his son, Paul, operated the largest and most respected fine arts photography studio in New York City. They photographed the work and portraits of almost every major American artist including Winslow Homer, George Innes, Thomas Eakins, Grant Wood and Hans Hoffman. The collection of 127,000 images constitutes a sort of mini-history of American art.
Today, as chief image technologist in the Smithsonian Office of Imaging and Photographic Services, Jones assists in the preservation of more than two million pieces of photographic film, glass plates and digital images for the three main museums at the Smithsonian: the Air and Space Museum, Museum of Natural History and Museum of American History. All with Macs, Mac OS X, Xserve and Xserve RAID.
Digital Preservation
“We know how to keep film for a thousand years,” Jones says in a pleasant Virginia drawl. “We have a cold storage vault that will keep color negative film for at least 500 years. There is science for that. You handle film with white gloves. You don’t put it near fluids. You don’t use film in certain environments. But now that we do more digital original photography,” Jones adds, “it’s crucial that we know how to preserve digital images for the long term.”
When Jones joined the Juley project, he discovered that a database of images had been written and stored on an old mainframe computer from the 1970s. “In order to get any information about what we were doing, I had to submit a request for a report. That request had to go over to another person who would put it into a computerese request and that request would go to the operators who knew how to put this request into the computer and a couple of weeks later I would receive two three-inch binders of records that included the answer to my question. And if it happened that I had phrased the question wrong, I started the process again.”
Image Archiving
To manage the huge photographic resources for the three museums today, Jones developed an image archiving system using FileMaker Pro as the database, Macs with Xserve and Xserve RAID storage as image servers, Lasso software from Blueworld and AppleScript as a helping hand.
“We know how to keep film for a thousand years. There is science for that. But it’s crucial that we know how to preserve digital images for the long term.”
“Our production at some point touches digital in almost everything we do,” says Jones, “so our digital capabilities have been growing progressively over the last five years. Now we’re shooting a lot more digital originals, so having an efficient image archiving and retrieval system is of paramount importance to us.”
The Xserve and Xserve RAID units are on public display in the exhibit at the Museum of American History because they demonstrate the latest in digital printing technology.
“But I also moved the image archiving department up there,” Jones says, “because Xserve with Xserve RAID is such an incredible piece of equipment. It gives you up to 2.5 terabytes of storage per unit and it really breaks a price/performance barrier that we haven’t seen in this type of storage device before. And it’s a tremendous boost to our ability to store and retrieve images.”
Web-Accessible Database
Photographers catalog, store and retrieve images using the web-accessible database. “Through a web interface,” says Jones, “photographers select what type of object they have — film, digital original or QuickTime movie, for instance — and the database attaches a unique number to that object so we can find it later on. Then, on another web screen, users fill out key information about that object, including the name of the photographer, a brief description of the image and other details. That goes into a FileMaker database.
