Find out how the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle has streamlined its media management and developed its digital strategy thanks to a high-performance DAM solution!
Aurélie Roux began her career in a private photo agency nearly 19 years ago, as Head of the Image Department at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle (MNHN). In 2004, she joined the MNHN as a Documentalist in the photo library and progressed to Manager. A few years later, she took charge of the new Images department, created to bring together photo/video production and the photo/video library, where she now manages 6 people.
It had just been digitised when I arrived. Thousands of slides and paper photos were hosted on an old online photo library solution. At the time, the animal and plant thesaurus already represented almost 100,000 media. Our solution didn't cope well with the sheer volume and the fairly long loading times made searching difficult.
On a day-to-day basis, it's production management. I've set up an internal form for requests for new shoots. Everyone needs photographers and videographers but we're a relatively small team, so I have to take stock of needs, plan according to priorities/availability and supervise before delivery.
And this is one of the aspects in which Muséumédia is involved, because it's on this interface that I'll submit the shots I've requested. They are then sent to our archivist who indexes them and makes them available. So we're involved in the whole media chain, from production to distribution. And we also create content on our own initiative, of course.
We've gone through quite a few solutions, including Opsomai, which was the solution we were using just before switching to Keepeek. To be honest, we didn't want to change initially; this classic Digital Asset Management tool suited us fine. But when the company went out of business, we had to change very quickly and Keepeek was recommended to us by the publisher. What's more, a member of our team had already worked with Keepeek for the Cinémathèque Française and was instrumental in validating our choice of your solution.
Initially, we worked with Keepeek on the same scope as we had with Opsomai. The robustness and fluidity of the solution quickly led to the emergence of new requirements. What's more, the front-office interface was an instant hit with our teams in terms of its visuals and ease of use. Our back-office work has also been greatly facilitated. Today, the Keepeek DAM solution offers a centralised platform for all MNHN's digital assets: images, videos, graphic documents, logos, animations, 360° videos, podcasts, etc.
Finally, if I had to highlight one point, it's the quality of the project monitoring by the Keepeek teams, which really made all the difference.
I went through several migration phases because we'd already changed solutions in the past. The kind of migration follow-up we had with Keepeek was unheard of! Having a documentalist to train us and, above all, talking to people who understand us has added a lot of value. We have a very specific language, with complex indexing of our media and the project management was really up to scratch and very professional. Unlike traditional Digital Asset Management solutions, the Keepeek teams really understand their customer's challenges. Thanks to their expertise, we avoided a major delay in the release of our project due to a problem with one of our indexing files.
It's an image bank that allows us to make all our photos and videos available. Internal profiles can download the media freely while external visitors can only view them. If they want to download an image, they have to request it by email.
The internal user teams are very cross-functional, including communications teams, exhibition organisers, researchers, lecturers, etc.
For external users, we tend to turn to publishing houses, particularly those that publish school textbooks and major works, the press, tourist guides and sometimes private individuals who want to decorate their website.
Absolutely, we're slowly starting to do a bit of audio and podcasts that we index on Keepeek too. This year I've also added a ‘cartoon library’ category because we have a lot of cartoonists at the Museum (of plants, animals, and soon scientists). And, as it's a tool with lots of features - which I intend to exploit to the full - we have a new project to integrate scientifically validated text content, particularly educational content.
This content will also be available for free consultation on the front office, at least for the web teams, who will also be able to deposit their content so that it can be kept in an archive and not have to repeat the writing process several times over the years in the different departments.
Maybe not advice, but I do have some arguments! First of all, the undeniable security compared with a drive or a shared server and the storage limit that can quickly become a problem with this type of tool. Back-up is also very important and that's not possible with a Drive.
And then, as I said earlier, support and the fact of being able to talk to people who understand the project contributes greatly to the success of a DAM project.
I know that it can be difficult to justify a budget for a solution like DAM, when you can see that a drive or a server costs less, but I can only recommend switching to a solution like this because it saves an enormous amount of time and is incomparably easy to use.
Today, the MNHN has around 70,000 media published on its front office and 50,000 in its archives.
Every year, 10,000 photos and 100 films are added.
