ResourceSpace has changed the way the DEC uses content, making it much easier for us to quickly make assets available both internally and externally during our emergency appeals.
It’s no secret that artificial intelligence technology has been developing rapidly over the last 18 months, impacting everything from the way we search for things online through to how we do our jobs.
It was a trend that Steve Harman, Technology Director at The Saturday Evening Post, was keenly aware of when the organisation was looking for a new Digital Asset Management system in mid-2025.
“Our old DAM vendor was moving all of their customers to the cloud, but they told us they were unable to migrate our archive because the metadata had been highly customised,” recalls Steve.
“Believe it or not, they weren’t even able to offer us a path forward.”
“We were working with a third-party reseller that came forward with some ideas for a new DAM, but I didn’t see any of those companies doing much at all with AI.”
It was at this point that Steve started to do some of his own research, before coming across ResourceSpace.
We sat down with Steve to discuss how we were able to meet The Saturday Evening Post’s expectation of a DAM taking advantage of AI, and have provided them with functionality they’d never even dreamed of before.
“Out-of-the-box ResourceSpace brought more to the table than anyone else.”
During the mid-20th Century, The Saturday Evening Post was the biggest magazine in the United States, with a weekly circulation of almost 7 million.
Today, the magazine continues to be published six times a year, and although we’re now far from the publication’s heyday, the Post continues to be known around the world for its iconic cover art created by the likes of Norman Rockwell, J.C. Leyendecker, John Falter, Stevan Dohanos and more.
What’s more, the organisation also owns the entire archives of another popular 20th Century magazine, The Country Gentleman, as well as six children’s magazines. What did this look like in practice? Every page of every edition of these magazines living within their old DAM system.
So, when the time came to migrate to a new platform, there was a lot of work to do and some significant potential challenges ahead.
“When I first came across ResourceSpace, I set up a free demo workspace and tested it by uploading some of the old editions of the magazine, and it automatically created AI descriptions and metadata tags of every page,” says Steve.
“Out-of-the-box ResourceSpace was bringing more to the table AI-wise than any of the other vendors I’d seen up to that point.
“One of the vendors our reseller had recommended said they could try to do some of this stuff, but they were going to charge us for the development. ResourceSpace was including all of t hat - as well as technical support with the migration - as part of their basic price tag.”
“It was an absolute no brainer as far as decisions go.”
“ResourceSpace is a lot more powerful than our previous DAM ever was.”
Steve and the rest of the technical team weren’t just migrating digital assets from their old DAM system. The Saturday Evening Post also had another external database that stored keywords and other data that had to be brought across into ResourceSpace.
“Before we started the migration, I asked the ResourceSpace team about tweaking the AI prompt to ensure it imported everything exactly as we needed,” says Steve.
“But in the end, because it was doing such a great job with what we’d already imported, we decided to stick with the default AI prompt.
“What also reassured us is that, if we found holes in the data or uncovered an issue, we could go back later and add new metadata with a different AI prompt and run it again anyway.”
The Saturday Evening Post’s archive dates back to the 1821, so there was a huge amount of content to import—over 740,000 unique assets, to be specific. What made this more complicated was that there wasn’t even granular metadata in their previous DAM to import. Manual tagging and categorising all of that content would take years, but ResourceSpace’s AI-powered metadata tagging was able to handle the majority of it at the point of upload.
“The AI does a great job of summarising the subject of the images in the keywords, while we can also search the extracted text from the pictures and articles,” says Steve.
“As we were migrating our content I also began tagging famous faces, which the AI could then recognise and propagate throughout the system. One of our most famous covers that shows ‘Rosie the Riverter’, and the AI could recognise that, despite it not saying that anywhere in the magazine.”
“ResourceSpace is a lot more powerful than our previous DAM ever was.”
“ResourceSpace has leaned into AI earlier than most, and it’s benefitted us a lot.”
ResourceSpace has significantly extended the usability and searchability of The Saturday Evening Post, which has proved critical to both the organisation’s editorial team as well as their licensing division, which is a big part of their business in the last few years.
“The licensing division is more about finding artwork, and ResourceSpace has given us power they never even had before,” says Steve.
“The ‘Visually Similar’ tool has also been really useful to our licensing division. For example, let’s say the team is looking for a picture of flowers because they’re doing some floral artwork for a client. If they find one image that looks like it might work, they could surface all of the images that looked similar to that first asset.
The Saturday Evening Post has been able to benefit from ResourceSpace’s existing AI functionality, but there’s a lot more to come in the next few months, and it could take the publication’s archive to the next level.
“The next thing I’m discussing with ResourceSpace is training AI on our content, so you actually ask an English language query of our archive,” says Steve.
“I started doing some of my own research into how this would work and spoke to our account manager about it, and ResourceSpace will be incorporating some of that functionality in the version being rolled out later this year.”
“I was really surprised no other DAM was leaning into AI much at all, but ResourceSpace leaned into it earlier than most, which has benefitted us a lot,” Steve reflects.
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Blog featured image is made up of six historic covers of The Saturday Evening Post:
“Rosie the Riveter” by Norman Rockwell, cover of The Saturday Evening Post, May 25, 1943. Image © SEPS.
“Commuters” by Norman Rockwell, cover of The Saturday Evening Post, November 16, 1946. Image © SEPS.
“Shuffleton’s Barbershop” by Norman Rockwell, cover of The Saturday Evening Post, April 29, 1950. Image © SEPS.
“Saying Grace” by Norman Rockwell, cover of The Saturday Evening Post, November 24, 1951. Image © SEPS.
“Triple Self Portrait” by Norman Rockwell, cover of The Saturday Evening Post, February 13, 1960. Image © SEPS.
“Golden Rule” by Norman Rockwell, cover of The Saturday Evening Post, April 1, 1961. Image © SEPS.
