image research database

2017 Dec

I developed a database to track potential images for new exhibits in the Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center, which helps our team at the California Science Center collaborate with graphic designers at Evidence Design in New York.

While creating content for 150 new exhibits, we research and select thousands of images to convey scientific concepts to our guests. We also needed to track these images and their metadata—for example, which exhibits they belong to, their usage rights, and if the image was selected for production on graphic panels—and share them with our designers in New York. But, we needed something more robust than a Dropbox folder to manage the all these images and their metadata. Therefore, I used the open-source software ResourceSpace to create a custom database for our image research, and hosted it all on a Google Cloud Platform virtual machine running Apache, MySQL, and PHP.