Case Study - ResourceSpace + The Kent School

9th August 2024

Situated on the banks of the Housatonic River at the border between Connecticut and New York State, Kent School’s picturesque surroundings are as remarkable as the founding ethos and ideology of this independent coed college.

The school was founded in 1906 by an Episcopalian monk for students of modest means, and continues to echo the Episcopal Church’s ethos of ‘radical welcome’.

“It’s fair to say the school has a long and rich history,” says Amy Voorhees, the school’s Library Director, and who oversees library operations and the school archives.

“The mission of Kent School is to develop young minds and prepare students for university and college study, in part by ensuring they respect the environment they’re living in, and helping to understand the school’s traditions,” explains Amy.

“We’re dedicated to building an equitable and inclusive community at Kent, and since Covid we’ve really focused on telling our own story to our current student body and their parents, our alumni, as well as all of our staff, and engaging all of these different groups requires a huge amount of content to be created all of the time.”

“There were some digitised files, but they were living on the archivists’ local machines.”

During the 118-year history of Kent School, the institution had built up a huge archive of physical documents. Student records, including sensitive documents such as grade reports and application files were stored in a building off-site, while the school’s historical assets were all stored in physical archives within the library itself.

“There were some digitised files, but they were living on the archivists’ local machines—we didn’t have much of a backup system in place back then,” Amy recalls.

“This posed all kinds of challenges around preservation, access and security, and it’s just not where we can responsibly be anymore.”

This led Kent School to the realisation that it needed a dedicated Digital Asset Management system in 2011. The archival team spoke to a number of other schools to enquire about the best options, but after speaking to Montala and seeing what ResourceSpace had to offer, it was an easy decision for Amy and the team.

“We were really quite taken with ResourceSpace as the one that made the most sense for our specific use case, and it was just the best fit,” says Amy.

“I can’t say enough about the responsiveness of the team.”

Kent School initially implemented ResourceSpace in 2012, and 12 years later Amy and the archival team couldn’t be happier with their experience of the platform.

“I can’t say enough about the responsiveness of the Montala team and the ease of use and access as a customer.

“I have such a high degree of confidence that if we want to configure the system for our use, or need help with something, that I can get what we need immediately.”

As well as the customer support that Amy describes as ‘fantastic’, Kent School also highly values the metadata-powered search functionality.

“Keyword search and metadata is everything for us, and I’m also really excited about the AI tools for metadata that we are beginning to explore,” says Amy.

“Being able to set varied access permissions for different user groups has also been crucial for us.”

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

Although the school is proud of its many traditions, there was one legacy the institution was willing to move on from: hosting their DAM on-premise.

READ MORE: Is on-premise DAM dead?

Kent School had been hosting their own instance of ResourceSpace for years, making the switch to the cloud in 2023, and they’ve never looked back.

“Our philosophy towards cloud hosted technology has changed wholesale in the last few years,” explains Amy.

“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.

“However, as time went on it just became the case that more and more affiliated tools were cloud hosted, and that this was best practice from a redundancy and security point of view, while it also saved us time and internal resources.

“Our understanding of the redundancy and fidelity to best practices internationally became a greater point of comfort for us—the security of cloud hosted DAM gives us a lot of peace of mind.”

Moving to cloud hosting has also meant Kent School benefits from system updates as they are rolled out, ensuring their whole system is in great shape and taken care of at all times.

“I’m so glad that we took the leap to ResourceSpace because it’s been growing with us—the system has always been very responsive to our changing needs,” concludes Amy.

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