CATALYST

There’s a new DAMS in town at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science — and no, it’s not for storing water. Instead, behind this DAMS, you will find a rich reservoir of digital assets and content, from historic photos and field notes to 3D models and research data, all ready to explore!  

For Museum staff who work in collections and archives, DAMS stands for Digital Asset Management System. At the Museum, DAMS is digital software that  constructs, organizes and preserves the repository of digital assets flowing from the Museum’s Science Division. This can include everything from historic excavation photographs to contemporary collection objects and specimen images, film lecture series, oral history projects and more.  

The journey to roll out the new DAMS began in the fall of 2007 when the Museum adopted its first system: LUNA. Over the years, the Archives department — otherwise known as the Museum’s history-keepers and professional information wranglers — uploaded and managed over 20,000 digital assets in LUNA.  

Founded in 1977, the DMNS Archives collects documents, photographs, audio recordings, films and artifacts largely from across DMNS and selectively from external donors. The Archives also processes the photographs taken by the museum photographer before they are distributed to staff and the public.  

Learn more about the Archives Department, here. 

With essential funding from a National Endowment for the Humanities grant awarded to the Integrative Collections Department in 2022, the project to replace LUNA began. Together with Director of Integrative Collections and staff representatives from Anthropology, Conservation, Earth Sciences, IT, Registration and Zoology, the Archives department spearheaded a multi-disciplinary effort to launch the new DAMS. “NetX" was selected in April 2023 and by January 2025 the DMNS Digital Collections was launched. 

Now, with the new DAMS, materials can be organized and described using up-to-date metadata standards, while tracking which digital assets are viewed, downloaded and shared. This will give the Science Division more insight into how collections are being used. Another exciting feature is that the public can create their own user accounts and download materials directly from the Science collections. 

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From the ancient past to the present, from land to sea to ocean to sky, the Denver Museum of Nature & Science offers an unparalleled opportunity to discover and explore the wonders of the natural world that surrounds us.   

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