Managing Graphic Assets at Cal Poly
Mike Blum, a graphic communication
professor at California Polytechnic State University, had an organization
problem: The students in his prepress course were being overloaded with images
and had no way to manage them. The files were being saved helter-skelter—on
servers, compact discs, and floppy disks.
So Blum sought a method for
organizing the images across the department. He settled on Cumulus 5.5, a
digital asset management system for organizing and publishing digital files
including images, layouts, presentations, video, audio, and text. Cumulus, from
Canto Software Inc., enables users to search and access images via the Internet,
reads metadata, and can be integrated into an existing workflow.
Blum said
he chose Cumulus because he wanted a system that students could use to easily
manage images and not one that they had to struggle with. He said he especially
liked that the software categorized images in a hierarchical structure, instead
of relying solely on keywords, because it helps keep the images in order for the
different classes he teaches.
When the department began using Cumulus,
all of the images that were previously scattered over different types of media
were saved on the server. The images were then cataloged and keywords were added
to make searching and finding images easier for students year after
year.
Because Blum and his colleagues didn't want to spend too much time
entering keywords, they developed an AppleScript to do automatic keyword entry.
In this custom program, Cumulus reads lines from a spreadsheet that lists both
the names of the images and associated keywords. Then the keywords for each
image are automatically read from the spreadsheet and cataloged in Cumulus with
the appropriate image.
Students use the images cataloged in Cumulus to
perform a variety of class projects such as creating four-color brochures and
building sample Web sites. The students also use the images to learn about
trapping, imposition, preflight, and output techniques. When the students want
to use images not already cataloged in Cumulus, photos are taken with one of the
high-quality digital cameras the department has on hand and then dropped into
Cumulus. This allows students to use both stock and original
photography.
The Cumulus system allows users to attach metadata about
each asset. The metadata can be descriptive, such as keywords or categories;
technical, such as file type or size; or legal, such as rights and credits.
Assigning metadata to an asset allows users to search for the asset by
describing it.
In short, the software creates a record for each asset. The
record contains information about the asset, a thumbnail image, and the path to
its location on the server. During a search, a database engine looks through
every record to find a match to the query.
"Before Cumulus, students
spent a considerable amount of time just looking for images—time they could have
spent learning," Blum says. "Now…students can find the images they want, right
away, saving a considerable amount of time."
For more information, contact Mike Blum at mblum@calpoly.edu.