Solutions
Digital asset management for museums and archives
Decades of digitisation in one catalogue, with provenance, rights and reproduction terms recorded beside each image — and controlled vocabularies so two people cataloguing the same object agree.
The collection is digitised. The catalogue is in six places
Most collections have been digitised more than once, by different people, to different standards, into whatever system was current at the time. The images survive. What tends not to survive is the connection between an image and everything known about it.
So the rights position sits in a spreadsheet, the provenance in a database that no longer has a maintainer, the reproduction terms in the memory of a curator, and the keywords in whatever words each cataloguer happened to use that year.
The result is a collection that is technically online and practically unusable: a press office that cannot establish what it may publish, a researcher who cannot find what exists, and a digitisation budget spent twice on the same object.
What the platform does
The same six jobs on every sector page. What follows is what each one means for a collection.
One library
One catalogue for the whole collection, however many digitisation projects produced it, with existing IPTC and XMP metadata carried across rather than flattened.
Search that finds it
Search across catalogued fields, keywords, captions and your own vocabularies — and by what an image looks like when nobody wrote down what it shows.
Who can see what
Reading-room access without an account for everything: researchers see what you have cleared for research, the press office sees what is cleared to publish.
Sending files out
Send a watermarked preview for an enquiry and the full file once terms are agreed, as a link that expires rather than a permanent copy.
Consent on the file
Rights, provenance and reproduction terms recorded against the object. What may be published, by whom, and until when is a property of the record.
A record of what happened
A log of every download and share, so a rights holder’s question about where an image has appeared has an answer.
What changes day to day
Cataloguing gets more consistent, and access stops depending on who is in the building:
- A thesaurus and controlled country lists, so the same object is described the same way twice
- Custom fields for accession numbers and whatever your cataloguing standard requires
- Bulk upload for a digitisation batch, with metadata read from the files
- An API, so the collections website reads from the catalogue instead of holding a second copy
- Rights terms that lapse take the image out of circulation on their own
And the images you cannot publish stay in the catalogue, marked as such, rather than being kept out of it and rediscovered by somebody who does not know why they were missing.
Questions collections ask
Will our existing metadata survive a migration?
Yes. Embedded IPTC and XMP come across with the files, and anything held alongside them maps onto custom fields. We do the migration as part of setting you up.
Can researchers get access without an account for the whole system?
Yes — a workspace or a share link gives someone exactly the material you have cleared for them, for as long as you decide.
What about images we hold but do not own the rights to?
They stay in the catalogue with their terms recorded, and permissions stop them being downloaded by people who cannot use them.
How does it scale as we digitise more?
Storage grows without a new quote, and every reader you add costs nothing — the licence covers the institution rather than a number of seats.
Related reading
March 13, 2025
Why DAM for GLAM Matters: The Key to Accessible and Organised Archives
Discover how DAM for GLAM preserves archives, connects past to present, and unlocks true value for galleries, libraries, and museums. Read more now.
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June 24, 2025
Unlocking the Power of Archives with Digital Asset Management
Archives matter now more than ever! Discover why, and how digital asset management (DAM) helps preserve, access, and bring history to life in the digital age.
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Next step
Talk to us about your collection
Tell us how the collection was digitised and what state the cataloguing is in. We will show you the platform with a sample of your own material.