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Another DAM Podcast interview with Paul Riggio on Digital Asset Management

Paul Riggio discusses Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • How does an organization focused on music use Digital Asset Management?
  • 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 Paul Riggio. Paul,
how are you?
Paul Riggio: [0:09] I’m doing quite well, thanks and yourself?
Henrik: [0:14] Paul, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Paul: [0:16] I basically fell into it because I have a background in music, music
for TV and commercials more specifically. I was looking for a system to better
access my back catalog of music. [0:30] Once I started down that path, I found
that it was a much larger task than expected. Also found that other people
wanted it, as well. I started a company called, TuneSpring, that really houses
the music of multiple companies and makes that accessible. It was out of
need, in short.
Henrik: [0:52] How does an organization focused on music use Digital Asset
Management?
Paul: [0:56] Basically, if you’re familiar with Pandora or any of those services,
what we have to do is somewhat similar. We have to tag, similar to video or
photos, give some sort of descriptors. Basically, my company puts all of this
information together to make it accessible. That’s how we’re involved in it.
Henrik: [1:17] What are the biggest challenges and successes with Digital Asset
Management?
Paul: [1:20] In general, I’d say one of the biggest successes is the fact that you’re
able to do more with your life outside of Digital Asset Management. Specifically,
for our business, it’s very hands-on. I’m consistently, along with many of the
people who use our system, we’re consistently asked for specific types of music.
[1:43] Putting a system like this together, which also incorporates video, in terms
of synchronization with audio and video, this system makes review and approval
very, very fast, and the ability to put playlists of tracks together very quickly. The
success is the ability to service clients at a very high level, and also have a life,
and be able to access that from anywhere.
[2:10] The challenge, I would say, especially with a system like ours, which is web
based, having to run through multiple iterations of browsers. Having to deal
with a lot of the technical aspects has been challenging. Also categorization is
always something that comes up.
[2:27] In our particular system, you’re able to search the music of multiple providers,
but each provider actually tags their own music. They’re all responsible for
their own tagging. We give guidelines and we provide different keywords that
we suggest, but everybody can tag the way they want to tag it.
[2:48] It was challenging to get to a place that would be both flexible enough for
individuals who might, say, have tags that would describe music specific to their
area. Even music that would be in different parts of the UK, for instance, might
have different descriptor that we wouldn’t use here in the states.
[3:08] Working out that system to be flexible enough to handle specific keywords
and that sort of thing was one of the many challenges.
Henrik: [3:17] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and
people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Paul: [3:21] Basically, like I said in the beginning, it’s something that was based
on need for me. I think, even if it’s something that you’re not sure how to approach
the business, essentially, look from the place of need, which is a little
bit broad. But it starts to come to light and as one experience the world a little
bit. [3:41] Essentially, again coming from a place of need, I would say one of the
things that I did was I really had to deal with a lot of my peers, who work within
the industry that I’m in primarily music for advertising, but also music publishers
and that sort of thing.
[4:01] I’ve spoken with major music publishers and looked at what their needs
would be, and tried to formulate a system that would simply address everybody’s
needs. It’s dealing with other people and experts within the field, such
as I dealt with metataggers who used to work at Pandora.
[4:24] I’ve dealt daily and technically with companies that are excellent at automatically
turning audio files into multiple versions of those files so they can be
reviewed in things like Firefox, which require OGG files, and that sort of thing.
Basically, from there, it’s based on need. There are many systems in place that
are badly in need of help, both with tagging and we’re finding that…One of the
major publishers I spoke with, I’m [inaudible 04: [4:41] 57] their name, had a staff
of about a dozen people, not too huge. They’re constantly going through and
tagging a million plus track library. They will be doing that, if you start doing the
math, and getting down to the hours per person, it takes a very long time.
[5:12] There’s work to be found. I had worked a bit with Dan McGraw in the
beginning. He helped to organize and break down the system that is the core of
what TuneSpring is now, to have the ability to look at potentially an industry that
from an outside perspective having somebody come in and look at it and break
it apart was very helpful for us.
[5:36] Again, if you can’t hire experts to speak to experts and try to interview
people who do this all the time, and kind of pick up fields that seems to
have a gray area of massive amounts of metadata, music being one of those
huge areas.
