The Digital Asset Management community recently came together in London for DAM Europe 2026 and the co-located DAM and Collections Management for Cultural Heritage 2026.
As sponsors of DAM and Collections Management for Cultural Heritage, the PastView team were delighted to be part of a day dedicated to the unique challenges and opportunities facing galleries, libraries, archives, museums and performing arts organisations.
Across the sessions and conversations throughout the day, there was one theme that came through clearly: cultural heritage organisations are not simply managing digital assets. They’re caring for collections, protecting context, supporting scholarship and finding new ways to make history more accessible.
Our COO, Casper Smithson, also presented during the event, discussing our PastView platform and the role it can play in helping organisations open up their collections online.
Using our work with The London Library as an example, Casper explored how digitisation, metadata and online discovery can come together to transform archive material into a structured, searchable and engaging digital resource.
The project highlights something we believe strongly at PastView - that a successful digital collection should do more than store assets. It should help people explore them.
For cultural heritage organisations, that means creating digital experiences that support discovery, context and accessibility, while still respecting the complexity, sensitivity and long-term value of the collections themselves.
It was great to see a few of our clients there presenting and discussing working with us, such as Twinings and the Royal College of Surgeons of England.
It was great to see our partners Orange Logic, alongside another of our clients, Pentland, on stage at the conference discussing an ongoing digitisation project that we've been working on together (above).
A key takeaway from the wider DAM Europe conversation was that DAM is not only about technology, but about people.
That feels especially true in the cultural heritage sector.
Technology can support workflows, enhance metadata, improve discoverability and create new routes into collections. AI may also have a growing role to play in content operations and asset management. But technology is only useful when it serves the needs of the organisation, the collection and the audience.
For heritage collections, success depends on trusted foundations, like accurate metadata, clear rights information, thoughtful governance, sustainable processes and platforms that make collections easier to find, understand and share.
It also depends on people, such as archivists, librarians, collection managers, digital teams and subject specialists who understand the stories, context and significance behind the material.
PastView helps organisations transform analogue collections into engaging digital resources. Developed by TownsWeb Archiving, the platform is supported by expert digitisation services that convert physical materials into high-quality digital assets, ready for integration with existing DAM systems.
PastView then acts as a publishing layer, enabling organisations to curate and present collections through interactive portals and bespoke archive websites.
For cultural heritage organisations, this means collections can move from being digitised and stored to being discovered, explored and used.
It was fantastic to meet and speak with so many professionals in London working across DAM, collections management and cultural heritage. The discussions throughout the day reinforced just how much knowledge, care and innovation exists across the sector.
Thank you to Henry Stewart Events for bringing the community together, and to everyone who joined the conversations around digitisation, metadata, preservation, access and the future of digital collections.
We’re looking forward to continuing those conversations and seeing the DAM community again at DAM New York 2026!
If you'd like to learn more or discuss a specific project, please don't hesitate to get in touch with our team.