August 2026
There's a lot happening at CatalogIt this summer, and we are excited to share it! This issue includes some exciting updates: HUB Pro is now in beta, subscriptions are easier to manage, and we're enhancing our DAMS functionality. We're also hosting an upcoming webinar on working with books in your collections, and we’ve noted where you can find us during this fall’s conference season.
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We're excited to give you a first look at HUB Pro, a new add-on built for museums and institutions ready to deepen their public presence. HUB Pro gives you everything included in the HUB, plus advanced branding and customization, detailed analytics, and custom DNS, so you have more control and new insight over how your collections are presented, experienced, and understood by the visitors and communities you serve.
• Track detailed analytics on visitors, views, and engagement
• Customize fonts, colors, layout, and display style
• Play audio and video directly from HUB entries
• Connect a custom domain for your published collection
Additionally, to better support GDPR requirements, we've introduced a cookie consent banner for both the HUB and HUB Pro. The banner appears automatically for visitors, helping institutions provide greater transparency around cookie usage without requiring any additional setup.
HUB Pro is currently available for beta testing, and we're inviting subscribed account owners to become early access users. If you would like to try HUB Pro, please reach out to our team at [email protected].
Managing your CatalogIt subscription just got a lot easier. We've simplified subscription management so that account owners can change payment methods, upgrade, downgrade, and add or remove add-ons whenever they need to. Soon, details for invoiced subscriptions will also be viewable. As team members come and go, subscription management can be handed off seamlessly, so your account stays current no matter who's at the helm.
There is also a new Usage section in Settings that allows you to view your current usage, including how much storage you’re consuming, as well as how many Entries and Users you have.
We are excited to talk about our DAMS (Digital Asset Management System) functionality and some of the powerful new features we are adding, powered by AI, but managed and controlled by you.
CatalogIt already includes basic DAMS functionality such as the ability for users to upload any kind of image. CatalogIt retains the unaltered original and generates a standard web image format from the original optimized for different sizes and environments (i.e., mobile vs desktop). CatalogIt also includes the ability to watermark images, support for PDF/video/audio (both upload and playback), and the ability to include text from documents (PDF/Word/Excel) in searches.
Today we’re announcing the addition of powerful new capabilities to make finding, describing, and connecting your media assets in CatalogIt easier than ever. Here's a preview of what we’re working on:
• Reverse image lookup, so you can look up an Entry using your device’s camera or an existing photo. Snap a photo of the object and instantly find the matching record. No more handling of fragile objects to find their tag or object ID.
• Auto-generated image titles, captions, descriptions, alt-text, and consistent structured faceted tags for your media assets, ready for you to edit, accept, or modify as needed.
• Enable the CatalogIt Assistant to not only look at your data, but your images as well when querying and prompting the system.
• Auto creation of collection records from photos with rich metadata from your bulk uploaded images.
We are grouping all this functionality under the heading “Collections DAMS” which is CatalogIt’s suite of DAMS functionalities specifically optimized for collections management.
NOTE: We use AI to make suggestions only. You must explicitly approve, and optionally edit, any AI-suggested content before it becomes associated with your Entry.
As we move toward launch, we're inviting subscribed account owners to let us know if they are interested in early access. Early participants will have the opportunity to explore Collections DAMS and the CatalogIt Assistant before its public release and help shape the experience by providing valuable feedback.
As with the CatalogIt Assistant, which was previously introduced, Collection DAMS features powered by AI are built with privacy at top of mind. Your collection data is not used to train AI models. These features are entirely optional and only process data when you choose to use them.
In this informative webinar, bookbinder and CatalogIt Museum & Collections Specialist Nicoline Meyer will be joined by Museum & Collections Specialist Brittany Williams to explore how a book's role in your collection, whether reference material, archival record, historical object, or work of art, should shape the way you catalog, care for, and handle it. You'll learn to identify the cataloging information most relevant to each type of book and build confidence handling everything from artist books and manuscripts to antique books and reference texts.
• Identify when books function as works of art, historical objects, archival materials, or reference materials
• Understand how cataloging priorities differ for books-as-art versus books-as-object
• Learn the basics of handling, storage, and exhibition preparation for books
Please join us on August 13th at 1:00 PM ET for this informative webinar.
Looking for a place to connect with fellow CatalogIt users? Join our Facebook Users Group to share tips, ask questions, and see how other institutions are putting CatalogIt to work!
Fall conference season is right around the corner, and we can't wait to keep meeting so many of you out on the road! Connecting with museum and collections professionals face-to-face, hearing about your work, and showing off what's new in CatalogIt never gets old. We have a full slate of events coming up, so if you're at one of them, come find us and say hi! Pictured below at the Association for Living History, Farm and Agricultural Museums 2026 conference are Co-Founder Dan Rael with longtime ALHFAM members and valued CatalogIt clients Dick Rosenberg of Tillers International and Pete Watson of Howell Living History Farm.
Catch us on the road at:
American Association for State and Local History Annual Conference
September 16-19, 2026 in Providence, RI
Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, & Museums Conference
September 21-24, 2026 in Spokane, WA
Southeastern Museums Conference
September 28-30, 2026, in Winston-Salem, NC
Michigan Museums Association Annual Conference
October 19-21, 2026, in Oakland County, MI
