Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria

Project Details

For the past 12 years they have been using Canto Cumulus DAMS to manage and share their large collections of images of living and dried plants, fungi and algae.

As the number of images grew and a new public website was introduced, things started to get complicated and issues arose with existing workflows.

Customer

Name: Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria

Website: rbg.vic.gov.au

Industry: Environmental Services

GOAL

RBGV needed to streamline and simplify their content management and improve channel distribution and publishing.

RESULTS

Content management is more efficient and user experience is vastly improved.

Comprised of two remarkable gardens – Melbourne and Cranbourne, as well as National Herbarium of Victoria, Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria (RBGV) house an extensive and growing botanical library and archive, and a collection of botanical art. For the past 12 years they have been using Cumulus DAMS to manage and share their large collections of images of living and dried plants, fungi and algae.

As the number of images grew and a new public website was introduced, things started to get complicated and issues arose with existing workflows.

Niels Klazenga, Cumulus DAMS Administrator and Biodiversity Informatics Developer at RBGV, has been the driving force behind the Gardens’ DAMS success and was always looking for ways to improve his team’s user experience and overall digital success of the organisation.

The Challenge

Over the years, the number of images had grown significantly with many new files added to the collections, and the average size of images had increased, especially the widely used Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) assets. Additionally, along with VicFlora public website, RBGV had created HortFlora – a visual online guide to horticultural flora of South-eastern Australia. As a result, the Gardens wanted more staff to participate in the management of the images without needing access to the master catalogue.

It was clear, the existing image transfer, conversion and distribution processes were no longer suitable for the current requirements. RBGV needed a solution that would help content managers process a large volume of digital content from the initial cataloguing, through an approval process, channel distribution, web publication, and final archiving.

The Solution

After initial consultation it was decided that DAAS (Digital Asset Automation Solution), a solution developed by databasics, would be a good fit for the challenges at RBGV.

DAAS is based on Canto Cumulus DAM and Roboflow technologies.

The solution comprises catalogue structure, metadata sets and automated channel distribution workflows (approval, publishing, conversion, and archiving).

It is versatile, scalable and can be implemented as standalone, integrated or hybrid solution.

Implementation

Databasics worked in collaboration with Niels Klazenga to develop and implement a tailored solution design. A hybrid solution was devised by updating some of the existing configuration and integrating additional customised DAAS components.

The solution included:

Approval workflows
Multiple staging and production channels feeding content from different sources into publication catalogues for integration with websites
Automated image conversion workflows
API integration between the publishing catalogues and the RBGV VicFlora and HortFlora websites using Canto Integration Platform (CIP)
Automated metadata synchronization workflow
Archiving workflow.

In addition, databasics provided extensive solution design and implementation documentation as well as training.

The Results

Sabine Glissmann-Gough, Chief Information Officer at RBGV sums up:” We finally feel that we have a handle on the RBGV images.”

Nearly 100,000 images were processed by the solution in just the first few months and the workflow “didn’t fail once”, according to Niels. “The solution is very well thought out and seems broadly applicable,” he adds.

RBGV can have staging catalogues for short- and long-term projects and, at various stages during the project, can decide which images they want to have in their production catalogue, which need to be archived and which can be deleted. As a result, more people can process content simultaneously, collaboratively, and effectively.

In summary, the DAAS implementation at RBGV proved to be a robust and agile solution. It has addressed past and current digital content management requirements and can be flexibly adapted to resolve future challenges. The entire content management process is now streamlined, simplified and more efficient with less room for user error.

“We can only imagine how much easier things would have been for us if DAAS would have been there 12 years ago when we started out with Cumulus,” concludes Niels Klazenga.

We can only imagine how much easier things would have been for us if Digital Asset Automation Solution would have been there 12 years ago when we first started with Cumulus DAM.

Niels Klazenga
DAM Administrator

We finally feel we have a handle on RBG images.

Sabine Glissmann-Gough
Chief Information Officer

Victoria botanic gardens improve user experience with DAM