A Balance of Balancing Acts


F


aced with a vast trove of images, Defense Imagery Management Operations Center (DIMOC) Archivist Julia Hickey’s job


revolves around two questions: Where to begin, and where to stop.


Hickey’s work of making images easy to find is a balance of balancing acts. From the archivist’s perspective, there are lots of different ways to look at that imag- ery—which is not only both motion and still, “born digital” and physical, but is also in a number of different formats. Tere is also audio, which can include radio broadcasts.


A still image could be in physical or digital form, and of various sizes, black and white, color, etc. Still imagery can also include graphic work—such as a magazine layout—and more traditional artwork, such as the canvases found in a museum, Hickey said. Motion media can come in physical and digital form and can include any number of formats, including motion picture film in 35 mm, 16 mm, 8 mm, etc. And then there are sound recordings, both physical and digi- tal—again, such as radio broadcasts—in myriad formats as well.


A strategic archivist like Hickey has to weigh different kinds of value—historical and otherwise—and the time sensitivity of potentially deteriorating assets, among other criteria.


THE ARCHIVIST Julia Hickey, strategic archivist at DIMOC, is responsible for prioritizing which imagery gets digi- tized—and therefore preserved—first. Imagery that is in danger of being lost forever because of the instability of the format receives top priority. “Digitization is the ultimate preservation objective that we can accomplish,” she said. (DOD photo by TSgt Jamie Powell)


SEEING IN MANY DIMENSIONS Part of DIMOC’s job is to go through all of its digital and digitized images and tag them with descriptive metadata so that users can find and use the images.


For example, said Hickey, the 3,000 digi- tized collodion glass plates that DIMOC


received from the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, VA, appear to document con- struction. “Tese are likely glass plates that were taken to document the contrac- tor’s work during construction to ensure that the shipyard was getting the services they needed. So we can go back into the contracting files” and do other research, she said, “then pull out what’s signifi- cant—what’s significant for Norfolk,


ASC.ARMY.MIL 83


CONTRACTING


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