DAM and Museums 2023

Join this session for two quickfire presentations with a combined Q&A. Topics covered include:

• Taking the Hit with a False Start Digital Asset Management System – How the Milwaukee Art Museum Turned it Around
• Break it Till you Make it – How the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) Scaled its DAM to 10 Million Assets in Just a Year

Session 1: Taking the Hit with a False Start Digital Asset Management System – How the Milwaukee Art Museum Turned it Around

Beret Balestrieri Kohn, Digital Asset Manager, and Heather Winter, Head of Knowledge Management and Digital Assets at the Milwaukee Art Museum will share, from experience, the pain points of investing in a DAM that didn’t meet the needs of the institution. The false start was because:

• Integration with the museum’s object database caused many technical challenges
• After many years, it only contained images of the museum’s permanent collection
• It was never successfully expanded to manage the museum’s other digital assets
• There was a lack of senior management support after the initial investment, plus a lack of staff engagement with, and usage of, the DAM, with no adoption of the DAM into the department workflows

The solution … in 2018, the museum received a substantial grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the museum’s efforts to make its content more easily accessible; along with the funds from an additional grant in 2021 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services the museum was able to:

• Migrate to a new DAM system
• Build a foundation for a larger digital photography program to document the museum’s collections and archives, alongside an expanded, museum-wide digital asset management program
• Refresh the museum’s website to make the content more fully available online and tell the stories behind the collection

The results … the museum now has full support at senior management level, alongside increased enthusiasm and user-engagement from the museum’s staff, and the formation of a Community of Practice group formed of key stakeholders to steer the asset management program forward.

Beret and Heather will talk about the exciting future built on a DAM fit for purpose, not just for now but for the long-term.

Session 2: Break it Till you Make it – How the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) Scaled its DAM to 10 Million Assets in Just a Year

Join Jessica Knight, Senior Advisor for Digital Ecosystem, Preservation and Discovery at the USHMM on the story of how the museum:

• Made over 6 million pages of evidence of the Holocaust held by Ukrainian archives available for download to users around the world
• Tested the limits and occasionally broke the system in the process
• Why we did it … and was it worth it