Adapting a DAMS to Support Cross-Departmental DAM Workflows in Museums

Mar 17

Implementing effective cross-functional digital asset management (DAM) workflows in museums can be tricky.

What’s even trickier? Without them in place, your teams can end up working in departmental silos using separate workflows. This leads to inefficiency, wasted time, duplicated work, and lost productivity—or at worst, lost assets, missing data, or copyright and licensing issues.

It doesn’t need to be this way. A digital asset management system (DAMS) can help you break free of departmental silos while protecting your digital assets and metadata.

Implementing an adaptable DAMS with modern functionality can streamline collaboration and processes—but first, you need to know what features to look for.

Understanding cross-departmental DAM workflows

Cross-departmental DAM workflows in museums are any process where multiple museum teams interact with the same digital asset.

More staff than ever want access to their museum’s DAMS—but having more users can create issues around version control, copyright and use, and user access.

The right DAMS can help prevent these challenges from materializing while supporting cross-departmental DAM workflows in museums. For instance, it can:

Streamline communications: When multiple teams can work on the same asset with robust version control mechanisms, you can eliminate multiple emails or calls between teams about where to find the “final version.”
Store important information alongside digital assets: Your DAMS can enable you to store metadata, rights and licensing, and other important information with each digital asset, rather than in a different location.
Protect your digital asset security: You can implement strict user permissions that specify what different internal and external users can and can’t see and edit.

Selecting a DAMS that’s purpose-built for the GLAM sector can be a lifesaver in museums. It’s able to preserve the care, security, versioning, and proper usage of your institution’s digital assets and metadata, while also supporting common collaborative scenarios like exhibition planning, usage requests, and external partnerships.

Which museum departments can benefit from using a DAMS?

The short answer? All of them.

A digital asset management system can support your museum’s departments to store, access, manage, and preserve their digital assets. By accommodating each department’s workflows, it empowers team members to collaborate seamlessly—both intra- and inter-departmentally.

Let’s explore how using an adaptable, collaboration-friendly DAMS offers specific benefits for each museum department.

Collections Management

Collections management teams can leverage a DAMS to support their cataloguing and preservation responsibilities.

By improving their efficiency and streamlining processes, it can also reduce the time needed to respond to inquiries or search for digital assets and metadata:

Organize and keep track of digital assets: The team can use the DAMS to store, organize, and manage the digital surrogates of collections objects in a central location. This makes it easier to track, catalogue, and preserve your museum’s digital assets. It’s also less likely for information to accidentally fall through the cracks.
Improve access to collections: After you define user permission levels, researchers and other departments can access approved digital assets in your DAMS without submitting a request for approval. This cuts down on time spent responding to inquiries.
Source images for creating online collections: A centralized hub for digital assets makes it easier for the team to search for images in your DAMS and add them to online collections. It’s even easier when your DAMS is integrated with your collections engagement solution.
Streamline loan processes: Attach loan information to digital assets in the DAMS, including loan status, who the asset was loaned to, and for how long. Your staff will save time and effort when they no longer have to hunt this information down in separate folders, emails, or spreadsheets.

Database Management

Your digital asset manager’s role is to oversee the DAMS as an admin. A DAMS helps them and the database team support cross-departmental workflows through standardization and integration with your current tech stack, while keeping assets and sensitive information safe:

Monitor and safeguard digital asset history: Database managers can oversee the full lifecycle of digital assets from ingest to preservation. Implementing version control to track changes and manage asset history can make sure the correct versions of assets are being used.
Standardize usage: The team can establish standard workflows in your DAMS and uphold the proper use of digital assets. Standardization improves efficiency and asset discoverability while making it easier to onboard new volunteers, interns, and staff.
Create seamless data flow via integration: Before investing effort in purchasing a new DAMS, make sure it will play nicely with your existing tech stack. When it integrates well with your other museum solutions, such as your collections management system (CMS), data can flow seamlessly, improving your efficiency across departments.
Protect sensitive information with permissions: Your DAMS admins can configure permissions down to the individual user level. Proper permissions ensure your users—whether museum staff or external stakeholders—can only access and edit information within strictly defined rules. This prevents unauthorized access to sensitive information and safeguards your digital assets.

