One DAMS, multiple applications: maximising return on investment in the context of digital collections
Return on investment from your digital asset management system (DAMS) can take many forms, from demonstrating operational efficiencies and broader reach and impact for your projects to new opportunities for collaboration and the ability to achieve more from a single solution.
The myriad benefits of serving multiple audiences with separate digital collections sites, all managed from one flexible, powerful and efficient DAMS, are being realised by libraries and archives across the US and around the world.
Harnessing digital assets to tell multiple stories
The limitation of being able to assign a digitised asset to only one digital collection, with little scope for onward discovery, is a frustration that poorly serves patrons and causes unnecessary duplications of uploaded assets and increased workloads and hosting costs.
The J. Paul Leonard Library at San Francisco State University (SFSU) is relaunching its core digital collections using the same DAMS as its internal partner, the Bay Area TV Archive. BATA has used the system since 2020 and was instrumental in developing functionality to enhance search and accessibility of its 300-plus hours of rare TV footage. The SFSU library will leverage this rich audio-visual resource and amplify its impact by applying selected assets to new thematic collections and exhibits.
This flexibility allows us to aggregate content across library units while retaining the distinctiveness of individual collections. Access to this broad repository allows us to really think about the wider historical significance of assets and present them through different lenses to serve different research needs and projects.
Facilitating how different audiences search and discover content
CJ Williams, Technical Services Manager at Harris County Public Library, and Laney Chavez, Archivist at Harris County Archives, have shared a single DAMS instance since 2021.
While each partner operates differently and serves discrete audiences, they agree that the ability to share digital assets through separate public websites has tangibly benefited both partners.
I had been working with an extensive video collection to enrich the library site but realised how much relevance it had for the archives’ site. Having already processed the metadata in the DAMS, editing it to meet the archives’ required standards and then making the collection publicly discoverable was easy. It’s an efficient, customisable and mutually beneficial process, creating opportunities to share new content and enabling both organisations to better serve our patrons’ needs.
While these partners use customised metadata models to serve the different needs of their audiences, SFSU seized the opportunity to standardise metadata across its organisation.
Sharing digitised content from across library units in one system has allowed us to evaluate engrained methods of cataloguing and collaboratively develop new classifications. We expect this to simplify user discovery for our faculty and students and better facilitate data harvesting to our state content aggregator.
Creating impact through collaboration
The ability to multiply the use of digital assets and publish multiple sites from one DAMS can also be a catalyst for meaningful collaboration beyond organisational silos, creating profound and long-lasting benefits.
The University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM) is leading the way in publishing additional sites to support faculty research as well as its own growing corpus of digital collections. From oral histories to highly specialised research into economic and social themes, each individual site represents a further successful collaboration across campus.
In 2021, Syracuse University Libraries’ campus partner, the D’Aniello Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IVMF), sought advice from the libraries regarding the development of a public-facing portal for its internally produced research and curated external resources.
We had recently adopted our DAMS and begun building our core digital collections when we realised how it could also support the IVMF’s digital library project. The system’s content management and public user interface elements enable us to create multiple, bespoke portals to display content for these different audiences, while the DAMS itself lets us platform our owned content and maintain intellectual control over digitised materials.
Following the launch of the IVMF portal, SU Libraries has continued to further maximise its investment by building several additional interfaces from its single DAMS instance, both for external and internal use. “That really is one of the most exciting things – the scope to do more with the services we already have,” says Déirdre Joyce.
The possibilities for capturing further return on investment for these and further institutions are confined only by the creativity and capacity of libraries and researchers, and by the flexibility of the technologies that support digital collections and digital humanities projects.
Technology vendors must also be creative, putting themselves into the shoes of digital content publishers to understand their evolving operational landscape and develop services that deliver long-term value.
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