As the repositories of so much of our culture, museums – whether fine art, history, natural history, photography, university, or others – share a unique set of requirements and challenges. Their collections must be dynamic, informative, and entertaining, as well as accessible to the public and to researchers – all while being carefully preserved.
Creating digital representations of their collections expands the ways in which museums can share their unique offerings with the public and with researchers and academics, and allows them to share the physical objects in their collections as well as their born-digital content and associated stories with a global audience. Impactful narratives can be created around collections and exhibitions, and objects that are only rarely accessible due to physical gallery space limitations can be viewed by wide audiences. For all these reasons, Digital Asset Management systems have become a priority for a growing number of museums.
The Benefits of DAMs
DAMs handle all types and sizes of images, audio and video files, digital art, marketing materials, and documents. They become the single location for organizing, managing, storing, preserving, and securely sharing and distributing the museum’s digital material. As the single source of truth, they ensure that everyone across all museum departments as well as external partners use the correct versions of every asset. They also assist museums to ingest, catalog, annotate, control vocabularies, enrich assets with metadata, and back up their collections.
In addition, DAMs streamline workflows and ease collaboration between departments and with external stakeholders. They simplify searches, allowing relevant information to be quickly and easily accessed, thereby enabling the efficient creation of high-quality marketing materials as well as complex presentations for a demanding public.
Managing Museum Permissions
Museums are required to keep track of all aspects of their permanent and temporary collections and exhibitions – including permissions. DAMs can assist by centrally managing permissions according to the museum’s databases – making life easier for marketing departments.
Portals
A self-service portal can automate repetitive tasks by enabling the museum staff to access, view, and download images, audios, and videos of selected assets – saving time and decreasing the workload of the marketing staff.
Combining a DAM with a CMS
Most museums use a Collection Management System (CMS) such as IDEA Muse – with some features that overlap with DAMs. Once a collection is digitized and a DAM has been installed, the two systems can be integrated. This combination enables the enrichment of the DAM with vast amounts of information about the collection that exists in the CMS, including accession numbers – the serial numbers given to content when added to the collection, and provenance – information regarding the origin, history of ownership, and authenticity of an object. This detailed information provides an expanded picture of each asset – simplifying searches, and enabling the preparation and publication of in-depth information that can be used for websites, brochures, and museum and exhibition marketing materials.
MasterDAM May Be the Right Solution for Managing Your Museum’s Digital Assets
n addition to securely storing and managing millions of the museum’s visual and audio files, providing advanced AI-based meta-tagging of each object in the collection, and becoming the single source of truth for all your museum’s digital assets, MasterDAM offers practical benefits that will save your staff time and effort: adaptability to your unique requirements, rapid and painless integration, unmatched searchability, and surprising ease-of-use requiring no training.
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