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

Over time, Oxford University Museum of Natural History has accumulated, and continues to accumulate, digital assets. These include assets such as important images, video and sound 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 DAMS is the Digital Asset Management System needed by the Museum to enable:

• The ability to better find and use 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 capability for The Ashmolean, Pitt Rivers, and History of Science Museums. The implementation of the same DAMS system, ResourceSpace, across all museums will provide uniformity across GLAM which will enable more effective and efficient management across 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 May 2025. To date, the focus has been on working closely with the Museum team to validate requirements for the system including, for example:

• How the DAMS will be integrated with the Museum’s collections management system EMu, and
• What metadata (i.e. the data that is stored with, and describes, each asset) will be needed for the various asset types.

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

• Configuring the DAMS to meet the Museum’s requirements.
• Preparing the Museum’s digital assets to be migrated into the DAMS

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

Key project personnel

The Museum’s leadership team takes a key role in all project decisions, supported by:

Project Sponsor:  Eliza Howlett, OUMNH Head of Earth Collections and Digital Collections Lead

Senior User:  Sarah Joomun

Integration Representative:  Lukasz Kowalski

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