How the National Historical Museums of Sweden succeed with DAM

With millions of digital assets stored and thousands flowing through the systems on a regular basis, the agency relies on effective content workflows to ensure control and enable comprehensive digital collections. While most files are photographs of the museums objects, the National Historical Museums also store other forms of content, ranging from films and marketing materials to pdf’s, historical images, and event imagery, resulting in the need for a flexible solution to cover various use cases and needs.

In this article, we’ll explore how they use Digital Asset Management (DAM) to efficiently store, manage, and distribute their massive collections of content items - ensuring smooth and scalable workflows.

Making every asset searchable

By storing digital assets in one central platform, the Historical Museums can ensure a single source of truth across their collections, making every content item easily searchable and avoiding duplicates.

Since the system is based on metadata, it allows for a flexible and user-friendly setup, enhancing the discoverability of every asset. Users of the system can search by intuitive keywords and filter their way through massive collections, finding the right file in seconds without having to ask around. This is particularly useful for people working with Marketing and Communications, as well as Curators and Archivists, who often need to access specific assets. Their use cases may vary, including everything from managing digital collections and exhibitions to locating the correct content items to use in campaigns or for PR purposes.

The process of adding and adjusting metadata is partly automized through metadata-driven workflows and datasets, which have been specifically tailored to the agency’s needs. By taking advantage of the image management tool, FotoStation, photo archivists at the Historical Museums can stack multiple actions, enabling efficient metadata corrections. The tool also allows for linked keyword-lists, which enable relational metadata structures, minimizing the task of tagging assets with updated information.

LEARN MORE: How to leverage AI for Digital Asset Management

Collaboration across museums

Having one solution for seven museums is an efficient way of fostering seamless collaboration. However, it requires a strict setup and a single source of truth across the institutions to ensure control and efficiency. With Fotoware, the National Historical Museums of Sweden can ensure that all assets are available—and easy to locate—in one central place. This allows everyone to collaborate more easily and offers stakeholders a central place to look for specific content items.

Keeping track of licenses

When new assets are uploaded to the Fotoware DAM solution, they are through automated macros enriched with metadata before finally being reviewed by an administrator, who may add additional metadata before archiving the assets. As a part of this process, the Historical Museums can ensure that every asset is properly tagged with the right licenses and that this data is easily available to all stakeholders.

Licenses and image rights are highly important to the agency since certain types of photos may be in the public domain while others aren’t. By effectively using the DAM system, they can easily tag files with the correct information, ensuring that the assets are accessible to the right people for the right purposes.

READ MORE: Interactive markers and workflow automation at Queensland Museum

Preserving cultural heritage

In the realm of Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAMs), content is key, and a great amount of it is usually stored across systems, platforms, and physical locations. In order to handle them securely and sustainably, it’s crucial to invest in scalable systems that are configurable and with a potential for advanced automation.