Curatorial

Curators benefit from a DAMS because it centralizes all digital assets in the same place. They can find what they need quickly, create links between assets and important information, and collaborate across teams to create impactful exhibitions:

Centralized storage for efficient access: A cloud-native DAMS offers curators a unified repository for their digital assets and associated data. During the acquisition process, for instance, they can collectively store the details on each new object’s history and provenance, related digital assets, and all documentation. Using the DAMS search feature, the team can also easily locate the digital assets and metadata they need for exhibition planning, display creation, and conducting research.
Keep track of how digital assets are received or loaned: Curators can use a DAMS to track key information attached to digital assets when they are received or packaged for loans. This tracking reduces confusion and prevents the loss of important information throughout an asset’s lifecycle.
Improve collaboration and access: A DAMS gives curators a central space to share and annotate digital assets together, eliminating confusing email chains and large spreadsheets. With metadata and rights and licensing information attached to each asset, it’s easy and more efficient to give proper credit and create object labels for museum artwork.

Archival

A DAMS offers helpful benefits for your archival team, especially when digitizing archival materials, preserving digital assets, and sharing digital assets with larger audiences:

Support digital preservation: A DAMS helps archivists digitize and preserve historical documents, photographs, and other archival materials. Through implementing preservation standards, they can ensure your museum’s digital archives are kept safe, secure, and accessible for future generations.
Share access to digital assets: By creating a digital library or online repository, archivists can expand access to your collections and share selected assets with scholars, educators, and the public. These stakeholders can be given specific access permissions, so they can only see the digital assets your museum wants to share.
Improve asset cataloguing and retrievability: Depending on your DAMS, its built-in features can significantly improve your archival team’s efficiency. For example, bulk upload tools can speed up asset ingestion time, and AI-powered optical character recognition (OCR) technology can convert text or handwritten information into searchable metadata.

Conservation

Museum conservators can leverage a DAMS to support their conservation efforts, keep track of treatments, and protect sensitive information by setting up strict permissions:

Improve efficiency and access: A DAMS gives your conservation team a home for all their important digital documentation. They can store information on preservation treatments, condition reports, and before-and-after images of restored objects together on the platform, improving efficiency and ease of access.
Restrict access to departmental data: Access to certain sensitive conservation files will need to be restricted to only conservation team members. Your museum’s DAMS can be set up so these materials are not shared with anyone outside the conservation team.

Marketing and Communications

A DAMS helps your marketing and communications team create campaigns more quickly by offering a centralized place to store your museum’s brand assets, guidelines, and marketing collateral:

Support and streamline campaigns: Marketers can use your DAMS to ensure they’re accessing the correct digital assets for promotional purposes, social media content, and press releases.
Track usage rights and ensure proper attribution: Before using any digital asset, your marketing and communications team must confirm the usage rights and attribution required. This information can accompany each digital asset record in your DAMS. The team can get the information they need quickly and efficiently, rather than reaching out to other staff members.
Ensure consistent branding: Marketing staff can create a central brand asset library in your DAMS that includes logos, brand guidelines, colour palette information, and approved content templates. Having this information readily available helps ensure brand assets are used consistently in all public-facing materials.

Education

Your education department’s lives are much easier with a central locale to store educational documents and share them with other team members and the public:

Have a central location for resources and documents: With a DAMS, the education team can store digital learning resources and educational documents in the same place, making them accessible and easy to find.
Improve accessibility and version control: A DAMS can make sure educational materials are easily accessible, with the most recent versions available for internal and external stakeholders. Education staff can also guide the content’s usage by sharing other relevant information, such as which grade level it’s appropriate for.
Share access to educational assets: The team can share selected assets with researchers, teachers, or students via digital libraries or online repositories. With a flexible DAMS, you can configure each stakeholder’s access permissions, so they only see the content that’s most suited to them.

Research and Publications

To support collaboration, a DAMS gives your research and publications team a central hub to store, manage, and access digital assets and scholarly materials:

Centralize research materials: Staff can streamline the preparation of materials when there’s a single place to store all research materials, including images, documents, and datasets.
Manage digital assets: The department plays a key role in ensuring your museum’s digital assets are accurately featured in academic publications and museum catalogues. Using the DAMS, staff can find the information they need, share select asset information, and refer to each asset’s copyright and usage information to uphold proper usage.
Collaborate with external researchers: Your team can securely share digital assets with external researchers, granting them access with customized permissions in your DAMS.
Link published works to source materials and objects: When the team publishes materials like research papers, a link can be added to the associated records in the DAMS to provide more context and ensure proper attribution.

