Digital asset management for catalogues raisonnés
Once an artwork has been photographed, the catalogue team preserves the resulting file, connects it to the scholarship, controls how it is used, and keeps it accessible through decades of additions, corrections, and staff changes. Digital asset management provides the structure for doing so.
A digital catalogue raisonné may contain thousands of images: new photography, historical photographs, scans of archival documents, signatures, inscriptions, conservation images, and comparative material. Each may also exist in several forms, from a high-resolution preservation file to the thumbnail displayed in a search result. The immediate question is where to store all these files. The more important question is how to keep them coherent, identifiable, secure, and usable for the life of the catalogue. That is the problem digital asset management is intended to solve.
This article focuses on the image layer of a digital catalogue raisonné. For a broader comparison of purpose-built platforms, assembled systems, and custom software, see How to choose a digital strategy for your catalogue raisonné.
Claude Monet, Soleil couchant sur la mer, c. 1862. Pastel on paper, 15.3 × 40 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; in the public domain.
What is a digital asset?
A digital asset is more than an image file. It is a file together with the information needed to identify, understand, govern, and preserve it.
For example, an asset might consist of an authoritative TIFF file accompanied by:
Descriptive metadata, such as the artist, title, date, dimensions, and a description of what the image shows
Technical metadata, such as the file format, colour profile, capture device, resolution, and checksum
Rights information, including the copyright holder, licence, required credit line, reproduction permissions, and access restrictions
A stable identifier connecting the file to the corresponding work or document in the catalogue
Administrative information recording who supplied, reviewed, replaced, or approved the file
The file and this information need to remain connected. A folder of images and a separate spreadsheet may appear workable at the beginning of a project, but the relationship becomes increasingly fragile as the collection grows and staff members change.
What a digital asset management system does
A digital asset management system, usually abbreviated to DAM, manages files as controlled, identifiable assets rather than as items in a folder. For a catalogue raisonné, it should support four foundational requirements.
One authoritative master. There should be one recognized, high-resolution master file for each image. It should be held in a known location, protected from accidental alteration, and versioned when it is corrected or replaced. Without an authoritative master, several slightly different files may begin to circulate. Staff can no longer tell which one has the correct colour profile, crop, rights information, or most recent corrections.
Copies generated for use. A website should not deliver the full preservation master every time a reader opens a page. It needs smaller derivatives: thumbnails, standard web images, and often tiles for close zooming. A DAM can generate these automatically from the authoritative master. This reduces manual work and ensures that every derivative comes from the correct source.
Metadata that stays connected. Technical, descriptive, rights, and administrative information must remain reliably associated with the file. Some metadata may also be embedded in the file itself where appropriate. This connection becomes especially important during export or migration. Retrieving a folder of images is not enough if the project loses the identifiers, rights statements, credit lines, or relationships that make those images intelligible.
Access that can be governed. Different versions of the same image may require different levels of access. A thumbnail might be publicly visible while the high-resolution master is restricted to designated staff or supplied only for approved reproductions. The system should be able to enforce these distinctions rather than relying on staff to remember them each time a file is used.
A DAM is not the catalogue’s research database
A catalogue raisonné needs both asset management and research data management, but they have different responsibilities. The research database holds structured information about works: titles, dates, attribution states, provenance, exhibition history, literature, inscriptions, and relationships between records. The DAM holds and manages the files themselves. It versions the masters, creates derivatives, records technical and rights metadata, and controls access. The two systems meet through stable identifiers. The catalogue record should point to the correct asset without requiring the image to be copied into several different systems. This distinction prevents a common problem: treating a database attachment field, a shared drive, or a website media library as though it were a complete asset-management strategy. These tools can hold files, but file storage alone does not provide version control, preservation planning, derivative generation, rights governance, or reliable migration.
The operational workflow
Software cannot compensate for an undefined process. Before selecting a system, a catalogue team should document what happens to an image from the moment it arrives.
A practical workflow might include:
Receive: acquire the authoritative file and record its source.
Verify: check quality, format, colour profile, dimensions, and file integrity.
Identify: assign a stable identifier and connect the asset to its catalogue record.
Describe: add descriptive, technical, rights, access, and accessibility metadata.
Derive: generate the web images and zoom tiles needed for publication.
Publish: approve the appropriate rendition and level of public access.
Maintain: preserve the master, record replacements, review rights, and prepare for future transfer or migration.
Responsibility should be assigned at every stage. “The digital team” or “the catalogue team” is rarely precise enough. A named institutional role should be accountable for accepting masters, approving replacements, changing access conditions, and ensuring that responsibilities pass to someone else when staff change.
Four questions to ask about any arrangement
Whether asset management is included in a catalogue platform, assembled from several products, or commissioned as part of a custom system, four concerns should guide the evaluation.
1. Preservation and access
Preservation and access are related, but they are not the same. Access means serving responsive images to readers today. Preservation means keeping the authoritative files intact and understandable over decades. That requires backups, redundancy, integrity checks, documented version history, and plans for migrating files and metadata when technology changes. A website can display an image successfully without preserving its master adequately. Conversely, a preservation repository can protect a file without providing an effective way to publish it. A catalogue needs a strategy for both.
