The effort to capture digital images of the museum's extensive collection of paintings, drawings, sculptures, pottery and more will take many years, Hegley said, and will begin with the museum's most popular works. The digital images are being taken from multiple angles to provide clear and useful records of each work for historians, in-house publications, publicity, licensing and research.

The museum is using MediaBin Asset Server to organize and store the digital images, said Brian Meek, director of product marketing at Interwoven.

One of the prime reasons the museum chose MediaBin over products from some 40 other vendors was that it can be used natively with Microsoft Corp.'s SQL Server database, which the museum was already using in its IT systems, according to Hegley. It took about a year to choose a vendor after narrowing the pool of candidates to five, then viewing demonstrations of each potential product.

MediaBin starts at about US$50,000 for corporate use. The price tag for the museum's image project was not disclosed.

Another benefit of having digital images of the museum's collections is to make more of the items available digitally to the public around the world, which is one of the museum's goals, Hegley said. "Images are clearly the way to do that when the public can't be on-site," he said.