SPECTRUM Digital Asset Management

Primary Benefits

• Improved discovery of information, both internally and externally
• Providing organisation-wide access to digital assets for all staff/departments
• Supporting more rapid approaches to innovation and prototyping new services
• Promoting collaboration between different organisational functions
• Improved rights management within your organisation

Secondary Benefits

• Promoting the sustainability, longevity and accessibility of your organisation’s digital outputs (including created digital content)
• Reducing the opportunity costs arising from lost or inaccessible information
• Improved visibility of value and impact of digital assets
• Improved compliance with legal or statutory responsibilities

Additional Benefits

• Demonstrating the same commitment to the responsible acquisition and management of digital assets as for your physical collections and associated knowledge assets
• Supporting the training and professional development of your staff
• Demonstrating a commitment to long-term value for funders and investors
• Helping your organisation to attract funding opportunities (EU funding, and international projects)

Whatever your motivation in implementing a DAM strategy for your organisation, it is important to be clear about (and to share with your colleagues) the benefits which you are hoping to achieve.

Managing Change in your Organisation

It is beyond the scope of this publication to provide detailed advice on change management. However, it is important to bear in mind that the implementation of a DAM strategy in your organisation is a significant change, and that there are some simple principles which will help you manage this change and – perhaps more importantly – help your colleagues get behind what you are trying to achieve.

Where does your DAM Strategy fit?

Once you are comfortable that you understand why you are implementing digital asset management in your organisation and the benefits you hope to achieve, it is worth spending a little time considering where your DAM strategy fits within the overall strategic development of your organisation.

In many cases, your organisation will already have a Strategic Plan, or will be part of a larger parent or governing body which sets out strategic aims and objectives which affect you.

It is always preferable for your DAM strategy to be integrated into or closely aligned with the mission, vision and strategic objectives of your organisation. If it isn’t, you run the risk of the DAM strategy failing to deliver on your organisation’s ambitions, which will eventually result in it being marginalised and ignored.

To be fully effective, your DAM strategy needs to be part of (and owned by the same people as) the overall strategic management and direction of your organisation. This may also mean understanding how it fits into your organisation’s performance indicators, or its internal understanding of what constitutes success.

This process of alignment can be critical in ensuring that the whole organisation understands how DAM delivers value for their work, not just in terms of collections and preservation, but also in terms of audience engagement, revenue-generation and strategic planning. Broadly, each department, team or function in the organisation needs to understand how DAM will help them achieve their objectives.

Components of a Digital Asset Management Strategy

Once you have understood the key drivers for implementing DAM and how it fits alongside your existing strategic development it is time to start assembling your overall DAM strategy.

DAM strategies come in all shapes and sizes, and there is no one-size-fits-all model which can be applied to every organisation. There are, however, a number of core elements which tend to feature in common across different strategies:

• Mission – clearly aligned to the mission and vision of the organisation

• Short, medium and long-term goals (eg. 1, 3 and 5 years) – aligned to the broader strategic objectives of the organisation

• Roles & responsibilities of the people who will be responsible for the strategy

• Characterisation of the user community/stakeholders of the outcomes of the strategy

• Success criteria and how they will be evidenced

• A schedule/period over which the strategy will be reviewed and refined

The DAM strategy itself can be a relatively short document – what is important is that it captures a consensus about the strategic purpose and intended outcomes of your DAM activity that is shared with the various stakeholders within your organisation.

The DAM strategy should act as a reference point throughout the planning, selection, implementation and long-term governance of both your DAMS and organisational support mechanisms such as training and IT development.

The DAM strategy is also a key advocacy document, demonstrating to senior stakeholders how your DAM activity feeds into and supports their broader objectives for the organisation.

SPECTRUM Procedures

The SPECTRUM standard defines 21 procedures – essentially consistent, often repeated processes that are commonly used in museums, galleries and other types of organisation for whom the management and use of physical collections is a primary responsibility.

The SPECTRUM Procedures are:

The figure overleaf shows how the SPECTRUM procedures map to the core activities of collections development, collections care, knowledge generation, access and use.

The purpose of SPECTRUM DAM is to show how digital asset management activities can be incorporated into an existing organisational culture based on or compatible with SPECTRUM, so that they have a better chance of achieving their maximum impact.

