The Evolution of a Museum's Digital Asset Management system

For many museums, the journey into Digital Asset Management begins with the need to digitize their physical collection. While museums have traditionally used Collections Management Systems to manage their physical objects, the need to sync that data with a digital asset management system has become an increasingly important part of their workflow.

So if phase one is to digitize your collection, stage two is to configure and a DAM and establish an integration with your CMS platform, then what is stage three?

Museums are showing an increasing interest in Portals with the goal of communicating with a larger audience. Up until this point, digital asset management systems have been a research tool for curators and others within the museum, but we’re now seeing a more genuine interest in sharing their collection with a wider audience.

Portals can help solve a few problems for museums. On the one hand, Portals provide a dead-simple search platform for people to search, filter, and sift through a collection to find what they’re looking for. Portals allow our museum customers to not only curate their collections, but also find the relevant metadata that accompanies the asset. This is extremely helpful for teams with large taxonomies. While data is valuable, displaying all of your internal metadata fields may be overwhelming for an end-user who is only interested in per tenant information about a piece of art.

The other way Portals can be helpful for museums is to showcase current exhibitions. While many researchers are extremely interested in very specific works of art, others are generally more interested in what current exhibits are being hosted. Micro CMS pages within NetX Portals allow museums to build out content and images to showcase such exhibitions in a compelling way. Choose from one of our pre-existing templates to quickly showcase new exhibitions and easily place those pages into a searchable pull-down menu.

Another great use of Portals can be to see what people enjoyed while at your museum. Quickly make an Asset Request Form in NetX and imbed that link into your Portal, allowing museum-goers to upload photos from their recent visit. Allow them to tag the photos with their name and other keywords so you can call them out when sharing their experience on your social media platforms and within your Portal. These uploads can trigger a notification to your admins and can be quarantined until your team has had a chance to review them.

Digital asset management systems are a big topic, especially when it comes to museums and the endless possibilities. Looking for more information on how NetX can help with your museum? Schedule a call today!