How the White House Historical Association uses DAM to preserve and share history

29. January 2024 Eunbyeol Koh

— "Fotoware has expanded our potential, broadened our user base, and allowed for the rapid growth of our collection."

Stephanie Tuszynski

Director of the Digital Library at WHHA

The White House Historical Association (WHHA) is a non-profit organization striving to protect, preserve and provide public access to the rich history of the official residence and workplace of the President of the United States.

Founded in 1961 by First lady Jacqueline Kennedy, they do educational outreach and work with other non-profits and organizations to promote the history of the White House.

300,000

DIGITAL ASSETS
4,000

USERS
6,000

MONTHLY VIEWS

Background

In 2016 the WHHA launched their digital library, which contains about 20,000 publicly available assets, over 300,000 internally available assets, and about 4,000 registered users who utilize over 60 descriptive metadata fields. The digital library is supported by the Fotoware Digital Asset Management solution and is in part open to the public.

— "The old system was very static and it wasn’t being updated with new material, so there wasn’t any incentive for people to come back more than once."

Stephanie Tuszynski

Director of the Digital Library at WHHA

Challenges

Multiple Storage Systems

The old system only enabled WHHA staff to upload photos to the public archive. It became difficult to organize the library, and pictures that were not for public-use needed to be stored somewhere else. This made the public archive very static, and difficult to control.

This was a source of great inefficiency in the publishing workflow, and was particularly difficult with staff based all across the world in different time zones, working around the relentlessly fast-paced, 24/7 news cycle.

Manual reviews and approvals

Keeping the quality consistent across the entire system required a multi-step review process. Previously, this had been done through excel sheets and email correspondence, which was both time-consuming and difficult to keep track of. There was always a risk of losing important notes, or having a review process stopped due to a human error, since images and notes needed to be sent and retrieved from different platforms.

— "Registered users of the Digital Library can now log in and save photos to an album, download images individually and pin materials to save them for viewing later."

Stephanie Tuszynski

Director of the Digital Library at WHHA

LEARN MORE: Beyond digitization: How DAM helps Museums manage their collections.

Solutions

A central storage solution

After implementing Fotoware, the White House Historical Association has been able to have multiple archives. Whereas some archives are for internal use, one is also open to the public, and the configuration of the site makes it possible to scroll through photos by using both taxonomies or a search function. This keeps the public archive alive and easy to navigate within. While the internal archives make it easier to work with files not approved for public use.

LEARN MORE: How Queensland Museum runs 3 different web archives - for staff, research labs, and the public.

White House historical Association brooklyn bridge

Automated approval workflows

The review process is optimized by using a customized workflow. On the front end, this workflow consists of a couple of ‘set review’ actions, which sends the asset(s) to and from the Historian and Librarian team for approval. Lastly, the asset(s) will be sent to the Digital Library team for final approval. In this way, the entire review process is done within the DAM, tracking every step of the way.

— "If someone wanted an image from us we had to do everything via email and then send them the file transfer through something like Dropbox, which was very labor-intensive and cumbersome for employees. Now, it means that something which previously took several days has been cut down to just a few hours."

Stephanie Tuszynski

Director of the Digital Library at WHHA

READ MORE: How the White House Historical Association Increased the Fotoware ROI

Added Benefits

Shopping Cart Integration

By enabling a shopping cart integration within the Fotoware interface, the White House Historical Association can now easily sell images to members of the public. Now, users can easily request size and format for the image and order it in high resolution.

CMS Integration

An API that was built in 2019 links the White House Historical Association’s website to its digital library. In this way, everyone gets access to the public archives when clicking on a photo. The API also helps the marketing and communication departments to work more efficiently with their photos, as their DAM is now integrated with their CMS, which enables employees to simply select the pictures they want to use, removing the need for time-consuming uploading and downloading between platforms.

How the White House Historical Association uses DAM to preserve and share history

300,000

4,000

6,000