Mapping DAM Activity to SPECTRUM Procedures

Acquisition & Disposal

Most museums, archives, libraries and galleries will have in place a Collecting Policy, an Acquisition & Disposal Policy, or some kind of retention and selection schedule which defines the scope of the collection and how the organisation will develop it strategically over time.

Since the key principle of digital asset management is that the digital assets ought to be considered and valued in the same context as the physical collection items, it is important to ensure that the policies relating to collections development also provide a scope for creation, acquisition, retention and preservation of digital assets.

In some cases, this is likely to involve expanding the scope of collecting activity to address:

• The acquisition of digital surrogates (scans, photographs) into the permanent collection
• The acquisition of born-digital works, such as digital artworks
• The acquisition, selection, management and use of user-generated digital media about the collection

Due consideration should be given to whether the digital media should formally be accessioned into the collection, or should serve as part of the documentation and inventory of physical collection items.

Procedural Manual

Most Accredited museums, and many other types of collecting organisation, maintain a Staff Handbook or Procedural Manual which acts as a how-to guide for the specific processes and procedures in that organisation.

A Procedural Manual is a valuable tool for staff induction and training, as well as ensuring that different stakeholders across the organisation understand their relationship to and responsibility for different aspects of delivery.

In order to ensure that digital asset management is integrated successfully into the organisation, it is important to ensure both that existing procedures in the manual are updated to reflect and refer to the creation and capture of digital assets and that any task-specific procedures (such as format conversion) are also incorporated alongside their physical collection counterparts.

The policy for digital asset creation, capture and format conversions should be reviewed regularly and checked against current standards for DAM. Some DAMS can provide tools and reports to give a breakdown of the digital assets and formats currently being managed.

A revised Procedural Manual which sets out integrated processes for physical and digital collections/asset management can be a key tool in ensuring the long-term acceptance of your digital asset management activity.

It is also worth considering how the digital assets are entering your organisation – specifically, whether they are created gradually and incrementally as an ongoing outcome of your work, or whether they arise all at once from a specific programme, such as a digitisation project. If the latter, it is important to factor into the project planning how the resulting assets will formally enter the organisation and integrate with the DAM strategy.

Options for aligning digital programme outputs with your DAM strategy might include:

• Defining and including DAM system requirements and workflows within your (digitisation) project specifications;
• Using the existing DAM strategy to plan for the continuity of the digital assets after the completion of the digitisation project;
• Ensure that corporate knowledge and expertise arising from the digitisation project is available to support the migration of project outputs into a DAMS (and that knowledge of the DAMS is integrated into the project infrastructure).

Legal Context

As with all SPECTRUM procedures, it is essential to familiarise yourself with the broader legal context and implications of creating, acquiring, managing, preserving and using digital media before implementing your digital asset management policies.

Many of the legal issues pertaining to digital assets will mirror those for physical collections items. However, digital media may also present specific issues which ought to be addressed as part of the custom and practice of the organisation. Examples include:

• Performance rights in digital media
• Privacy and child-protection legislation
• Impact on Data Protection
• Laws relating to access to Public Sector Information

Wherever possible, appropriate legal advice should be sought and relevant policies created, communicated to staff and periodically reviewed and amended.

Ethical Issues

In addition to the specific legal and statutory issues associated with the management, preservation and use of digital media, it is also possible that your digital asset management activity may give rise to specific ethical challenges.

In many cases, these will mirror the issues which arise in the management and interpretation of physical collections. However, due care and consideration should be given to these potential issues, including:

• The digitisation and representation of sacred material
• The digitisation and distribution of material that is defamatory, obscene or offensive
• The digital distribution of personal artefacts
• The risk of perceived censorship or misrepresentation of events or communities
• The misrepresentation of the legal, ownership or ethical status of cultural property

Museums, archives, libraries and galleries are accustomed to behaving with sensitivity and consideration to the material in their care. The best policy is to extend these attitudes and values to encompass digital material which, although less tangible, may equally be distributed more widely and therefore present a greater risk.

Rights Management

The management of rights in a digital asset management context is connected to but not the same as the management of rights in the collection items. In addition to the different context of digital surrogacy, the organisation is likely to have to manage a framework of permissions and rights conditions, dependent on the different models of distribution and re-use which it wishes to support.

Due consideration ought to be given to whether the rights management policy for digital assets supports or inhibits the organisation’s strategic aims, its legal status (and any legal obligations in relation to its public task) and the different forms of use which it wishes to support.

