Capture integrates PLUS licensing standards into its asset management system
Capture a leading developer of image and digital asset management systems from the UK has announced that it has integrated the PLUS (Picture Licensing Universal System) standards into its web-based asset management system Capture Office Online (COO). According to a press release issued by the company “This means that the PLUS media matrix can be used in COO to specify standardized usage categories – and then generate prices easily (and the unique PLUS price code) by using COO’s price factoring facility”.
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At last year’s CEPIC Conference in Florence, CEPIC added a special one-day conference dedicated specifically to the topic of metadata – descriptive and identifying text information that accompanies digital photographs—hosted in partnership with the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) and the European news and media trade organization, IFRA. Building on the success of last year’s metadata meeting, the thee organizations will hold a second meta-data conference in Malta on June 5, 2008, called “Metadata for Better Business.”
Three years ago More Images, a New Zealand based stock photo agency, launched a keywording service called Keedup to serve the needs of photographers and photo agencies from around the world. Now the company is launching Keedup Ltd as a separate privately-owned company in order to better promote growth of the new business. “With our relatively low wages, and high education standards we are delivering keywording at the standard of US and UK companies, but at a greatly reduced price” states the company’s founder Kevin Townsend.
Keywording.com, a Portland Oregon based firm that specializes in keywording images for stock agencies and independent artists, has announced that it has developed a method to efficiently convert photograph captions into relevant keywords. The process was developed by the company’s managing Director Kirsti O’Sullivan, in response to a growing demand get images to market faster and at less cost. “Most photographs will have a caption. We can take that caption and jump-start you towards great keywords at a very reasonable price,” states O’Sullivan.
The library of Congress is participating in the launch of a Flickr initiative dubbed "The Commons" where it has posted 3,115 vintage images Including shots of early 20th century baseball players to 1940s-era images of horse-drawn carts and factory workers. The images have been posted in an effort to solicit help from the Flickr community in tagging the works in order to bring new context to the collection. 
The micro-stock company, Dreamstime, has created a new resource to help photographers understand better how their images are found by those who go purchase them. The company calls the tool, which is unique to Dreamstime and deceptively simple, “words that work.” It allows the contributor to see the specific keywords used by a purchaser to find the image they went on to buy. While often times the keyword is obvious, in many cases the words offer a different perspective on an image that might not have occurred to the contributor, which can provide helpful guidance to shooting and keywording on future productions.
Keedup, an Auckland, New Zealand keywording company, has decided to add another service to its offerings to stock photo libraries: picture research. The company believes many photo libraries miss out on sales because their staff can't keep up with research requests during regular business hours or simply don't get to off-hours requests soon enough to meet clients' deadlines. According Kevin Townsend, managing director at Keedup, "This is a particularly big problem for small to medium size libraries and photo agencies who are based in one country. When the day comes to an end there is often no one around to deal with customers' research requests."
In partnership with Elizabeth Whiting Associates (EWA,) digital image services provider JaincoTech has opened a scanning facility in the UK. The company now has three scanning operations worldwide, in London, Mumbai, India and Solon, Ohio.
Internet Archive of San Francisco has announced a partnership to scan, archive and manage the NASA's collection of photographs, film and video. Currently, NASA has more than 20 major imagery collections online. For the first time all of the NASA collections will be available through a single archive of NASA imagery. NASA appears to have selected Internet Archive, as a partner largely due to the fact that it is a nonprofit organization. The two organizations are teaming through a non-exclusive Space Act agreement to help NASA consolidate and digitize its imagery archives at no cost to the agency.
The Stock Artist Alliance and American Society of Media Photographers have been selected among eight partnerships awarded for preserving digital media by the U.S. Library of Congress. The partnerships are each awarded to address different aspects of preservation, to help ensure the survival of digital media. The SAA has been recognized previously for the publication of its "