[5:55] There’s a lot of automatic categorization coming up, which is phenomenal
and really, really helpful. It has a tendency to find songs that sound like other
songs based on a variety of factors. But the human element is one that I think
to get truly accurate tagging, especially with audio, which is something that is
happening over time, you can’t just sit and look at it. It’s a particular challenge.
[6:22] There was one cool thing that we came up with in TuneSpring, which was
the fader search, which dealt with the unique challenge where music is concerned,
which is typically with keywords that a track is either happy or it’s sad, or
it’s kind of sad or it’s kind of happy. You don’t really have tags for that.
[6:40] We came up with a range fader for mood, for the subjective terms like the
“size” of the sound. Maybe technically an orchestra is very large, but if they’re
playing a small, quiet session, they’ll sound quite small, whereas if you look at
the White Stripes, which is just two people, they can sound enormous.
[7:08] Dealing with those things that the person who’s searching can react to
based on the results was the thing that’s been very successful with what we
created, having that move the fader from moody to happy and hearing what’s
there and being able to have an opinion based on what the results are. It’s
something very industry specific.
[7:33] Also, there’s a great book I’d recommend, which I think a lot of DAM
people may or may not know about, which is “Everything Is Miscellaneous.”
That was something that was very inspiring to me in terms of looking at the
broader world of Digital Asset Management and what the challenges are and
will be in the future.
[7:51] It’s an insane world. We are a world that’s generating a lot of content, particularly
in the music arena, since you can make a track on your iPhone or iPad,
and probably on an Android phone, too. It’s ever expanding.
[8:10] I guess in a way what we’re doing is, we’re doing a subscription based
group source thing, having all of our individual companies tag their own music
while also offering the potential of hiring professionals, should they so desire.
Henrik: [8:27] Thanks, Paul. For more on this and other Digital Asset
Management topics, log on to AnotherDAMblog.com. Another DAM Podcast
is available on Audioboom and iTunes. If you have any comments or questions,
please feel free to email me at AnotherDAMblog@gmail.com.
Thanks again.

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Michelle Lowe on Digital Asset Management

Michelle Lowe discusses Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • How does an organization focused automobile advertising use Digital Asset Management?
  • What are the biggest challenges and successes you have seen with DAM?
  • 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 Michelle Lowe.
[0:09] Michelle, how are you?
Michelle Lowe: [0:10] Hi, Henrik, good. How are you?
Henrik: [0:11] Good. Michelle, how are you involved with Digital Asset
Management?
Michelle: [0:15] I am the Digital Asset Manager in an automotive agency, and I
was introduced to the Digital Asset Management more than a decade ago when
we started producing digital assets and that created a need of storage for all
the photography, illustration, videos. Now, in the recent years, we started the
apps, too, the applications. At the beginning, we created a rudimentary digital
storage. We didn’t have anything. We called it a jukebox. That was based on the
[0:37] hard drives, DVDs and servers, which didn’t work very well with us.
But later on, we were able to acquire a Digital Asset Management system, and
our lives completely changed, became a lot easier.
[1:01] A couple of years ago, I moved to another agency that didn’t have any
type of storage system. They were in big need of a DAM. With my previous experience,
I was able to put in place a Digital Asset Management system, making
sure all the assets are easy to be accessed, the metadata is correct, the rights
and expiration dates are up to date. For legal matters, this is very important in
the advertising world.
[1:30] I am responsible for adjusting and processing all the agency’s assets and,
also, for delivering them to our clients’ central DAM system. They have one, too,
because they have many agencies they work with. They use all the assets such
as digital assets, from every other agency.
[1:51] Our agency’s digital asset system is a central repository where every art
director, or designer, or buyer, competitor even, account executives can access
the assets and use them for their project.
[2:05] DAM is a very flexible storage system, we have all kinds of files, APS, has
JPEG s in designs. We have them in all kinds, audio and video files, too. That
helps a lot.
Henrik: [2:21] How does an organization focused on automobile advertising use
Digital Asset Management?
Michelle: [2:26] Because our client operates globally, we must be efficient.
When it comes to digital assets, advertising now is a very fast paced environment
and projects have a quick turn around and having DAM systems helps immensely.
[2:41] We’re introducing a very large number of assets with our projects
but at the same time, for budget purposes, we have to share the assets with
other agencies that work for the same clients. To meet these needs, we deliver
to our client everything we create along with the metadata and they add them
to their central DAM system where the other agencies, around the world, have
access to.