The organisation should establish a clear and justifiable policy in relation to the granting of permission (licensing) of rights for open access and re-use (including use of digital assets by 3^rd party platforms, services and applications) and the withholding of permission to support commercial activity. In many cases, it is possible to establish a permissive licensing framework which also supports and reinforces the organisation’s commercial activities.

User Access Management

User access control is an important element of ensuring the long-term viability of your digital asset management solution. You should define, communicate and periodically review a policy which sets out who is able to access, edit or delete information and assets from the DAMS, and what degree of resilience and version control you will expect your DAMS to provide.

In many cases, it is useful to consider access control for your DAMS in a similar way as key control for security in the physical premises – permission should be granted on a limited basis against identified needs, with as few people as possible in a position to make system-wide changes to promote information security.

Information/Asset Security

In much the same way as it is important to implement appropriate security measures to protect the integrity of your physical collections, it is also important to develop, maintain, review and update policies to ensure the security and integrity of your digital assets.

There are four key elements to ensuring the security and integrity of digital assets in your DAMS:

• User access control
• Technical architecture
• Versioning
• Audit

The weakest point in any system is its users, and it is easy for people to become relaxed about information security over time. It is important to try and foster a culture of risk management, in which all staff are aware of the risks to your digital assets and are careful to observe policies on passwords and sharing information. It is useful to build information security into any other frameworks, policies or practices which your organisation has to address the physical security of the building, collections, visitors and staff.

Cybercrime is an ever-increasing risk, and there are several incidents of cultural organisations being targeted, either through denial-of-service attacks or to change, falsify or remove information about collection items. The security of your DAMS should form part of your organisation’s broader measures to protect your IT infrastructure, including servers, email and firewalls.

Version control, particularly in multi-site/multi-user systems is an important feature of your DAMS. The system should support session identification (identifying which registered user made which changes to the system) and appropriate functionality to roll back or remove changes made up to a specified point in the past.

Many DAMS contain tens of thousands of digital assets, which can make it difficult to audit their contents effectively. You should incorporate an audit of your DAMS alongside the periodic audit of your collections (or your organisational audit or stockcheck if you do one) and ensure that the DAMS provides reporting tools which support this activity.

It is also useful to consider any security measures that need to be incorporated into or supported by your DAMS for output formats. For example, if you need your DAMS to integrate watermarking of images into the supply process, you should factor this into the specification for your system.

Digital Fingerprinting

With multiple users, it is likely that your users will attempt to ingest an asset into the DAMS which has already been imported by another user. Good file naming practices are important but should not be the only method of reducing duplication.

Every digital asset has its own digital fingerprint. A commonly used digital fingerprint algorithm is an MD5 Checksum or MD5 Hash. The DAMS should generate an MD5 Hash for every asset that is ingested. The DAMS should then check for any duplicates based on the MD5 Hash and alert the user if a copy of the asset already exists. This method works irrespective of the filename and ensures only unique digital asset files are ingested.

From a preventative conservation perspective, MD5 Hashes can also be used to check for potential corruption of a digital asset (which can occur when files are copied, moved or tampered with). Some DAMS provide comparison reports to verify that a file’s MD5 Hash has not changed.

Formats

The selection of appropriate formats for your digital assets is an important factor in their medium to long-term sustainability, as well as the expense and complexity of migrating to new formats in future.

Most DAMS will support current industry-standard formats for images, video, audio and other media. If your audit of digital assets reveals that you have non-standard formats (such as 3D LIDAR point-cloud scans of objects or buildings), you should work with the DAMS supplier to identify how best these can be supported.

Where you have a body of digital assets in deprecated formats (legacy formats that are no longer supported), you should consider updating these assets - where possible – to industry-standard formats prior to inclusion in the DAMS.

When considering formats, it is also important to consider the range of output formats which your DAMS is expected to support. For example, you may wish to integrate your DAMS with a web content management system such that it can provide low-resolution JPEG thumbnail images derived from high-quality TIFF images. While it is important to avoid over-specifying your DAMS requirements, it is equally important to ensure that you have taken into account both specific formats and specific use cases which your DAMS needs to support.

File Naming Conventions

As DAMS have evolved to support metadata for management, discovery and use, the use of file naming conventions (standard approaches to naming files) has become less of a critical issue in asset management.

However, good file naming practices are still useful in reducing duplication and managing the preservation and re-use of your digital assets, particularly where your DAMS is operating in a multi-site or multi-user environment.

An example of a simple filenaming convention in a multi-user environment might be:

This convention would yield filenames in a consistent sequence, e.g:

12022013_adawson_0001.jpg
12022013_adawson_0002.jpg

In establishing your file naming conventions, it is important to bear in mind that they should be compatible across platforms. Some IT systems support non-alphanumeric characters such as punctuation marks and spaces in their file names, but many do not. Some are case-sensitive (e.g. Linux systems); others (e.g. Windows) are not. This can cause problems when providing files that can be used reliably in a variety of different environments.

In general, it is best to keep to standard alphanumeric characters separated (where necessary) by the underscore (_) rather than anything more exotic, and to stick either to lower case or upper case throughout.

Choosing appropriate filenames depends both on the potential application of the digital assets and on the nature of the content of the assets. Hence, if you are digitising a large quantity of books, you may want to establish a file naming convention that represents the book title, chapters and pages. If digitising images which form parts of a whole (such as sequential images of a scroll or large map) it might be useful to adopt a convention which identifies both the whole and the placement of the part in a sequence or grid.

It is also important to consider how your use of file names will impact on the different output formats which your DAMS will need to support. If, for example, your DAMS supports the rendering of different sizes or resolutions for the images, then you may wish to develop a file naming convention which allows for the identification of these different versions.

Whatever the convention you adopt for file naming, it is important to ensure that it is adopted consistently across the different users of your DAMS. This can involve:

• Creating and publishing a File naming policy for your organisation
• Training DAMS users in the use of the file naming convention (and why it is important)
• Providing support and guidance to users with queries about file naming

Further information and guidance on selecting consistent file names is provided by JISC Digital Media in their article Choosing a File Name^{Footnote 2}.

Backup, Recovery & Disaster Planning

Although it can support digital preservation and archiving, your DAMS is not in itself an archive. The purpose of the DAMS is to enable your organisation to maximise the value and use of your digital assets. It is a ‘live’ system, in which the assets and metadata will be subject to change and amendment on an ongoing basis.

It is important to make this distinction clear to the users of your DAMS – users are often tempted to treat the DAMS as a store for all of their digital output, and to regard the act of submitting something to a DAMS as being the same as archiving it.

It is beyond the scope of this publication to cover the policies and practices of Digital Preservation in detail, however, it is useful when specifying, procuring and implementing a DAMS to understand how it will contribute to your Digital Preservation Strategy and how it aligns with your Disaster Recovery and Emergency Planning.

Metadata Schemata for DAM

Selecting and implementing an appropriate metadata schema for your DAMS is a function of several factors:

• The nature of your digital assets
• The uses envisaged for digital assets across your organisation
• The relationship between the DAMS and the Collections Management System
• The relationship between the DAMS and other management/information systems in the organisation

While the metadata structure in a SPECTRUM collections management system is relatively complex – reflecting the broad range of management activities which take place during the lifetime of the physical collections item – the metadata which is created, stored and managed in the DAMS (or in the DAM functionality of your collections system, if using an integrated platform) should be correspondingly simple.

An example of a common metadata framework for your DAMS might include:

• Dublin Core for descriptive, technical and rights metadata
• XMP/IPTC for metadata embedded in images
• EXIF for embedded metadata from the capture device
• A locally-defined schema for administrative metadata

Where your DAMS is handling more complex formats, such as video, audio, datasets or other media, you should ensure that it is capable of supporting the most appropriate industry-standard metadata scheme for that format.

The Embedded Metadata Working Group (EMDaWG) of the Smithsonian Institution defined a useful set of recommendations^{Footnote 3} for the minimum descriptive metadata to be embedded in digital image files as follows:

• Document title
• Copyright notice
• Source
• Creator
• Date
• Description
• Keywords
• Credit
• Job identifier
• Headline (caption)

A key function of embedded metadata is to support the retrieval/discovery of the system. Many services such as Flickr (www.flickr.com) automatically extract embedded metadata to support the search and display of images. It is therefore important not only to consider the structure of your metadata, but also the use of controlled vocabularies to support different types of use – a common example is the use of non-technical or thematic keywords to support use in picture libraries for internal and external audiences.

For more information on selecting the appropriate metadata schema for your DAMS (or verifying your DAMS for compliance with the appropriate schema), refer to the JISC Digital Media guide on Metadata and Digital Images^{Footnote 4}.

SPECTRUM & Metadata for Digital Asset Management

Selecting the right approach to metadata for your DAMS is complex, and requires technical knowledge of your organisation, its assets and the various uses to which they will be put. A key criterion in the selection of appropriate metadata policies is the degree of integration with the organisation’s Collections Management System.

The content of your Collections Management System essentially represents metadata about your physical collections. This metadata is structured around a combination of two types of information:

• The Units of Information defined in SPECTRUM and;
• User-defined fields

SPECTRUM Units of Information^{Footnote 5} provide a metadata structure for capturing and managing the knowledge and administrative information that arises during the process of collections management. This structure consists of 46 ‘groups’ of information, structured around 11 ‘categories’:

1. Object groups
2. Procedure groups
3. Address information
4. Date information
5. Location information
6. Organisation information
7. People information
8. Person information
9. Place information
10. Record Management groups
11. Reference information

A full list of the SPECTRUM Information Groups and their associated categories is provided in Appendix 2.

Integrating DAM activity alongside collections management activity in your organisation is key to ensuring widespread adoption and long-term sustainability. Ensuring that your DAM fits with your existing SPECTRUM collections management activity means taking one of two possible options:

• Using a Collections Management System which has been extended or developed to offer both DAMS and CMS functionality within the same ‘core’ (or modular) system – and which therefore use a common metadata structure;

• Ensuring that the metadata structure you adopt for your DAMS can easily be mapped to or associated with your SPECTRUM-structured collections information.

Each of these options has its strengths and weaknesses. However, using a system that is already widely used in your organisation will confer significant advantages in terms of rollout, training, change management and user support.

Controlled Vocabularies

As with physical collections management, the consistent classification of digital assets is a key element of ensuring that they are discoverable and usable in the long-term. If metadata provides the structure of your information (like fields in a database), then controlled vocabularies provide the keywords with which these fields can be populated.

A Controlled Vocabulary is defined as “a prescribed set of consistently used and carefully defined terms, which promotes consistency in the indexing of documents and facilitation of searching”. There are many controlled vocabularies and term lists available for your organisation to use – some of which form part of commonly-accepted international standards and some of which have been developed for us in specific contexts.

Wherever possible, your DAMS should repurpose controlled vocabularies already in use in your organisation, such as those in your Collections Management System.

Where it is necessary to develop or adopt controlled vocabularies that are specific to the nature of digital assets (such as, for example, in the case of file formats), it is advisable to:

• Make use of an existing vocabulary or term list
• Document clearly the scheme used
• Provide a process for managing proposed changes and amendments to the scheme

Where the use of digital assets also includes crowdsourced activities such as social tagging, folksonomy or transcription (generating keywords), it is important to preserve these alongside the asset with a record of the context under which they were created.

Folksonomic taxonomies should periodically be reviewed to address the scope for new terms to be entered into the ‘formal’ classification scheme.

Creating Metadata

Whatever approach you choose to the structure of your metadata, you will need to put in place long-term policies and procedures for creating metadata and associating it with your digital assets.

Creating and quality-controlling metadata can be labour-intensive. It takes place throughout the lifecycle of the digital asset, from creation to management, re-use and preservation.

To be effective, your DAM strategy must be supported by a long-term culture of metadata creation and quality control across the whole organisation – everyone, whatever their interaction with your digital assets, needs to be skilled and empowered to create or add to the metadata your organisation holds.

Integrated vs. Standalone

As mentioned above, digital asset management and collections management form part of a continuum of activities which your organisation is likely to need to support. These activities might include:

There are many different approaches to implementing systems which support these activities. It is possible to construct a technical infrastructure based entirely on standalone systems. Equally, it is possible to develop or purchase systems which integrate all of these activities into one software platform.

There are many factors to be taken into account when procuring the best solution for your needs, but a key element is in deciding where to place the emphasis on the core functionality of your system. For example, you might choose from the following options:

• A digital asset management system into which SPECTRUM procedures have been integrated, but which might not support your collections management processes as fully as you would like;

• A collections management system with core digital asset management functionality, which might offer good integration into your existing practice, but be less flexible in terms of supported formats.