2. Standards and portability
The durability of an asset depends partly on whether other systems can understand it. Use stable identifiers, established file formats, structured metadata, and documented exports. When evaluating portability, ask whether you can retrieve:
The original files at their full resolution
Their technical and descriptive metadata
Rights, credit, and access information
Stable identifiers connecting the assets to catalogue records
Version and change histories, where applicable
Portability is not simply the ability to download files. It is the ability to move them without losing their meaning.
For image delivery, the International Image Interoperability Framework, or IIIF, is particularly valuable. IIIF allows compatible viewers to request a thumbnail, full image, or selected region from a compatible image server. This makes it possible to support close looking without preparing and storing every possible image size by hand.
3. Rights and reproduction
Rights information changes. Copyright may expire, agreements may be renegotiated, a rights holder may impose new conditions, or new photography may replace an older reproduction. A suitable system should distinguish between the permissions attached to the master, downloadable files, web derivatives, and thumbnails. It should also preserve credit lines and usage conditions with the asset. These decisions require human oversight. The software can enforce an access rule, but the organization remains responsible for determining what that rule should be and for reviewing it over time.
4. Accessibility
An image cannot communicate equally to every reader without an appropriate textual description. Alternative text and longer image descriptions should be treated as part of the asset’s metadata and created as images enter the workflow. If accessibility is postponed until publication, it becomes a large retrospective project and is more likely to be applied inconsistently. Keeping accessibility information with the asset also makes it easier to reuse the same description—or adapt it thoughtfully—where the image appears in different parts of the catalogue.
How the technical approach changes responsibility
Digital asset management looks different under the three broad approaches to catalogue technology.
A purpose-built catalogue raisonné platform
In a purpose-built platform, asset management is integrated with the research and publication environment. The platform can hold the master, generate derivatives, connect assets to catalogue records, manage permissions, and serve images to readers. The vendor maintains the infrastructure, security, integrations, and updates. The catalogue organization remains responsible for scholarly, editorial, rights, and governance decisions, but it does not have to operate the underlying software itself. Because several catalogues use the same platform, improvements can benefit a broader user community rather than being commissioned and funded separately by each organization.
Common platforms with integrated digital asset management include Navigating.art, Artlogic, Artifact, InventoZen, and Artifex Press, although their asset-management, IIIF, export, and preservation capabilities vary.
An assembled system
An assembled approach might combine a research database, a dedicated DAM, a content management system, an image server, and a public viewer. Each component may be well established, but the organization must define which system is authoritative for each kind of information and maintain the connections between them. Stable identifiers are essential. This approach can be effective when an organization has strong technical capacity. Its principal risk lies in the seams: upgrades, plugins, exports, synchronization processes, and custom integrations all require monitoring and maintenance.
Common standalone DAM tools include ResourceSpace, Canto, NetX, Piction, and museum-oriented systems such as CollectionSpace or CollectiveAccess; these are often connected to FileMaker, WordPress, Drupal, or another research and publication system.
A custom build
A custom system can integrate an existing DAM and image server into software developed specifically for the catalogue. It can also build some asset-management functions directly, although doing so increases cost and responsibility. Requirements such as derivative generation, IIIF delivery, rights controls, metadata export, and preservation workflows must be specified from the outset. They are expensive to add after the rest of the system has been designed. With a custom build, the organization also becomes responsible for managing software development and the vendor relationship. Every enhancement, change, security issue, or integration problem may require separately funded work. Over time, managing the software can consume resources that would otherwise support the catalogue’s research.
Custom catalogues commonly integrate an established DAM—such as ResourceSpace, Canto, NetX, Piction, or an institution’s existing collections or asset-management system—rather than developing file storage, derivative generation, and rights management entirely from scratch.
Questions to ask before choosing a system
Ask prospective vendors or technical partners:
Where does the authoritative master live?
How are replacements and previous versions handled?
Which derivatives are generated automatically?
Does the system support IIIF?
How are rights and access restrictions expressed and enforced?
Can metadata be embedded in or exported with the files?
How are checksums, backups, and recovery managed?
Can we export the original assets and their metadata in usable formats?
How are assets linked to catalogue records?
Who maintains each component and each connection?
What happens when a staff member, vendor, or development agency changes?
What will this arrangement require from our organization in five or ten years?
The final question is especially important. A technical design is also a distribution of responsibility.
Keep the scholarship and the assets together
The publication interface of a digital catalogue will change. Software will be updated or replaced. Staff members and vendors will come and go. The durable parts are the scholarship and the evidence on which it rests. Digital asset management helps preserve that evidence by ensuring that each file remains authoritative, identifiable, governed, accessible, and connected to its catalogue record. The goal is not simply to keep the images somewhere. It is to ensure that future editors and readers can still determine what each image is, where it came from, what they may do with it, and which version they can trust.
Download the presentation
Download: Digital asset management and catalogues raisonnés
This presentation introduces the asset lifecycle, the distinction between a DAM and a research database, IIIF image delivery, rights and accessibility, and the way purpose-built, assembled, and custom systems distribute responsibility.