Choosing the right Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) or Collections Management System (CMS) can be daunting for museums, libraries, archives, and other cultural heritage institutions. Your collections are unique, your metadata models are complex, and your preservation and access needs often differ sharply from those of commercial enterprises. Yet you still face the same core challenge: how to select a system that balances sustainability, usability, governance, and long-term value.

Since the millennium, the Royal College of Surgeons of England (RCS England) has undertaken a range of digitisation projects to make Heritage Library and Archives collections accessible online. However, a new organisational strategy in 2021, driven by the aim to become a digital‑first organisation and improve access to College information and knowledge services, combined with a new public engagement programme, led to a shift towards prioritising digitisation for enhanced engagement with members, staff, and wider public audiences.

This presentation will explore how The Postal Museum developed its capacity to preserve and make born digital records accessible. As one of the UK's most significant business archives, holding records designated as being of outstanding national importance, The Postal Museum faced unique challenges in capturing, preserving, and making accessible the digital records of Royal Mail Group plc and Post Office Ltd. 

This session explores how online discovery helps cultural heritage organisations unlock their collections to make history truly accessible. Casper Smithson, COO at TownsWeb Archiving / PastView, will discuss how structured, metadata-rich, and searchable collections transform archives into discoverable, usable resources.

Cultural heritage organisations have spent decades building rich, standardised metadata, but are their collections truly discoverable? As AI transforms how users search and interact with digital collections, heritage professionals face a critical question: how do we bridge traditional metadata practices with AI-powered discovery while maintaining the scholarly rigour and contextual depth our collections demand?

Background and context
From 19th-century photographic documentation to today's digital-first strategies, the V&A's approach to image and asset management has always centred on one goal: improving public access to its collections. But with over 2.8 million objects and a Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) supporting both curatorial and non-curatorial staff across the museum, ensuring appropriate access requires sophisticated governance frameworks and rights management. 

A journey from a single photograph to worldwide recognition

The Backstory

In 2018, while researching an 1880s South London wrestler and boxer, Jack Wannop, historian Sarah Elizabeth Cox stumbled upon an unusual name in a newspaper archive: "Ching Hook." A Google search led her to a striking photograph held in The National Archives – a young Black boxer, fists raised, digitised but unidentified. There was no other information publicly available about the man.