Artifact photography: preserving cultural heritage with DAM

The role of artifact photography in cultural heritage

Artifact photography can be defined as the specialized practice of capturing accurate, high-quality images of cultural, historical, or archaeological artifacts. However, to fully describe the value it offers, one should pay attention to its importance when preserving and distributing cultural heritage.

When it comes to telling a story, there are few instruments as effective as images. In seconds, a picture can reveal both obvious and hidden details about an artifact, and if presented appropriately, it also has the capability of evoking immediate reactions of the viewer. There’s also a level of truth to images, which text files simply cannot recreate, and since they’re able to capture the physical state of an artifact at a specific time, visual files are ideal for artifact documentation.

Learn more: Artifact photography for museums – key principles by Daniel Lindskog

Therefore, cultural institutions that are successful in photographing objects are overall better suited to preserve and share their assets with the world, ensuring that important information stands the test of time. To do this, both the photography process and the digital workflows that follows must fulfill certain requirements for quality, precision, and consistency.

The intersection of artifact photography and Digital Asset Management

There’s no use having perfect artifact photos if people are unable to access and view them. This is where DAM comes in.

With an adequate Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution in place, cultural institutions can successfully tag, organize, manage and distribute content items with speed and precision, ensuring that the right file is always available to the right people with up-to-date and relevant data intact.

Learn more: Metadata tagging – best practices

Challenges for managing artifact photography

When preserving cultural heritage, photographing is key. It offers the opportunity to store digital references of how the artifact looked at the moment the photo was taken – safeguarding this information from being lost if something were to happen to its source.

Getting high-quality visuals of the artifact can be an expensive process, oftentimes requiring specific equipment and experience that can be hard to come by. For this reason, it’s essential that once the images are ready, they’re preserved and managed in a successful manner. However, with managing such large volumes of files and data comes many challenges, including, but not limited to:

• Metadata management – maintaining consistent, detailed and accurate metadata for all visuals.
  
  
• Access control – ensuring that people only see the assets and data they’re supposed to.
  
  
• Asset organization – keeping track of massive media libraries, sometimes exceeding millions of visual assets.
  
  
• Potential data loss – securing files and data from being corrupted or lost.
  
  
• Searchability – ensuring that stakeholders can easily access the files and information they need.
  
  
• Collaboration – coordinating access and collaboration across departments and with external parties when relevant.
  
  
• Software lock-in – replacing third-party tools without migrating large volumes of content.
  
  
• Sensitive images and data – ensuring that content containing sensitive or graphical information is hidden from people that shouldn’t see it.
  
  
• Attribution management – keeping track of rights, licenses, attribution requirements and copyright strings.
  
  
• Social responsibility – answering information requests from researchers, journalists and the public.
  
  
• Content distribution – distributing selected visuals and key information to online channels.
  
  
• Ongoing maintenance – continuously ensuring that digital collections are up-to-date, accessible, and works as intended.

Fortunately, most challenges can be either minimized or completely removed with a DAM solution. This is thanks to the DAMs ability to structure content based on metadata and automatically trigger results depending on the data values. For example, by incorporating license information into the metadata, one can ensure that photos with expired or limited licenses are automatically revoked from specific collections.

Learn more: RISD Museum – a connected ecosystem for digital art collections

Additionally, DAMs are built in a manner that supports a single source of truth across the entire digital ecosystem. This enables museums to connect their digital libraries that are stored in the DAM to other third parties. As a result, GLAMs can more easily avoid system lock-ins since the files and their data are only stored in one system, making others easier to replace.

The importance of consistency

Consistency plays a central role in most GLAMs’ abilities to sufficiently manage and preserve artifact photographs and object data. It’s essential both when it comes to the images themselves, and the metadata used to describe and sort them.

Starting with the actual images, consistency is a key element in making them timeless and easy to work with. This is because such types of images are typically taken with multiple purposes, some of which will require them to match those taken at other times or by other museums.

For instance, when researching archeological findings, it’s beneficial to focus solely on the object itself, its opacity, solidity, color, material, damage, etc. If different groups of images are photographed in different manners, it may confuse researchers or analysts in their work.

Learn more: Digitalizing cultural heritage – LIECHTENSTEIN, the princely collections

Consistency is also a central element to documenting an object’s identity, by ensuring that the information one stores aligns with the standard outlined by the International Council of Museums (ICOM).

Then there’s the question of AI. While it can be a helpful tool for efficiently tagging digital assets, it’s limited in its ability to accurately communicate about cultural artifacts. Therefore, in order to implement AI into the GLAM technology-stack, one must establish sufficient routines and structure to optimize the machine’s ability to analyze and learn.

How DAM solutions revolutionize photography management

When implemented and integrated successfully, a DAM solution positions itself at the core of the organization’s content ecosystem. It’s a centralized content platform from which all digital assets and their associated metadata can be accessed, managed and distributed to other channels. In the case of artifact photography, a DAM makes it possible to streamline the way all photos are tagged, organized and distributed, effectively preserving them and ensuring complete control of every file.

Learn more: The complete guide to Digital Asset Management

What makes DAM a central tool for the photography workflows is its capability to map content items with vast amounts of metadata at high speed. Typically, DAMs come with highly configurable options for access control, ensuring that the right people always have access to the right files and data, nothing more and nothing less.

Learn more: What is Digital Rights Management?

Most DAMs also come with API capabilities, enabling organizations to integrate with other key software. In the case of museums, this will include the CIS and the CMS, but customized integrations are also common. If the DAM offers CDN-powered delivery and is optimized for such integrations, it will be able to completely prevent museums from storing unnecessary duplicates, since every image – no matter where it’s viewed from – originates within the DAM itself.

DAM for GLAMs

Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAMs) differ greatly from other organizations in terms of how they store, manage and use digital assets. They typically have vast archives made up of thousands, if not millions, of content items. Sometimes, they have data with multiple associated assets, and sometimes this data changes, which can result in extensive procedures without the right system in place.

GLAMs are also unique in their societal responsibilities, often resulting in stricter requirements for asset control and consistency.

For these and other reasons, GLAMs will often benefit from choosing a DAM that supports advanced options for metadata management. It’s also essential that the solution supports the photography workflows and can be integrated with other key systems, such as the CIS, as this will enable consistent and accurate data population.

At Fotoware, we’ve delivered DAM solutions to a wide range of museums and archives, from Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, to the Munch Museum of Norway, the White House Historical Association in the US, and many more.

You can read more about how we help GLAMs preserve and manage cultural heritage on our website or book a demo with one of our experts to see the solution for yourself.