From 590,973 Files to One Searchable Collection: Implementing a Digital Asset Management System for a Major College Art Museum.

About the Client

Founded in 1877, the RISD Museum is part of the Rhode Island School of Design, widely regarded as one of the nation’s top schools for fine arts education. The Museum holds RISD’s art and design collections and is one of the largest college art museums in the country, with paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, furniture, costumes, textiles, and mixed media from around the world dating from ancient times to the present.

Industry Context

Museums face growing pressure to make collections digitally accessible while managing files that accumulate for years across ad hoc local storage, with inconsistent naming and no unified metadata. IMLS’s Museums for America program, the agency’s largest competitive museum grant program, exists specifically to help museums like RISD modernize collections stewardship and public access. A modern DAM implementation increasingly means connecting rather than replacing existing systems: a collection management system holds the authoritative object records, a DAM platform manages the digital files, and a public-facing content management system displays the collection online — each doing what it does best rather than duplicating content, and cost, across all three.

Current Situation

In fall 2018, the RISD Museum was awarded an IMLS grant to upgrade its collection management system, select and implement a DAM system, and upgrade its website. Through competitive procurement, RISD selected Picturepark as the DAM solution and Iknow for system design and implementation, choosing Iknow for its comprehensive project approach and its experience with Picturepark. The project launched in mid-February 2021.

• Nearly 600,000 files scattered with no central system. RISD’s digital assets — 590,973 files totaling almost 100TB — were spread across three separate network drives with a complicated, inconsistent file-naming convention.
• 101 different file types to reconcile. The collection spanned image, audio, video, font, camera RAW, geospatial, Office document, archive, and backup files, complicating any single migration approach.
• Existing metadata wasn’t built for public-facing search. RISD’s MuseumPlus collection records had been heavily customized over the years and weren’t consistent with current digital-asset metadata standards.
• A public-access mandate on a grant-funded timeline. The IMLS grant required RISD to deliver a genuinely public-facing improvement in collection stewardship and access, not just an internal database upgrade.

• Inventory and understand RISD’s existing digital assets to inform a migration and cleansing strategy.
• Gather and validate RISD’s business and technical requirements from a user-centered perspective.
• Design a comprehensive metadata schema and taxonomy aligned with current digital-asset and museum-sector standards.
• Install, configure, and integrate Picturepark with RISD’s existing MuseumPlus collection management system and Drupal website.
• Migrate, cleanse, and enrich RISD’s digital collection content into the new system, and test and close out the implementation.

How Iknow Structured the Work

Iknow structured the engagement into nine steps: Project Initiation and Planning; Digital Content Audit; Business and Technical Requirements Collection/Confirmation; Taxonomy and Metadata Development; Picturepark Installation and Configuration; Drupal Module Development; Digital Content Cleansing, Migration, and Enrichment; Testing; and Project Closeout.

Key Activities & Decisions

• Digital content audit. Iknow inventoried RISD’s existing digital assets and determined the Museum had 590,973 files across three network-drive repositories, totaling almost 100TB across 101 file types — with .jpg files alone accounting for more than 56% of the total — informing a content-cleansing exercise that eliminated unnecessary files before migration.
• Requirements collection. Iknow gathered requirements RISD had published over the prior year. Working with RISD, Iknow defined Administrative, Primary, and Secondary user groups, covering registrars, curators, photographers, web team members, designers, object handlers, external authors, museum educators, and students. Iknow then prioritized their needs and defined 12 epic/job story combinations that were validated with RISD and tracked on a shared Trello board through biweekly agile sprints.
• Taxonomy and metadata development. Iknow developed a customized taxonomy and metadata schema of approximately 150 terms, incorporating relevant terms from standards including Getty’s Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA), the Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF), the IPTC Photo Metadata standards, the Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP), and the Cultural Objects Name Authority (CONA). Iknow then mapped MuseumPlus field names to Picturepark field names so RISD’s existing metadata could populate the new system.
• Picturepark installation and configuration. Iknow installed and configured Picturepark around the validated requirements and user groups, including auto-tagging and permission structures tailored to file type and role.
• Drupal module development. Iknow built the integration connecting RISD’s public Drupal website to Picturepark via API, so collection images could be published and browsed online without being duplicated inside Drupal.
• Content cleansing, migration, and enrichment. Iknow migrated the cleansed digital asset library into Picturepark, enriching each object with metadata sourced from MuseumPlus and applying the new taxonomy.
• Testing and closeout. Iknow tested the metadata schema and taxonomy with sample image sets, validated the Drupal-Picturepark integration, prepared documentation and training materials, trained RISD staff to maintain the schema, and closed out the engagement.

Stakeholders & Collaboration

Iknow served as prime contractor with Picturepark as technology subcontractor, working directly with RISD Museum staff across registrar, curatorial, photography, web, design, and education functions, engaging the project team through biweekly agile sprint planning sessions throughout the engagement.

Migrating Without First Knowing What There Was to Migrate

Nearly 600,000 files spread across three drives with an inconsistent naming convention made it impossible to plan a safe migration by guesswork. Iknow addressed this by running a full digital content audit first — quantifying exactly how many files, how much storage, and how many file types existed, and where they lived — before designing the migration, cleansing, quality control, and testing approach.

Aligning Many Different Museum Roles Around One Shared System

Registrars, curators, photographers, web staff, designers, and educators all needed different things from the same system, and a static requirements document risked missing real day-to-day needs. Iknow addressed this by defining explicit user groups and their key jobs-to-be-done, then running the requirements process as biweekly agile sprints on a shared Trello board so the full project team could engage with planning in real time.

Quantitative Outcomes

• Digital assets inventoried: 590,973 files, almost 100TB, across 101 file types in three legacy repositories.
• Metadata schema: approximately 150 terms, drawing on five standards — CDWA, EXIF, IPTC, XMP, and CONA.
• Requirements: 12 epic/job story combinations, defined across distinct Administrative, Primary, and Secondary user groups.
• Public access: tens of thousands of collection objects made discoverable online through the new Drupal-Picturepark integration.

Qualitative Outcomes

RISD moved from a fragmented set of inconsistently named files spread across three network drives to a single, cloud-based digital asset repository connected directly to the Museum’s public website — the outcome that its 2018 IMLS grant set out to achieve. Connecting Drupal to Picturepark via API, rather than storing duplicate copies of every image in both systems, eliminated a source of extra cost and version-control errors the Museum had previously experienced managing assets in two places. The RISD project team was pleased with Iknow’s intermediate deliverables throughout the engagement, and staff came away with documented, trainable ownership of the metadata schema going forward.

Timeline to Impact

The engagement launched in mid-February 2021, and Iknow carried the full nine-step implementation through to a completed, publicly accessible system within about a year.

Core Skills

• Digital asset management strategy
• Taxonomy & metadata development
• DAM/CMS systems integration
• Digital content migration & cleansing

Methods & Frameworks

• Digital content auditing
• User-centered requirements gathering (jobs-to-be-done)
• Agile sprint planning (Trello)
• Standards-based metadata schema design

Technologies & Tools

• Picturepark digital asset management platform
• MuseumPlus Classic (Zetcom) and Drupal
• Getty CDWA, EXIF, IPTC, XMP, and CONA metadata standards