Keep source systems synchronised. Enter data once, update everywhere.
CIIM writes data back across connected systems, eliminating duplicate data entry and ensuring every dataset stays in sync.
CASE STUDY: National Trust for Scotland
How CIIM automatically links over 100,000 photographs to their collection object records for Project Reveal
As part of Project Reveal, an 18-month initiative to catalogue and photograph the objects held across 47 National Trust for Scotland properties, the Trust needed a way to link tens of thousands of new photographs to their collection records without doing it by hand.
The challenge
The Trust's Collections Information Officer, Joe Cooper, faced a problem of scale: every object needed a unique number, every photo needed that same number attached, and every photo then had to be linked to its object record by hand. Across tens of thousands of objects, that manual linking threatened to consume as much time as the cataloguing itself.
The approach
We installed a custom deployment of CIIM to run between the Trust's two core systems: their Axiell collections management system and their Portfolio digital asset management system.
Each evening, CIIM automatically:
- Scans both systems for new records
- Reads the unique object numbers attached to incoming photographs
- Matches them against the corresponding object records
- Links the two, with no manual effort required
- Writes back into Portfolio and Axiell (either a url or metadata)
The outcome
Project Reveal has produced over 100,000 photos which have been automatically linked to their corresponding object records. Anyone browsing an object record in Axiell now sees its professional photograph from Portfolio, and the link works in reverse too, browsing a photo in Portfolio surfaces the full object details from Axiell.
"I don't need to think about how many hours it would have taken to do this one by one [manually]." - Joe Cooper, Collections Information Officer, National Trust for Scotland
Read the full story on the National Trust for Scotland website.