Matchmaking: when collections met photography

The prospect of Project Reveal providing an inventory record and professional photo for every object in the Trust’s collections was hugely exciting for me. But having done collections inventory work myself, I know how difficult it can be to get each object linked up to its photo. Every object needs a unique number; the photograph also needs the same unique number attached, then it has to be attached to each record one by one. It was overwhelming to think of doing this for every single object we came across in our properties.

So we had a think about how we could make this run more smoothly. What if it was possible for every photo to automatically link to the information about the object in the photo? With the project start date rapidly approaching, we wondered if anybody had ever done that before. The company we worked with, Knowledge Integration, had a track record with exactly this sort of tricky issue. Their solution was a custom installation of their CIIM software.