February 17, 2011 -- The Preserving Digital Still Images project, led by the nonprofit organization ARTstor (external link) , has released its final report, along with the EMET tool (external link) for extracting embedded photographic metadata.
ARTstor’s EMET project was funded under the Preserving Creative America program. The project explored how to encourage professional and scholarly photographers to use embedded metadata to facilitate the creation of archive-ready born-digital images.
A key outcome of the project was the development of a tool that would facilitate the extracting of metadata from images. Project staff discovered during the course of their research that many photographers were already using tools with an embedding functionality, and what they were really lacking was an easy-to-use tool for extracting embedded metadata for ingestion into external systems and databases.
For this reason, ARTstor submitted a revised proposal in 2009 to develop a tool to extract metadata from images as a stand-alone application. EMET, the Embedded Metadata Extraction Tool, was released in November 2010 and is now available for free download both from the ARTstor website (external link) and as open source code on Source Forge (external link).
The project’s final report outlines the activities and outcomes of ARTstor’s grant and reflects upon the benefits and challenges of using embedded metadata as a means of managing the lifecycle and preservation of born-digital images.
