Photographic resources management is a strategic issue for the Directorate of Communication at the Université de Franche Comté, which offers high-quality photographs for both internal and external use. Anxious to develop a rich and varied photographic database, the University took the decision to use Keepeek in order to establish a library able to handle the mass production of their communication content. In an interview, Ludovic Godard, a photographer for the communication service at the university, describes the importance of a powerful image bank and adapted to the university environment.
Ludovic Godard: When I arrived in 2009, I was asked to organize the image bank at the Université de Franche Comté. All the data was stored on a standard network server to which we had access. In order to feed the bank with more images, we used to supplement the Picasa software that was already installed, but unfortunately this was quite limited. We were forced to copy data for various target users (services, faculties, laboratories and so on) and deliver reports using a large file transfer system.
We needed a solution that is able to integrate the tree that had already been established by my predecessor (which was really rather complex). Keepeek is the only publisher able to provide a solution in this case. We also wanted the solution to be simple to use, to be intuitive… and Keepeek was able to satisfy our need in terms of all these criteria.
We started the integration project in 2012 - and all I can say is that the tool works really well today. It certainly meets all our expectations. The integration was performed by Keepeek teams in collaboration with the IT department at the university. We were particularly impressed with the ability of the Keepeek tool to link up with our centralized authentication system "CAS". This was a heavy constraint on the part of our IT department and Keepeek overcame all the challenges with flying colors.
Users of the library can upload images into the database and then organize them in folders. We currently have a total of 103,000 pieces of media content referenced in the DAM tool: corporate illustrations, building images, students, laboratory research... We decided to use the Keepeek tool for photography only and to use other platforms to host the videos. We wanted to leverage the power of a space dedicated specifically to photography.
The entire communications department has access to the library. What is particularly interesting with the Keepeek tool is that all business communication (media relations, internal communication, graphics, etc.) can be found on the tool. We feel that the solution was developed for this purpose. Our goal is to enable the entire university community to take advantage of this tool. We have opened up the library to other branches of the university so that they can store their own images. This has been particularly successful in the case of our largest engineering research laboratory, FEMTO-ST, whose image bank has now been migrated onto the Keepeek database.
The tool has been extraordinarily easy to handle for all our employees, especially in terms of uses - there isn’t simply one way to do something, but many options. This clearly shows just how intuitive it is. I also appreciated the responsiveness of support teams at Keepeek. This point really deserves to be highlighted because this is unfortunately not as common as it should be. I found the team very attentive. I recently had a phone call from Keepeek… they just wanted to double check that everything with the tool was going well!