Dave Ginsberg discusses Digital Asset Management

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 Dave Ginsberg.

[0:08] Dave, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Dave Ginsberg:  [0:12] I work with my IT and archive team to develop and implement our DAM strategies, so myself and the teams define what assets are managed using our tools and our metrics around what is considered successful for our DAM strategy.

[0:25] At the Institute, we have many decades of assets that have yet to have even been digitized, so we are currently working on how to do that quickly, yet cost‑effectively.

Henrik:  [0:35] Dave, how does a non‑profit organization, that actively advances the work of film‑makers and story‑tellers worldwide use digital asset management?

Dave:  [0:44] We have a two‑tiered approach to asset management. We track and manage our legacy non‑digital assets, and the system we use for our newly created elements, which includes over a hundred thousand plus photos taken at each festival, as well as lab programs and countless hours of panels, interviews, marketing pieces, dailies, and completed productions from our lab.

[1:06] We are also investigating how to take our extensive library, and put it up on the Web so our community can have full access to it. There’s some amazing historical photos and videos that I’m sure our audience and researchers alike would love to be able to access directly.

Henrik:  [1:20] What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with digital asset management?

Dave:  [1:25] What is challenging about asset management is finding the resources, both financially and human to do it. It is so easy to just take a drive and throw it up on the shelf with materials packed on it, and that seems to be what everybody does these days.

[1:39] What’s hard is actually managing all of that in a normal way, and in a way that you can find things. It’s also very hard to make a case to spend money here, since there are always other priorities that seem to take precedence. However, once an organization makes the decision to have a plan around asset management, they’ll see a lot of wins.

[1:58] We have found that formally creating a group or archives department to manage the assets, as well as spending money on hardware and systems around digitization and management, we can now find materials in seconds to minutes that used to take days to weeks.

[2:13] What this all means is we can tell our story to the world better, and we can leverage our assets. We’re now exploring how to simplify access to our DAM system, so our entire staff can access our history, as well as direct Web access to the world. We think the potential here is enormous, since currently only a small number of people can access our huge library.

[2:33] One huge win we had installing our DAM, was we were able to automate our photo‑approval workflow for our January Park City Festival. Festival photos go through Adobe Bridge software, where we add metadata, and then on to our Levels Beyond DAM, and then are distributed by Box to our approvers.

[2:51] This is a process that used to take our team hours per day manually, and now it’s done automatically, in minutes.

Henrik:  [2:57] Dave, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Dave:  [3:02] Learn as much as you can about the technologies available, the vendors, and best practices. At Sundance, our archives team is composed of professionals with library science degrees, and that gives us a lot of amazing insights around metadata, which really is the Holy Grail around any asset management system. Without a good plan around capturing and tracking this information, your DAM will be useless.

Without a good plan around capturing and tracking this information, your DAM will be useless.

[3:25] The other thing to consider is that you need to keep up‑to‑date on what everybody in the industry is doing around asset management, so doing things like listening to this podcast, reading articles, going to conferences ‑‑ these are all things that will help you to stay up‑to‑date on the current workflows, and also give you a lot of insight into a lot of the newer practices that people are just starting to employ.

Henrik:  [3:47] Thanks, Dave. If you’d like to hear more from Dave Ginsberg, check out his podcast at elegantworkflow.com.

Henrik:  [3:55] For more on this and other digital asset management topics, go to anotherdamblog.com. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. For this podcast and 150 other podcast episodes, including transcripts of every interview, go to anotherdampodcast.com.

[4:15] Thanks again.

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