WAUL Digital Asset Management seminar – Oct 2022

MC Claire Fletcher, Manager Resources & Collections, Murdoch Library

DAM Project reports

UWA Cultural Collection
Responding to digitisation activities from DCWA
Discovering and preserving UWA ‘cultural assets’ in digital form project – inc indigenous protocols
Procurement end 2019 Library and ITS: functional requirements (DAM + Discovery), assessed existing systems (discounted Alma/Prima + Rosetta ad-on), access rights granularity and relationships between items, item formats needed, search + browse experience, environment scan, RFP ended up with ‘Recollect’ from a NZ company
Recollect – integrated DAM + discovery, inc single sign on + community access, custom metadata scheme (encoded in Dublin Core; and integrate with Trove), focus on relationships (objects, people and places), on-demand Australian storage (as needed), granular permissions and access rights (item can be separated from metadata), built in preservation module (makes derivatives, and manages pres copies in storage; but not file obsolescence)
Challenges – enterprise-scale buy-in (variety of opinions, and stakeholder engagement esp contributors schools, galleries, museums), useful campions, funding initial and ongoing digital storage
Good engagement with University Archive, and Calloway Centre (Music)
Owned by Library going forward, AWS SnowCone for big data transfers
Integration with Trove and CollectionsWA

Digital Curation Centre, UK – focussed ‘end goal’ of preservation and openess, ideally started at the creation point, documentation and value adding implicit (human readable) and explicit (computer readable) content – context and metadata
RDM acronym in slides – Research Data Management?
Key to sustainability is human factor

Megan Schlipalius, Project Officer, Collections WA also AMaGA WA branch

Publish collection records online for free, plus organisation page
Launched June 2020 (from collecting sector working group formed in 2016; wide membership), do not replace existing collection management systems
Similar to Victorian Collections, established in 2009
WA Museum tech support and built platform
Copyright has ‘ask first’ policy where materials are cleared before adding
Moral rights, but not an infringement of rights to do anything in good faith to restore or preserve a work
Indigenous cultural IP – important to engage with communities
AMaGA has created a roadmap – First Peoples: a roadmap for enhancing indigenous engagement in museums and galleries
Sensitive records flagging (and not published publicly to Collections WA) e.g. privacy laws, graphic images, offensive, culturally sensitive, secret or sacred
Upload from Mosaic, Spydus, ehive, Portfolio, excel spreadsheets, or harvesting from online systems
Includes geotagging facility
Includes QR code generator to link to a collection, or a record e.g. exhibition displays
Can syndicate with Trove
Joel Leather from WAM useful tech contact working with Collections WA

Lucy Cammell (UWA Lib), Scott Nicholls (UWA Lib), Andrew Kelly (Digital Preservation Officer, SLWA, shadowland.net), Megan Schlipalius, Rochelle Palmer
UWA got traction on ‘research assets’ concept, investment in collection and preservation beyond bricks and mortar, global engagement indigenous repatriation
Query around DCWA digitised materials mandatory added to UWA DAM? Decision in progress.
Copyright SLWA – some items embargoed, digitised but archive only for pres, access only on site
Copyright UWA – huge range of considerations, knowledge gap round expertise on copyright, Recollect seems to have enough fields to control
Does info flow between collection management and DAM systems esp copyright details. UWA DAM is a siloed system at moment, with manual ingest from collection management systems
SLWA 350TB of material, Scott Nicholls working on preservation, creating digital preservation policy, roadmaps, guidelines (but other peers have integrated w physical) using DPC RAM as assessment tool and find gaps + push forward