Henrik: [3:07] What are the biggest challenges and success that you’ve seen
with Digital Asset Management?
Michelle: [3:11] Usually, adoption would be one challenge, and getting people
to know about Digital Asset Management system and accepting it and finally
using it. But since I have the system, I had to train and many times, I go one-onone
team members and it’s challenging. [3:30] Another challenge is the metadata
which is a very important part of any DAM system and everyone needs to
be involved in it, in the input of it. Not only for the legal aspect of it but also
because the quality of the metadata we applied to the assets can affect the
chances of them being found and subsequently used. Every word becomes
of keyword.
[3:55] Eventually, if you research that, DAM has a great future. I would like to be
better at it that and advertising. It’s a challenge, at this point, too. That’s the
best thing when we have our colleagues and team members learning something
about it and working with it and finding that it’s making their lives a lot easier
that is the best thing.
Henrik: [4:23] What advice would you like to share with other DAM professionals
and people aspiring to be DAM professionals?
Michelle: [4:27] A Digital Asset Manager needs to have great organizational
skills, be focused, and try to stay consistent. I think a bit OCD, if I can say that
would actually work because a perfectionist is an ideal candidate for the DAM.
[4:46] Another advice would be understand the user’s rights and copyright law
and really understand the work flow process of your organization that you are
involved with that is very, very important.
[5:00] I’ve been doing this for a while and I think working on DAM is just perfect
because it gives you challenges and gives you joy. Every day, I can tell you,
it’s the best.
Henrik: [5:13] Thank you, Michelle.
Michelle: [5:14] You’re welcome. It was a great pleasure.
Henrik: [5:17] For more on Digital Asset Management topics, log on to
AnotherDAMblog.com. Another DAM Podcast is available on Audioboom and
iTunes. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at
AnotherDAMblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.

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Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic, Spotify, TuneIn, and wherever you find podcasts.

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Jennifer Neumann on Digital Asset Management

Jennifer Neumann discusses Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • What are the biggest challenges and successes you have seen with DAM?
  • What advice would you like to share with DAM Professionals and people aspiring to become DAM Professionals?

Transcript:

Henrik: [0:01] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management.
I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, I’m speaking with Jennifer Neumann. Jennifer,
how are you?
Jennifer Neumann: [0:09] I’m doing fine. Thank you for inviting me to come on
your show, Henrik.
Henrik: [0:13] Jennifer, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Jennifer: [0:16] That’s actually a story that goes a long time back, to the early
‘90s, when the company I cofounded initially produced scanning software. It
was just after about half a year of selling scanning software, which helped a lot
of people create digital images. I was swamped with requests for building a
system that would then allow them to manage and access these thousands of
images created, in an efficient way. [0:44] Basically, I took that opportunity and
Digital Asset Management back then was actually just called an image database.
It’s had its incarnations since then, as you probably know, first being called
media asset management and then, ultimately, Digital Asset Management, It
evolved quite quickly, and we had a lot of customer demand. The solutions, ours
and competitors’ solutions, grew in very different directions at the same time,
supporting, of course, much more than images. The thing that I really like there
is that, from the beginning, it showed there is tremendous need for DAM, even
though it might not always be obvious how it should be best addressed.
Henrik: [1:24] What are the biggest challenges and successes you have seen
with Digital Asset Management?
Jennifer: [1:28] To follow up on what I just said, to put some figures out to
describe what I call success there. Over the years that we sold Digital Asset
Management, my company alone sold over 10,000 server solutions. We can only
estimate, but we bundled with many, if not most, of the biggest software vendors
out there. We probably reached about a million customers on the single
user side. It just endorses that Digital Asset Management has a clear demand
from the market. It might still struggle though fulfilling that demand and meeting
customer demand with clear cut offerings. [2:12] The challenges side are
actually both. They can be frustrating, definitely, for the customer. They can also
be frustrating for the vendor. What I think is important to look at is the topdown
view on the whole Digital Asset Management market. The one thing that I
recognized for a long time and still recognize is that Digital Asset Management
is still not as established as many other server solutions.
[2:37] Take, for example, the fact that every solution today is a web based
solution almost. Everybody would understand immediately. Everybody would
understand immediately and intuitively what a web server is. If you just mentioned
to a customer that has web based solutions, well, you should also install
a DAM server, you, more than often, still have to explain a lot in detail what the
DAM server would exactly do and what not to and how it would tie in with the
other servers.