Photography

A cloud-native DAMS offers infinite scalability for adding large files. It also helps your photography team maintain standardization, streamline workflows, and boost efficiency:

Store, organize, and share high-resolution images: Not long ago, photography teams had to store high-resolution images on desktop computers or external hard drives due to file size and space constraints. A cloud-native DAMS provides a single location to store, organize, and share these files that’s accessible from anywhere with a web browser. No more treks to the museum’s basement!
Streamline photography workflows: Having a DAMS with AI-powered features can help your photography department automate metadata creation and image tagging, saving them valuable time during ingestion.
Maintain standardization: The photography team is responsible for ensuring colour profiles and image quality standards are consistent across your institution. Having a DAMS can help them share this information with various collaborators, so everyone is clear on which profiles and standards should be used and when.
Improve efficiency: Photography staff are constantly fielding image requests and fulfillment processes, and providing requestors with the correct file versions and their corresponding copyright information. With a DAMS, this process becomes much easier. When all files can be stored in one location, it eliminates issues surrounding multiple versions of photos, duplication, and missing information.

Collaboration-friendly features to look for in a DAMS

A DAMS must make collaboration easy and efficient to effectively support cross-departmental DAM workflows in museums.

If you're selecting a new DAMS, or evaluating other options if your current system isn’t meeting your needs, there are important collaboration-friendly features you should look for.

Cloud-native storage

Microsoft defines the cloud as “a global network of remote servers designed to store and process data.” One important difference between cloud storage and traditional methods—such as hard drives and USB sticks—is the cloud can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection.

Cloud-native applications are built in and optimized to function well in the cloud. A cloud-native DAMS enables your museum’s departments to access digital assets in a secure, centralized location.

Because it’s infinitely scalable, you can start by adding as many digital assets as you like and scale up when needed. This is especially useful if you’re not sure how much storage you’ll need over time.

Not all cloud-native DAMS are the same. It’s best to choose a platform with robust security settings, such as Terentia’s Microsoft Azure-powered platform. Not prioritizing a secure environment could leave your DAMS vulnerable to potential security breaches.

Flexible metadata schemas

Configurable metadata schemas, set up by your digital asset manager, allow your museum’s departments to organize, tag, and retrieve digital assets according to their unique needs. This is possible through linked data, controlled vocabularies, or taxonomy-based classifications.

These schemas support collaboration and cross-functional DAM workflows in museums because each department can use the DAMS in a way that makes sense for them.

Customizable metadata schemas often require complex coding, extra money, or long wait periods to update. In contrast, your team can easily modify configurable metadata schemas—like those offered by Terentia—as needed. No need to learn how to code!

Intuitive search

Intuitive search capabilities make life much easier for your museum’s team members, who no longer need to rely on complicated Boolean queries or overly-detailed search terms.

Advanced search and retrieval capabilities—ideally powered by AI—make it fast and easy to locate the digital assets within your museum’s DAMS. These capabilities also support cross-departmental DAM workflows by reducing the number of inquiries team members send each other.

Role-based access

Role-based access empowers you to set granular security settings for your users based on their role and museum department. They can also establish these permissions for external stakeholders, such as curators from a partner institution.

To maintain proper usage and privacy, these DAMS permissions give your admins full control over who can view, edit, and download the institution's digital assets.

Version control and lifecycle management

Powerful version control features help your museum’s teams track changes, maintain asset history, and prevent duplication or loss.

Because the assets are stored in the same central repository, teams do not need to duplicate assets to add to their own workflows or save information in only the places they can access. Each team can simply use the DAMS to access and modify what they need.

Some users may still be concerned about adding information to the DAMS that they don’t want other teams to see. While emphasizing the importance of collaboration, remind them their team can have permissions set up to ensure only their members can see their data.

Built-in copyright and licensing

Mishandling or losing track of copyright and licensing information can lead to security and legal issues.

