This is a text in which cultural and historical content is skilfully interwoven with technological matter to provide both a source of reference and an insightful commentary on an important area of practice within the information profession.
Cultural institutions' developing engagement with the creation, storage and transmission of digital image data provides the context for the book, the rationale for which reflects the author's view that “Being informed of the issues surrounding digital media, and digital images, is the best way for those working within industry to understand the developing and changing information environment and provide useful services to users of digitized collections” (p. 137).
The work proceeds logically from a discourse on the nature and origin of images as fundamental aspects of perceptual and cognitive human activity, right through to current issues in the creation and consumption of digital images. The early chapters address the author's claim that the text is geared towards the type of questions an information professional working in library, archive, cultural and heritage information environments may ask about the technologies involved. The reader is treated to a thorough, but eminently readable treatment of such fundamentals as bitmaps, image resolution, colour representation, compression and digitisation standards, and an entire chapter is devoted to a comprehensive treatise on image file formats.
The later chapters, where the particular strength of this book lies, trace the cultural shifts in image creation and consumption, which impact upon principles and practice in the commercial and curatorial imperatives of image asset management. Here the reader will find an excellent historical survey of the engagement by memory institutions with digital image asset management. There follows a chapter devoted to personal image collections, which provides an insightful discourse on the remarkable way in which digital image technologies have penetrated society at large, bringing in their train a major shift in attitude and practice relating to the capture, processing and utilization of personal images. The evolution in technologies, and their having “become part of the fabric of our day to day lives“ (p. 145) is recounted masterfully. Thoughtful commentary on the use (or non‐use) to which the rapidly accumulating wealth of personal image material is put, and the lack of attention typically paid to its organisation and preservation, leads the author to highlight a risk that the visual record from the late twentieth century onwards will be seriously compromised.
A further chapter gives a detailed account of the role played by metadata in image asset management, and describes the most prominent metadata standards and schemas, plus an informative discussion about the role played by social tagging. Given the care with which the author has sought to promote understanding of other technical matters it is rather disappointing to note the very rapid dismissal of content‐based image retrieval (CBIR). CBIR has been the focus of nearly 20 years of heavily‐funded research effort directed at releasing image asset management from the constraints of text‐based indexing and retrieval operations. Its cursory treatment in this text, however, would almost certainly prevent the reader from understanding either the basic principles and implementation of CBIR, or the reasons why this paradigm has achieved so little penetration into professional practice.
Arguably, a more fundamental omission is any consideration of the moving image, the technological and social trajectory of which has much in common with the digital still image, and must be thought equally relevant to the information professional.
These observations apart, the information professional faced with a real‐life project in image asset management will find in this excellent text a supportive overview and pointers to some well‐established, detailed technical guides upon which to base implementation decisions. The more general reader will find an engaging and accessible text in which a commendable clarity of exposition has been married to research skills of a high order, the whole supported by recommendations for further reading and a most comprehensive bibliography. The shame is that such an informative, well‐researched work may enjoy only a short shelf‐life, such is the pace at which technology advances in this vibrant field.