It is also useful to consider the implementation of a middleware system which acts as an intermediary between your DAMS and your Collections Management (and possibly also Web Content Management) system. This can provide a cost-effective strategy to implementing a DAMS over a significant body of material held in legacy systems which enjoy strong organisational support.

Ultimately, the selection of any system is a trade-off between the ideal functionality and your capability to adapt the system to your specific needs. A key question, though, is whether the creation, management and re-use of digital assets is a primary or separate function for your organisation, or whether it is an activity which happens primarily in the context of your collections management.

Workflows or no workflows

The implementation of workflows (also known as automation) has become a key feature of next-generation DAMS. A workflow is essentially a structured process represented as a series of steps or interactions.

Legacy systems are passive in the sense that they simply provide tools which support specific functionalities. By contract, a system can use workflows to help the user remember the stage of the process that they have reached and to prompt them to complete specific steps.

For example, a workflow-based DAMS would be able to let the user see whether they had completed the creation of metadata before uploading the asset to the system, and could remind them to check rights information before moving on to the next stage of the management process.

Workflows can be particularly useful where the users of a DAMS are spread across multiple sites, teams or departments, or where different teams are responsible for different parts of the process. By part-automating the process of creating and managing metadata, and associated management activities, they can significantly streamline digital asset management in your organisation.

Open Source or Commercial Product

Since the last decade, open source has emerged as a thriving alternative to the costs of commercial ownership of software platforms. However, while open source platforms are widely used to support large-scale organisations and enterprise IT systems, it is important to balance the relative strengths and weaknesses of open source and off-the-shelf commercial solutions when deciding which DAMS to choose.

Critically, it is important not to be distracted by the apparent price differential. Open source products may often be ‘free’ in the sense that there is no commercial restriction to obtaining the software itself, but it is often worth remembering that the lifetime cost of ownership (the total amount you will end up paying over the lifetime of using the software in your organisation) may often be more or less equivalent, depending on how much bespoke development you will need to undertake and on whether you have expert personnel on a permanent basis (or other than contracted staff) to perform any necessary updates and provide ongoing technical support.

Whether you choose to pursue the in-house development of a collections management system with integrated DAMS functionality or a standalone DAMS solution, you also need to consult the community (including personnel with a background and/or understanding and experience in cultural informatics, as well as in DAM) to identify needs and to define your metadata specifications, taking into account recognised European and international standards. In any case, technology alone is not the total solution but a powerful tool to enable you to improve your performance in accordance with the aims and objectives of your organisation.

On the positive side, open source products often offer excellent standards-compliance (because they tend to have been developed by communities with an active technical interest in the field) which will support broader interoperability with other systems.

Nor is it necessarily the case that ‘open source’ and commercial are mutually exclusive – there is a thriving industry of commercial providers who offer bespoke implementations, support and maintenance of open source platforms.

Ultimately, your decision should not be driven by the licensing model of the software, nor solely by price. Key considerations include:

• Fit of the core product/platform to your requirements
• Fit with your capacity and capabilities
• Whether you have the resource to manage the software internally
• Support community
• Flexibility
• Integration with your existing platforms

Supplier or Partner

Specifying, implementing and running a DAMS is not a precise science – it grows and adapts with the needs of your organisation and the demands of your users. It is often tempting when procuring a DAMS to compare the featuresets of different software platforms against a matrix of your functional requirements.

While this is a useful part of the process, you should also be aware that, unless you plan to obtain and manage the software yourself, a strong partnership with your software supplier is a key factor in the success of your project.

During the procurement process, it is important to meet with the supplier, talk to them about your needs and objectives, and gauge the extent to which they engage with what you are trying to achieve. Is their primary interest in selling you a product, or in ensuring that you get a stable, proportionate solution that genuinely meets your needs? Do they understand the business you are in, and are they able to offer testimonials from previous satisfied clients?

You are likely to have to live with your DAMS for a number of years, and by association with your DAMS supplier. Taking the time to find a supplier you can trust, and who engages with your mission, will reap significant benefits over the long-term.

The importance of this relationship is also a good reason to talk to your existing Collections Management System provider about their integrated DAMS functionality (or partner DAMS suppliers who they can recommend and have worked with before). Most SPECTRUM Partners now offer DAMS functionality as part of their overall support package, and this can significantly simplify the process of procurement, integration, rollout and support.