Having a DAMS that supports copyright management, licensing, and the proper usage of digital assets—ideally by having the functionality to append this data to each asset—can reduce these risks. It’s critical for public-facing content, such as exhibition materials, the museum’s website, and third-party publications by media outlets.

Built-in copyright and licensing also supports cross-functional collaboration, as it reduces back-and-forth inquiries between departments to confirm this important information.

Effortless integration with your software stack

To ensure effective cross-departmental DAM workflows at your museum, choose a DAMS that integrates well with your CMS and the rest of your GLAM software stack.

Creating a cohesive digital ecosystem makes sharing, managing, and protecting your institution’s digital assets much easier and more efficient. Terentia’s DAMS integrates with:

Microsoft Azure
Microsoft 365
Adobe Creative Cloud
CI Hub
Figma
Google Workspace
SharePoint
Sketch
WordPress

Museums can use the Terentia DAMS with the rest of the Terentia platform or their existing collections management system.

Unlimited DAMS users

With no cap on users (as offered by Terentia), you can add as many team members as you want to your DAMS without extra charges.

Every department at your museum can access, contribute to, and manage their digital assets effectively, and you never need to worry about being unable to afford to add new users in the future.

When new users are added, follow best practices and update their permissions to reflect the appropriate access level.

Best practices for cross-departmental DAM workflows

Adopting certain best practices can improve cross-departmental DAM workflows in museums. Follow these tips to guide your way, provide clarity to your team members, and support user adoption.

Help users understand the why

A new DAMS can represent a huge change for your staff members. To support effective adoption, share the long-term advantages the DAMS will provide to their departments.

Sharing specific information, such as why certain metadata fields are being used, can also be helpful. You can include this information in your governance documentation—which describes your museum’s structure, rules, processes and procedures—or workflow documentation.

Establish clear governance policies for your DAMS users

Clear policies help ensure everyone uses your DAMS consistently while keeping your digital assets organized, protected, and correctly used in line with legal and ethical regulations.

Plus, ensure these policies are well-documented in your governance documentation.

Standardize naming conventions and metadata standards

Without effective conventions and standardization, your digital assets and their associated metadata can rapidly become disorganized.

Before implementing a new DAMS, start by asking what your DAMS needs to achieve to be successful and support your museum’s cross-departmental DAM workflows.

Then, work backward to determine the conventions and standards you need to implement. For example, say you know you need to export data in a certain standard. At the beginning, you must ensure that the data entry fields you choose will support that export standard.

Develop approval workflows for digital assets used by multiple teams

To foster effective collaboration, consider which types of assets need to be accessed by multiple teams and how they will use them.

Clearly set up approval workflows in a way that makes sense for everyone who touches the asset and makes their jobs easier, not harder. Establishing effective new workflows makes slipping back into older, siloed workflows less likely.

Train staff across departments on DAMS usage and best practices

Training is essential for encouraging user adoption. Depending on their roles, not everyone may be familiar with common DAMS-related terms (like metadata schema), so explaining these is helpful to ensure everyone has the same understanding.

Plan regular refresher training and create user guides that staff can reference when they aren’t sure how to do something. This will help prevent teams from going back to working in silos.

DAMS training doesn’t need to be overwhelming. You can always start small by onboarding a few select teams and training other users in waves as you add new departments.

Set up granular security and access controls for different user roles

Before implementing user permissions and access controls, carefully consider who should be able to access what.

Flexibility is key—having a DAMS that can support distinct permissions down to the user level helps ensure your digital assets stay safe and protected.

Build better DAM workflows with Terentia

Designing effective cross-departmental DAM workflows in museums and adapting a DAMS to meet your museum’s specific needs is possible with the right DAMS.

When you select a DAMS with collaboration-friendly features, build a solid implementation plan, and follow best practices to set up cross-departmental DAM workflows, you can transform the way your museum teams collaborate.

Part of Terentia’s next-generation platform, our DAMS is built to support all sizes and kinds of GLAM institutions. It offers API integrations with your digital ecosystem, AI-powered features, and flexible metadata management. No matter where you are in your DAMS journey, our expert team can support your institution’s unique needs.

Ready to build better workflows for digital asset management? Book a demo with Terentia to see how our DAMS can support every department in your museum.

Rachel Harris