PICTURE THIS A creative contracting solution helps DOD


catalog mountains of still and motion imagery by Ms. Margaret C. Roth and Mr. Steve Stark


M


any of us have hundreds or even thousands of images that we have every intention, someday and time permitting, of sorting, naming and putting to good use on a social media site, as


computer “wallpaper” or in an old-fashioned album. But even just changing a file name from “image.jpg” to, for example,


“Hilton Head Sunrise.jpg,” takes time. Identifying, tagging and cataloging every photo can add up to a part-time job for even the casual photographer.


Let’s say a photo you took of a sunrise and palm tree at Hilton Head, SC, is on your computer’s desktop as wallpaper. Someone wants to know who took it and where. You might be able to tell them, “Oh, I took that on a beach during our vacation on Hilton Head in 2003.” But the other 100 or more photos taken on that vacation might not be so striking—so they sit in digital limbo until you do something with them.


But what if you’re the Defense Imagery Management Opera- tions Center (DIMOC) of the Defense Media Activity (DMA), which supports DOD and other U.S. government communica- tion and operational missions? What if your job is to make sure that uncounted thousands of military-related images from myr- iad sources don’t sit in digital limbo but are online and accessible for use? DIMOC is DOD’s central repository for visual imagery.


It exists to preserve visual records—both “born digital” and digitized physical media, still and motion—first for DOD and then for other agencies and members of the public, said Mike Edrington, DIMOC director.


DIMOC’s job is to catalog and archive the images and make it possible for the government and the public to find and retrieve them. Accurate searching for images, such as on www.DefenseImagery.mil, requires that each one be tagged with metadata. So, going back to that photo from Hilton Head, each bit of information—beach, sunrise, palm tree, 2003—is potential metadata with which to tag the image and make it easier to discover in a search.


DIMOC is employing a novel contracting approach to tackle the massive job of digitizing, cataloging and making accessible an archive that includes wartime footage and photographs of personnel and military equipment, World War II audio communications


and instructional military videos. Te


contract, the first of its kind in DOD, uses a private company to digitize the images. In exchange, the contractor has a limited period of exclusivity during which it can charge non- DOD users a fair-market fee to access the images, which users will be able to search, preview and download on www.DefenseImagery.mil. However, DOD personnel can


76


Army AL&T Magazine


July–September 2014


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