Digital asset and consent management for museums, archives and collections

Most collections have been digitised more than once, by different people, to different standards, into whatever system was used at the time. The images survive, but 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.

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 every time
• 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
• Consent linked to the person for anyone identifiable in the collection, oral history subjects, donors, more recent acquisitions, so it's tracked the same way it would be anywhere else in the platform

An image you can't publish doesn't need to disappear to stay safe. Flag it as restricted and it stays in the catalogue, visible and explained, so nobody rediscovers the gap years later with no idea why it's there.