Primary Research Group has published Survey of Best Practices in Digital Image Management, ISBN 978-1-57440-256-8.

The study presents the results of a survey of the image management policies of 64 organizations: colleges, museums, government agencies, and private businesses, with data broken out separately for each. The exhaustive study covers a myriad of issues including: cataloging and metadata, marketing and distribution, use of image management software and services, revenues and sales strategy, promotional uses of images, use of images on social media sites such as Facebook and on image sharing sites such as Instagram and Pinterest.

The study also looks at the type of images maintained and how these images were acquired, for example through in-house scanning, outsourced scanning, digital creation at the outset, or purchased from a commercial vendor or other means. The report describes the type of digitization standards used, the use of crowdsourcing, spending on rights and licensing, methods of image retrieval available to end users, permissions protocols, discovery and access tools, digital preservation policies, and more.

Just a few of the report's many findings are that:

• 97% of higher education institutions in the sample considered in-house scanning to be their most popular means of image acquisition
• Only 9.52% of survey participants, or 6 out of 63, provide screen shots for retrieval
• 57.14% of all survey participants provide high resolution images for retrieval, including 75 percent of museums/government agencies
• 26.98% of all survey participants provide collection access through Flickr
• Among the 27 participants that use standardized content descriptions, 44.44% use CCO (Cataloging Cultural Objects), 29.63% use DACS (Describing Archives Content Standards), and the remaining 25.93% use MARC

Trudy Levy assisted Primary Research Group with the questionnaire development for this report. Trudy Levy is a founding member of the Image Consultant Cooperative and a consultant on image management for numerous museums and libraries including the San Francisco Public Library, CALIFA, and others. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, Trudy has written on digital asset management for Information Week, SPECTRA, Professional Photographer, the Seybold Report, MacWeek, and other publications.

The 275-page study is available directly from Primary Research Group and also from major distributors of books and research reports. PDF and print versions cost $98.00 and site licenses cost $199.00. For a table of contents, questionnaire, list of participants, and an excerpt, or to place an order, visit our website at www.PrimaryResearch.com.