Locally or Remotely-hosted

With the Cloud now firmly established in the mainstream consumer market, an ever-increasing number of software providers are implementing solutions that you access and interact with remotely via your Web browser. Sometimes called Software-as-a-Service solutions, remotely hosted software can offer significant benefits to your organisation, including:

• Reduced software & storage cost
• Reduced demand on your organisation’s IT platform
• Improved technical support and upgrades
• Multi-site, multi-user access to a common repository of digital assets
• ‘Out of the box’ interoperability with other remotely-hosted datasets

However, there are some circumstances which might make a remotely-hosted solution impractical for your organisation – for example where your DAMS needs to integrate with a locally-hosted collections management system, or where you need to develop a large amount of bespoke functionality that does not form part of the ‘core’ remotely-hosted platform.

Many museums, galleries, archives and libraries have found that remotely-hosted solutions offer an excellent balance of affordability, stability and low technical barrier to entry. The extent to which this is the case for your organisation depends on the complexity of your requirements. However, it is equally possible to implement a fully-bespoke DAMS for your organisation that happens to be hosted and managed remotely on your behalf by a 3^rd party.

If your organisation has not worked with browser-based software (other than webmail or a Content Management System) before, it is advisable to implement a less high-profile pilot project before jumping in with a remotely-hosted DAMS. In terms of change management, some of your colleagues may find it difficult to move directly to a web-based DAMS without first having experienced both the advantages and disadvantages of this approach in a less high-profile context!

Typical Rapid Scaling Approach to DAMS

A typical rapid-scaling approach might include the following steps:

While it offers clear benefits in terms of speed and simplicity of implementation, these advantages can also become disadvantages where they mean that opportunities for integration and change management are missed.

In the long-term, this may result in the system failing to ‘bed down’ in the organisation or being rejected by its intended users.

‘Typical’ Planned Implementation of a DAMS

While rapid scaling can offer a fast and effective means of implementing a DAMS in your organisation, many DAMS implementation projects take place over a number of years, in incremental phases. There is no single approach which will guarantee a successful implementation of your DAMS. The example overleaf is composed from features of a number of successful DAMS implementation projects.

Migration of Digital Assets

It is commonly the case that your organisation will already have developed a number of solutions to the creation, storage, management, access and use of digital media. These might include:

• Using a networked or shared drive
• Using simple DAMS functionality in an existing system (such as a web content management system or collections management system)
• Developing bespoke solutions using Access, FileMaker or an equivalent system

In many instances, the teams responsible for these solutions will feel a strong sense of ownership over them, and in this case it may be more difficult to convince them of the need to change to a common system.

In light of this, it is useful to take a planned, long-term approach to the migration of digital assets from legacy systems into a centralised DAMS. It is often much easier to convince people of the need to change once they can see that there is a viable system in place which will support their needs!

Organisations

Collections Trust http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk

JISC Digital Media http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk

Digital Preservation Coalition http://www.dpconline.org

British Library Preservation Advisory Centre http://www.bl.uk/blpac

Digital Curation Centre http://www.dcc.ac.uk

JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk

Resources/links

Collections Trust Collections Management Software Survey, which includes information about DAMS functionality in SPECTRUM Partner systems (http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk)

Collections Trust Sustaining Digital resources, including guides on museum metadata and strategies for sustainability of digital assets (http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/item/1058-sustaining-digital-network)

Collections Trust’s Digital Benchmarks for the Culture Sector (http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/collections-link/museum-development-support/mda-codes/item/1608-digital-benchmarks-for-the-culture-sector)

Digital Preservation Coalition Digital Preservation Handbook (http://www.dpconline.org/advice/preservationhandbook)

Acknowledgements

The Collections Trust would like to express their thanks to the following individuals/organisations for their contribution to the evaluation and development of this document:

• Ben Sullivan, KE Software Ltd.
• Richard Light, MODES
• Effie Patsatzi
• Anne Harlow, Vernon Systems
• Eric de Caquerary, Mobydoc
• Sandra van Kleef, Cultureelerfgoed Nederland
• Hannah Pennock, Cultureelerfgoed Nederland
• Sanja Halling, Swedish National Archives
• Neil Smith, Knowledge Integration Ltd.
• Christiano Bianchi, Keepthinking Ltd.
• Roger Layton, Roger Layton Associates