JA Pryse discusses Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

• How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
• You were recently awarded a fellowship on Digital Asset Management. Tell us more about this.
• What are the biggest challenges and successes with Digital Asset Management?
• What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor:  [0:01] This is Another DAM podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with JA Pryse. JA, how are you?

JA Pryse:  [0:10] I’m good. Thank you for having me on, Henrik.

Henrik:  [0:13] JA, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

JA:  [0:17] I was hired by the Oklahoma Historical Society in 2010 to process the [00:23] Carmen Gee collection, which is a very large collection. By process I mean the manuscripts, audio, video, and photographs. The project contained over 91 linear feet of manuscripts, close to 350,000 images, 207 mixed audios, and a number of video and some recordings. My job was to digitize and process the collection.

[0:47] That was my first introduction into Asset Management.

Henrik de Gyor:  [0:51] You were recently awarded a fellowship on Digital Asset Management. Tell us more about this.

JA:  [0:57] Oklahoma is pretty new on the digitizing field, and we’re relatively new as far as policy and procedures go. Of course, we have a huge collection especially with the five million image Gateway to Oklahoma history newspaper project, and the OPUBCO collection that we do have.

[1:14] My proposal was surrounding long‑term Digital Asset Management. I felt the Smithsonian Institute Archives, the way that they run their program and the way that they manage their assets, is something that I definitely want to model and bring back to the Oklahoma Historical Society.

[1:32] The proposal I wrote was concerning that, and the research that I will do for two weeks while I am residing there.

Henrik:  [1:39] Is this in Washington DC?

JA:  [1:40] Yes, April 5th through the 19th this year [2014].

Henrik:  [1:44] Sounds very exciting.

JA:  [1:45] It is. I’m looking forward to it, I’ve never been to Washington DC. My mission is to develop a management plan and best practice strategies for all of our assets that we have here.

Henrik:  [1:55] Fantastic. What are the biggest challenges and successes with Digital Asset Management?

JA:  [2:00] For the Oklahoma Historical Society and for myself and my department, there is pretty much one person handling each media format. And of course, we always go through budget cuts and we’re the first one to be cut in the state since we are a state agency.

[2:18] There’s only one of me, and the ethics grant has a total of one scanner ‑‑ which is a part‑time scanner ‑‑ one part‑time indexer, one volunteer indexer and I. Also, I like to say I moonlight as an audio engineer, an archivist, but have taken a lot of classes and lot of educational steps to get into the audio engineering field and audio archiving in the oral history collection.

[2:45] Whenever we do acquire new audio collections such as the Clara Luper collection, where it was an audio tape…every one of Clara Luper’s…who’s an African‑American archivist in the region. She had a radio show. We acquired that collection. It had 19 linear feet of audio tapes and cassettes. We’re going to digitize those.

[3:07] The biggest challenge is not having more than one me to handle the newspaper project as well as the audio digitization projects that we have.

Henrik:  [3:17] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

JA:  [3:22] I spoke to a class this morning that was doing a tour of the archives that we have here at the Oklahoma Historical Society. I was asked the same question. What I spoke to them about is becoming more familiar with all digital formats as much as possible, taking as many classes as you can.

[3:40] I mentioned earlier taking classes in audio engineering, taking online classes in video and film production, and getting familiarized with library processes. All different kinds of scanning and digitization as well as the preservation of that material that we are digitizing.

[3:57] Whenever I speak to students or aspiring archivists, I always want to say, “Keep studying. Keep studying everything that you can. Build your knowledge base.” The more that we know about the material that we’re digitizing, the more beneficial we’re going to be with managing that material. Whenever we speak with community colleges or the different universities, I always like to say, “Concentrate on the efficiency as well. Quantity, quality, and efficiency.”

[4:28] I think that we become more efficient as digital assent managers as we educate ourselves more along the different processes, which is one of the reasons why I’m looking forward to going to the Smithsonian for that fellowship. It’s primarily to learn how we can manage our material better.

Henrik:  [4:47] There’s still a lot of analog material out there to be digitized.

JA:  [4:52] Absolutely. Now that it’s become the time…the archivists before us that have worked here with the Oklahoma Historical Society for 37 years or for 40 years. That material that they have taken care of is expiring. They’ve all retired now and left it to us, which is just the natural progression/evolution of all the material.

[5:11] We’ll do our part, and then in 30 or 40 years, somebody will come in and do their part. Things keep expiring. The new advances that we see every day, I believe…If we fall behind, we fall behind.

Henrik:  [5:25] I’ve heard once it is digitized, it may be transferred into a different format eventually because to your point, before it gets expired.

JA:  [5:33] Absolutely. One of the other things I was speaking to students this morning is the importance of having a master copy, an access copy, or clones of the master copy for different uses. Online use, copy use, press release use, all different sorts of uses, but securing that master copy just in case anything ever happens to the original format such as fire, flooding, or in our parts, tornadoes. But definitely to have that master copy.

Henrik:  [6:05] Thanks, JA.

JA:  [6:06] Thank you for having me, and I enjoy your podcast quite a bit.

Henrik:  [6:10] Thank you.

Henrik:  [6:11] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, log on to AnotherDAMblog.com. Another DAM podcast is available on iTunes and AudioBoom. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.

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