Business Challenge:
Provide cataloging to facilitate Web access for clients seeking to purchase digital reproductions from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's premiere collections.

Business Team:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has collected nearly three million works of art from all points of the compass, from ancient through modern times. Ranging from American Decorative Arts and American Paintings and Sculpture to Asian Art, Egyptian Art and Islamic Art, the Met's collection represents some of the finest artworks that the world has to offer. The Met Museum of Art was founded in 1870 by a group of American citizens - businessmen and financiers as well as leading artists and thinkers of the day - who wanted to create a museum to bring art and art education to the American people. The paintings collections began in that year when three private European collections, 174 paintings in all, came to the museum. Today, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is an encyclopedia of world art. Every culture from every part of the world, from Florence, Italy, to Papua, New Guinea, from the earliest times to the present, and in every medium, is represented.

Electronic Scriptorium, Ltd. solves complex information management and data conversion problems for leading media companies, e-commerce initiatives, museums, libraries and government agencies. In a business association unique to Scriptorium, cloistered monks underpin a highly educated workforce that meets exacting standards of quality and accuracy. Scriptorium provides expertise in content creation for online product catalogs, digital photography, digital photo cataloging, USMARC record cataloging and XML document conversion.

Technical Approach:
The Met has long held the foremost collection of world-class art with over 2,900,000 paintings, sculpture, and artifacts in its holdings. As an institution devoted both to great works of art and to civic education, the Met strives to take advantage of emerging technologies to reach its growing world audience. The Met's website initiative is just one example of its determination to provide online access to the database containing its holdings. When complete, the database will provide a comprehensive record of the Met's collections that will be available to Met staff and the public through the Internet as well as other electronic media. Digital image requests will be submitted and fulfilled online in a variety of formats specified by clients. High-resolution image files will be delivered directly to the user's desktop computer.

The manual cataloging effort needed to describe hundreds of thousand photographs is significant. The Metropolitan Museum of Art collections have been administered and maintained since the days prior to modern computing. Since the late 1800's, collection management has relied on manual ledger systems that have been refined through decades of use. Objects and paintings were initially photographed at the time of acquisition. The photograph ledgers classified each photo by the terms most likely to be used for retrieval, such as object type, artist, class, size, negative number and date. All supporting written information from the photograph ledgers needed to be converted into a standard record format for use in the Met's TMS database management system. The complexity of the cataloging task was a natural fit for Electronic Scriptorium's highly skilled workforce.

Implementation Methodology:
Electronic Scriptorium first performed a comprehensive review of the various record types and methods used to describe the Met's complex record system. Electronic Scriptorium worked with the Met's software engineers to develop a data conversion tool that allowed the object data to be efficiently converted from the paper ledgers into a normalized database structure. Success of the project was heavily dependent on Electronic Scriptorium's ability to gain an expert understanding of the multiple cataloging approaches that had been developed by the Met's staff over the years. Electronic Scriptorium's staff successfully mastered the record format challenges and effectively became an extension of the Met staff. Electronic Scriptorium provided the Met with a team of project experts able to grasp and understand the cataloging techniques and collection methodologies needed to create the comprehensive electronic database.

Over the course of the year-long project, Electronic Scriptorium gained expertise in the Met's cataloging approach and thereby earned the client's trust. That trust gave the Met the confidence to ship the actual log books to Electronic Scriptorium for processing. Enabling Electronic Scriptorium to work from the actual logbooks not only saved the Met time and money, it also increased the quality of the database by precluding the legibility problems that can sometime occur in a facsimile.

Electronic Scriptorium sent completed data in logical blocks to the Met using secure FTP servers, thereby providing additional access as each logbook was completed. Electronic Scriptorium worked closely with the Met's technical staff to ensure that the cataloged records were smoothly merged into a comprehensive database for final review and implementation. Electronic Scriptorium developed comprehensive quality review procedures that facilitated merging the multiple individual databases into a final database that reached the Met's high standards of data integrity.

Conclusion:
Electronic Scriptorium's involvement with the Metropolitan Museum of Art has produced cataloging content for over 400,000 of the world's finest artworks. Our work has allowed the Met staff to spend far less time on research than in the past, when the traditional paper ledger approach was used to manage collections. Cataloging production exceeded the Met's in-house capacity by a wide margin.

Electronic Scriptorium is proud of its proven ability to satisfy the quality and production needs of world-class clients like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met project required both organizations to identify new and innovative solutions to the technical, logistical and quality challenges encountered during the project. Electronic Scriptorium solved many challenges while gaining valuable experience with the practical issues associated with cataloging photographic art ledgers. Our work with the Metropolitan Museum of Art demonstrates the ongoing need of world-class institutions for quality corporate partners. We are pleased to play a role in the Met's ongoing mission to make the finest works of art accessible to the public.