[3:04] I think a situation that would help the success of DAM solutions would be
that there is more clarity on what it exactly addresses and what actually also
would be required to build an integrated solution and therefore, basically, any
effort like the efforts that you’re undertaking with your blog and your podcast,
extremely valuable.
Henrik: [3:25] Thank you. DAM is not the end all, be all. It is just one component
of many integral things that an organization may need.
Jennifer: [3:32] Yeah, well, just to reiterate, and I think it’s very important to get
this point across is this, it would be great if we would have the whole industry
of Digital Asset Management. If we had a sentence that would be, a one line
sentence, that would get across what DAM does. Another way to describe it, for
instance, and it’s something that also should actually finally happen, and I know
from reading your blog that you have also pushed in that direction, is there
is no clear-cut job descriptions out there for the people that work with DAM.
My experiences that, more than often, DAM is something that just comes up.
[4:08] I just had a case myself. An old friend of mine from San Francisco asked
me if I could recommend a DAM system for real estate company that needs to
take photographs of all the houses in a certain region. The typical approach
is, of course, not that they take this as a serious project from the beginning,
the customer, of course. It’s easy to understand we’ll try to get something
easy to install, little money, and is definitely not project manager from the beginning
assigned or even a product owner to call it that, but all these things
should happen.
[4:39] It should be clear on how a DAM project gets executed. While there’s
nothing wrong with starting a project small and grow the solution with integration
into other systems over time, it still should be clear from the beginning,
what the alternative routes would be that this DAM solution could be taken.
Henrik: [4:58] It is a phased approach, at least how it should be taken because
it often grows and often they pick a solution now that’s the cheapest possible
upfront. Then they outgrow it and then they have to do it all over again for a
medium sized solution. As the organization grows, they may even need a larger
solution. Of course, the price point changes and the features and integration
points change as well.
Jennifer: [5:23] One implementation that was I involved with personally and
I think it’s a really good example of how these things sometimes can be very
pinpointed. Another friend of mine who runs Germany’s largest independent
Apple dealership chain had the same need. Came up to me and said, “Jennifer,
can you help us? We are implementing a new eshop.” [5:47] Here’s another
one of those clearly defined. Or actually, people perceive it as clearly defined
solutions, right? You know you sell online. There’s an eshop that needs to be
implemented. It happened to be that that open source solution that they were
taking and extending manually was. And lots of programming had no strong capabilities
for managing images plus it’s not just managing the image. It’s a very
simple yet it is a workflow effect that they draw their products from all kinds of
vendors and then the metadata is not much, but it has to be entered in a standard
way for each of the products so that they know which vendor provides the
product to the dealer chain.
[6:32] The only thing that needed to really happen in regard to managing the
images themselves was that something in the middle that he thought was a
DAM system should automatically generate the five different resolutions for
best and best performing display of the products on the eshop and on the
website. That’s the whole workflow, but it means that you have to tie together,
first of all, in the graphics department somebody works with Adobe Photoshop
naturally and then there’s this thing in the middle and magically all these images
appear at the eshop.
[7:05] I don’t want to give the solution even away, what technology we used
in the middle of the year but this is, for me, the most important point. From
the beginning there’s clarity on what the workflow will be like and then you
have a high chance for success. Again, it’s not really relevant what we used
in the middle for converting images and forwarding metadata to the eshop,
but it was extremely important that we had an agreed upon plan on what was
going to be done and buy in even from the graphic designer, which starts the
whole process.
Henrik: [7:40] I agree. There’s a lot of components in the middle. There’s a perceived
end result. That should be very clear, as well as the workflow. But often
the end result is forgotten as the process goes along, which is a challenge with
many organizations I’ve seen.
Jennifer: [7:56] I still have a feeling that there is not enough clarity, also, on
what it takes to be a DAM system integration person. From experience, I can
tell that many of the people that put Digital Asset Management service in have
basically system integration staff with the company themselves. [8:17] But even
with the biggest ones, and I hope you’ll forgive me for not mentioning names,
but even they sometimes struggle to have enough qualified staff in the different
regions. I think that is definitely a field that still needs to be improved on to have
not just at least one capable person but considering that many of these solutions
are based on very different platforms, bet it .NET or Java or even different
operating systems.
