At the NGA, all of our TMS media records are accessed by HTTP urls instead of mounted shares. We have a legacy server hosting all of our non-exclusive licenses and other agreements which are attached to the constituent record. This is a fairly stable
pool of PDFs that we don’t need to interact with outside of TMS.
This makes S3 an attractive option for us - since S3 buckets have individual resource references by URL you can point a media record in TMS to the S3 URL. We just need to figure out the permissions so the URL is accessible to TMS but not to everyone on
the network…
As Steve notes you can’t interact with your bucket like a normal folder with files – for example looking for something in that bucket can be a daunting task. But adding a file to a bucket is very easy – as is downloading
assets. The Amazon provided tools are good and not too difficult to figure out.
If anyone is interested in how we are using S3 / AWS to manage digital assets feel free to contact me off list.
Yes, I agree, that’s an interesting idea. We use S3 for backup of our image data, but the files aren’t accessible by regular workstations unless you have some special software or a special storage gateway in the middle. S3 files don’t
use the same sort of filesystem (CIFS) that TMS wants to work with. Without something “special” going on, you can’t treat S3 as a typical external fileserver on a Windows computer.
And as always, I’m curious about who (if anyone) is using Amazon AWS servers for any portion of their TMS system…
-Steve
Steve Rothman, Systems Administrator
Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology - mobile: 617-517-4855 or x5-9968
Thanks for posting this, Peter! I'd be curious to hear from anyone using this on how it's going. Storage space has become a big issue for us.
Fatima Mahdi
Collections Information Specialist/TMS
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
We are looking at using an Amazon S3 bucket for some of our TMS media records – these are PDFs of agreements that are not managed in our DAM (which manages access for collection images). We are
trying to figure out the best way to set appropriate permissions at the S3 level – we want all TMS users to be able to access the PDF’s.
I'm still new to the S3 permission structure and haven’t yet figured out the optimal way to configure security for TMS access.
Are any of you using S3 to store assets for TMS? Suggestions / thoughts on the best approach esp. re: permissions would be appreciated!
National Gallery of Art, Washington
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