Digital Asset Management Best Practice: Academic Institutions

12th September 2025

Are you able to effectively communicate the fantastic work carried out by your academic institution, as well as your student body? It’s not always easy to communicate those results with parents and the outside world without a centralised, single source of truth for your digital content, and this is where a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system comes in.

However, implementing a DAM is just the first step, because you need to make sure you’re also putting in place the best practices and processes to ensure you’re able to achieve those outcomes.

READ MORE: Why academic institutions need a DAM system

4 DAM best practices for academic institutions

For DAM Managers working within the education sector, there are four best practices and processes to follow that can make a significant difference to asset workflows:

1. Create a public-facing asset collection
2. Prioritise consent
3. Embrace cloud storage
4. Encourage student-generated content

Let’s take a look at each one in more detail.

Prioritise consent

As an academic institution, particularly if you’re a school, you’ll be producing images of minors, which means you must have really strong consent processes and policies in place.

In the UK, consent law for images of children is mostly the same as it is for adults, but data protection legislationlegisation requires you to take ‘extra care’ when processing the personal data of minors.

Depending on the child’s age (the typical guideline is that 12-years old is the point at which a child can consent for themselves, although it’s case-by-case), the parent or guardian must be told how images will be used so they can consent on their child’s behalf. Note that best practice for managing parental consent is the same as consent from an adult for use of their own images.

Getting this wrong can have serious reputational and legal consequences for academic institutions, so make sure you’ve implemented robust consent policies and practices and review them frequently to ensure they’re still fit for purpose.

Create a public-facing asset collection

Whether you’re a school or university, you’ll be creating a lot of visual content that celebrates what you do, including the work of your students and the events you hold each year.

Your DAM will store and organise all of this content, making it available to internal staff so they can use it in marketing materials and external communications, but students and parents should be able to enjoy some of that content too.

Consider creating a public-facing portal with collections of assets showcasing things like this summer’s sports day or the annual Nativity play, so these images can be enjoyed by everyone at their leisure.

Embrace cloud storage

Some schools and universities have an outdated view of on-premise versus cloud asset storage, believing that the most secure solution is to host their digital assets themselves. This was the opinion of Kent School, an independent coed college located on the boarder between Connecticut and New York State.

“There had been a feeling that we had to keep our most significant assets close to us, and we were really confident that we had the tools and security expertise to host the DAM platform ourselves,” said Amy Voorhees, the school’s Library Director.

“However, as time went on it just became the case [...] that [cloud hosting] was best practice from a redundancy and security point of view, while it also saved us time and internal resources.

“The security of cloud hosted DAM gives us a lot of peace of mind.”

You can read the full Kent School case study here.

So, if you’re still unsure about shifting your Digital Asset Management to the cloud, it’s time to reconsider.

Encourage student-generated content

Creating great content is important for academic institutions—but it can be quite time-intensive. The good news is, you’ve got some of the most tech-literate stakeholder groups around: young people.

Your students are already creating content all of the time, so why not leverage this student-generated content for boosting school-student engagement, creating a culture of inclusiveness and growing your school community?

There are still consent and permissions challenges to consider here, and just because a student has given consent for you to use their images or videos that doesn’t mean you have the consent from every student depicted. So, your institution needs to think carefully about how to implement and manage this.

ResourceSpace is trusted by some of the world’s leading academic institutions to organise and manage their digital assets, engage better with students and create content to share with parents.

Juilliard, University of Oxford and Berkeley are all ResourceSpace users—want to join them? Click below to book your free 30-minute DAM demo with one of our solutions experts.