Peter Hirtle, Director of Cornell Institute for Digital Collections, will describe the work being done with Luna's Insight software, an image management and delivery system. He will address, among other topics, how the system handles cross-collection searching.

Peter Hirtle began his discussion of the Luna Insight system by locating Insight in the context of CUL's ongoing effort to provide integrated access to visual collections. CUL's first solution for visual collection access was to use the MultiMIMSY 2000 system as a shared union catalog for images. Peter demonstrated MultiMIMSY's use as a cataloging tool designed for the museum environment.

Peter outlined the issues regarding standards for visual collections. Lacking a museum descriptive standard, the CIDOC (International Committee for Documentation of the International Council of Museums) reference framework can serve as a foundation for describing visual materials. In addition, CUL has sought to follow the VRA (Visual Resources Association) Core 3.0 element set, using the Art & Architecture Thesaurus, the Union List of Artist Names, and the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names for data values. Peter showed an example of a VRA 3.0 record and noted the layers of complexity in the record.

CUL's second solution for integrated access to visual collections has been the Insight system from Luna Imaging, which enables users to search multiple collections of visual materials. Peter demonstrated Insight. He pointed out that Insight can display metadata in multiple formats. Insight also allows adding annotations to images. Annotations can be textual, audio-visual, or links to other sites. In addition, Insight supports streaming audio and video. Insight's support of descriptive complexity includes its ability to handle hierarchical thesauri.

Peter presented slides depicting Insight's system architecture, its underlying Oracle table structure, and the data structure it uses for searching. Insight's virtual collection manager enables cross-collection searching that accesses multiple Insight applications across multiple servers. To facilitate cross-collection searching, all metadata formats used to describe individual collections are mapped to CDWA (Categories for the Description of Works of Art). Insight uses Dublin Core, MARC, VRA 2.0, VRA 3.0, and CDWA as built-in standards.

Currently CUL's Insight workflow involves entering data in MultiMIMSY and passing data from MIMSY to Insight. CUL is looking ahead to Luna's implementation of a stand-alone Insight cataloging tool as well as Insight's improved support for hierarchical objects, links to authentication systems such as LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) and Kerberos, and GIS support. The Insight users group has recommended that Insight support OAI as well.

Insight is being used as the delivery system for ArtSTOR, a Mellon-funded resource that will provide access to digital images in the humanities. In the context of the ArtSTOR project, Luna will develop the Insight Web client to brings its functionality more in line with the Insight Java client. Luna has an arrangement with Ex Libris for limited support of Insight access via a remote URL launcher that allows users to connect to images in Insight directly. Luna representatives have also recently met with Endeavor representatives to discuss the possible ways in which Insight and ENCompass might interact with one another.