Preserving and Perpetuating Who We Are Through Our Own Voices

How DAM supports Indigenous communities, specifically the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI), in preserving and sharing cultural knowledge through Indigenous-led digital stewardship.

How centering data sovereignty in DAM enables communities to control how Cherokee materials are stored, described, accessed, and protected.

Achievement and context:

The National Geographic Society’s Special Collections team reached a significant milestone in its DAM centralization efforts by successfully migrating 1.5 million media assets – including imagery from the full run of National Geographic magazine – from a decommissioned legacy system into its enterprise DAM.

Our focus for the Society’s digital archives is now firmly on the cross-divisional “Systems Unification Project”.

The goals:

Preserving digital content for the long term requires performing actions that complement digital asset management activities. This session aims to de-mystify digital preservation, placing digital preservation under the umbrella of the totality of digital asset management and stewardship. 

The NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation* is used as a template to discuss digital preservation policies and procedures that attendees can compare to their own internal practice. 

With the rollout of a unified digital collections’ ecosystem across the University of Oxford’s four museums with the aim of improving long-term preservation and expanding digital access to collections for research discovery and public engagement, this session explores the journey from fragmented, siloed systems to an integrated service, and the organisational, technical and cultural challenges involved.

As more museums bring AI into DAM processes, industry professionals are seeking clear guidance on adopting these tools responsibly—while honoring commitments to data privacy, digital preservation, and institutional integrity.

In this session, Terentia CEO Neal Bilow will explore what responsible AI means for the GLAM sector and how institutions can get started. Attendees will learn about Terentia’s approach to building a trusted AI digital repository, where AI systems are powered entirely by an institution’s authenticated data, assets, and metadata.

The need:

Marketing, creative, and product teams adopt AI tools for content generation, personalization, and operational efficiency, the foundational need for a single source of truth for all digital assets becomes critical.

Things to consider now before you lose control of your assets:

  • Forensic watermarking.
  • Embedded metadata and C2PA.
  • Upstream and downstream hand-offs and version control.

Solutions: