Museum of Natural History - Digital Asset Management System (DAMS)

Improving the way we manage the Museum's digital assets

Over time, Oxford University Museum of Natural History has accumulated, and continues to accumulate, a large number of digital assets. These include assets such as images, video and audio files which the Museum wishes to preserve for research, curatorial, conservation, and commercial purposes.

As with its physical collections, the management of the Museum’s digital assets is critical to its purpose and, in line with the Gardens, Libraries and Museums (GLAM) Digital Strategy, the Museum aims to “Build and maintain key infrastructure to ensure the secure and safe storage and management of its digital assets, ensuring the integrity, authenticity and validation of stored digital content.”

Why does the Museum need a DAMS?

The Digital Asset Management System is needed by the Museum to enable:

  • Easier access to the Museum’s digital assets.
  • More control over who can access those assets, and how and when they are used.
  • Long-term preservation to ensure the assets continue to be accessible and usable for generations to come.

This project continues the work already undertaken to deliver Digital Asset Management Systems for the Ashmolean, Pitt Rivers, and History of Science Museums. The use of the same DAMS system, ResourceSpace, across all the museums will provide uniformity across GLAM which will enable more effective and efficient management of GLAM’s digital estate.

More about the DAMS project

The DAMS project started in March 2023, and the new DAMS is planned to go-live in September 2025. To date, the focus has been on working closely with the Museum team to:

  • Validate requirements for the system including:
    • What metadata (i.e. the data that is stored with, and describes, each asset) will be needed for the various asset types.
    • How the DAMS will be integrated with the Museum’s collections management system EMu.
  • Configuring the DAMS to meet the Museum’s requirements.
  • Migrating the Museum’s digital assets into the DAMS.
  • Providing training for the Public Engagement team so they can have early access to the system and feed back to the project team.

The project is now focussed on the final steps needed to get the DAMS in place and ready to use.  These activities include:

  • Further migration of the Museum's digital assets into the DAMS.
  • Development of the integration with EMu.
  • Delivering training to other DAMS users, including the Collections, Research and Operations teams.

The high-level project plan, showing the key stages to go-live is provided below.

Key project personnel

The Museum’s Senior Leadership Team provides oversight of the DAMS project, supported by:

Project Sponsor:  Eliza Howlett, OUMNH

Senior User:  Sarah Joomun, OUMNH

Integration Representative:  Lukasz Kowalski, OUMNH

Portfolio Manager:  James Mundey, IT Services

Project Manager: Matt Ingram, IT Services

Want to know more?

If you would like to know more about the project, you can contact the project team via email at:  damsprojectteam@it.ox.ac.uk
 

Contact

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