A digital asset system transforming a growing visual archive into an accessible brand resource through intentional organization, metadata structures and scalable workflows
CHALLENGE
As the College of Architecture, Design and Construction’s visual archive grew, finding the right asset became increasingly dependent on knowing where it had been stored—and remembering when, where or why it had been captured.
About 75% of CADC’s assets were created within the last four years, which meant the archive was growing quickly—but our system for organizing it hadn’t kept up. The existing folder-based structure made it difficult to search across the collection or surface related content.
At the same time, older assets lived in long-term storage, effectively separated from the main archive, and assets was also scattered across the college because our system wasn’t designed to bring it all together.
The result was an archive that contained an enormous amount of valuable content but required significant institutional knowledge to access it.
SOLUTION
I researched and evaluated digital asset management platforms before selecting Air as a new home for the CADC Media Archive. Rather than simply replicating our existing folder structure, I approached the migration as an information architecture problem: How do we organize our assets, and more importantly, how do we need to find them?
I developed a taxonomy and metadata strategy around the ways the college searches for content. Custom fields allow us to narrow assets by criteria such as program, location and category, while Air’s search-first interface allows those relationships to work across the entire collection.
I then developed a migration strategy to bring together three previously disconnected sources, our primary archive, long-term storage and assets held by other areas of the college. I trained and oversaw student workers through the initial migration while establishing the structure and standards that would guide the archive moving forward.
OUTCOME
The CADC Media Archive—consisting of more than 100,000 assets—is now a searchable, interconnected resource rather than a collection of isolated folders. A 2005 study abroad photograph now appears alongside one from 2026. Searching a person’s name surfaces every asset we have of them, rather than requiring someone to remember which studio, review or event photos or videos they may have appeared in.
Finding an asset no longer depends on institutional memory. The system does the work.
The project was planned in phases, from research and taxonomy development to the staged migration of assets across multiple sources.
The new structure organizes 100,000 assets across CADC and its three schools, with dedicated spaces for headshots, news media and alumni content—all searchable alongside the broader media archive.
The organizational structure translated into Air, with each collection represented by a distinct board.
Nine custom fields make the archive easier to explore, allowing users to filter by location, program, who captured the content, featured subjects, best of the best and more.
Those fields become powerful search tools, allowing users to combine filters and quickly narrow the archive to the exact assets they need.