Date: 2019-2020 (staff member); November 2021 (consultant)
Brief: A digital asset management system (ResourceSpace, fully-supported by Montala) was procured for the History of Science Museum, along with other departments in Oxford University’s Gardens, Libraries and Museums (GLAM). The DAMS was used as an intranet, primarily for its object photography. It needed broad stakeholder adoption and to be integrated with the existing collections management system (Axiell EMu).
Roles: As the coordinator of digital projects at HSM, I was involved in the selection of the DAMS and then was responsible for its implementation, including the ingestion of tranches, together with documentation and basic training. For the consultancy I provided further support for this process.
Solution: Considerable preparation was required before we could use the system. I undertook or oversaw a number of stages, including the development of policy comprising a digital preservation policy, retention schedules and data protection. These ran alongside a digital assets audit, metadata specification process (involving all potential stakeholders), system requirements, data export, cleansing, munging and ingestion. As it was messy, I developed a Digital Assets Toolkit, comprising a set of custom scripts for some of the heavy lifting.
URL: https://www.glam.ox.ac.uk/digital-asset-management-system-dams-project
HSM DAMS: main dashboard
During implementation, as the system administrator, I monitored ingestions (aided by the graph).
Screenshot from the HSM DAMS, using ResourceSpace, available as open source software.
HSM DAMS: Collection Categories
Alternatively, it can record events (especially using video).
Furthermore, integration with Axiell EMu collections management system allows for specialist fields to be imported, as for Conservation.
Screenshot from the HSM DAMS, using ResourceSpace, available as open source software.
HSM DAMS: Featured Collection
A number of featured collection categories have been defined, including studio photography for a book, Director’s Choice.
The screenshot is from the HSM DAMS, which uses ResourceSpace, available as open source software.
HSM DAMS asset preview
The system can generate numerous derivatives, according to the purpose and user.
Depending on your access rights, one or more of these may be available for download.
Screenshot from the History of Science Museum’s DAMS system, using ResourceSpace.
HSM DAMS – Resource Tools
The system can generate numerous derivatives, according to the purpose and user.
Depending on your access rights, one or more of these may be available for download.
For the resource details, I arranged the metadata according to work areas. The tabs vary according to the resource type.
Screenshot from the History of Science Museum’s DAMS system, using ResourceSpace.
HSM DAMS – Related Resources
Screenshot from the History of Science Museum’s DAMS system, using ResourceSpace.
HSM EMu exports specification
Furthermore, the DAMS was populated with EMu data through ingestion (before systems integration).
This is part of the specification I devised for the export from EMu to support the process,
including a ResourceSpace ‘field type’ column indicated how it is to be presented in ResourceSpace.
Documentation from the History of Science Museum, University of Oxford
HSM Digital Assets Toolkit
cataloguing data was in spreadsheets, not always consistently maintained.
Valuable metadata was tied up in the filesystems. So, with the assistance of reports from TreeSize Pro,
this toolkit extracted the metadata and married it to EMu records, with various data cleansing.
Screenshot from an intranet of the History of Science Museum, University of Oxford
Tags
collections, digital assets, GLAM, ingestion, metadata, museums, Oxford, publishing, ResourceSpace, software
This page was published on 21 May 2022 and last updated on August 10, 2022.