[8:45] We need to find a way that there’s more talent in the market that understands
what they’re doing and maybe the analogy there, again, is if you talk
about Microsoft business then it is very clear cut. There’s someone that installed
your SharePoint server. If authentication isn’t working then it’s automatically
clear. You turn around and call the active directory guy. This is the kind of job
description that I’m talking about.
Henrik: [9:09] Those are missing from the industry because it’s all scattered
right now and there has not been a lot of consolidation even though there are
standardization bodies out there, I have not seen that coming out of them yet,
even though I have pushed for it. [9:22] I watch the job market every single day,
as far as seeing how organizations are advertising the needs for Digital Asset
Management so I understand their needs. But the standardization of the job
descriptions are not there and often they don’t know what they’re looking for.
Jennifer: [9:38] Yeah. I totally agree.
Henrik: [9:40] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and
people aspiring to be DAM professionals?
Jennifer: [9:45] I think that it’s just important to recognize that the same basic
skills are absolutely valuable, and they have been even before the digital age.
What I think of as…I just talked about that woman in the graphics department
for that German Apple dealer chain, she’s a very reliable, consistently working,
very detailed oriented person. I still, even though people might have different
viewpoints on what accountants do and what librarians do. But their qualities
that they have to do reliable work is just, those are basic skills that are very
important and help a lot to build a successful DAM installation. [10:32] But of
course, too, there is quite some learning involved. The systems are quite different
in how they’re used. It would be great if there was also, I mean, maybe, what
I would call soft standards. But what I see is that it’s basically down to people
accepting a job in the DAM area and then they will learn the system that is in
place with the company.
[10:56] Unfortunately, there is no standardized education at this point, but again,
through the help of your blog and other sites that I’ve seen, the DAM Foundation,
also, is a movement that I think is great. Everything in that direction that
helps, basically, detailed use skills will be helpful.
[11:14] It’s always, I mean, if there’s nothing there yet that tells you exactly what
to do, and I think this is also something you’ve mentioned before me and
others, too. I think the biggest right now is there should be more user groups
out there and there should be more events where people can talk to each other,
definitely. This is why I like user groups over conventions. Not everybody has the
chance to travel to New York for a show or Vegas or whatever. If there’s a way to
found more user groups around the DAM space, that I think will be helping the
end users a lot.
[11:46] Typically, people focus, of course, on the users and I can throw it back in
the mix, the technical folks there, too. I mean, DAM solutions do not normally
get instigated or started by the CIO or by the CTO. It isn’t normally, or in most
cases, there’s a pragmatic need for it, but I think it would be good, also, to find
a way to have more organized education towards the DAM technical folks.
[12:17] The last point, the last group that often gets forgotten from me is the
vendors. I think, there, too, I could basically criticize myself, you all, so, having
been involved in this industry for a long time, I think the vendors all should get
together more constructively and to try to build, maybe, standards, even, or
help build the perception of the whole market.
[12:42] Maybe a silly example or analogy there would be, if you look at how the
car manufacturers do it, I mean, they actually, I know this for a fact, they, at the
top level, but even at the engineering level, they meet at forums and groups
and discuss things and trends in the industry. That way, I think they’re helping
themselves to build a more consistent picture of what their market is about.
[13:05] If the vendors, and here’s another example of what’s already happening
even though it might not even be successful, is, even Microsoft, which is one of
the elephants, and the elephants normally are not the first to move, but agreed
to integrate a new standard called OASIS CMIS. CMIS stands for content management
interoperability services. Terrible acronym, of course. It simply means
that there should be a way through web services, in this case, how two systems
can synchronize data between them. Which is a great problem for DAM systems,
right? Because not all metadata necessarily has to live or will live in the
DAM server. If there is a content management system in the server mixed and
there will be some metadata, too. Maybe even the taxonomy is on the content
management server.
[13:56] If the DAM vendors work stronger and more successfully towards defining
how these interfaces work, I think then, they would also have less work to do,.
Because I know for a fact that it takes a vendor a lot of work, one by one, all of
them, to integrate with all the usual suspects, to start with Adobe products and
whatever else.
Henrik: [14:16] Great points. Great advice for the DAM vendors out there, and
solution providers.
Jennifer: [14:21] Yeah, just an encouragement. I mentioned your blog before.
I really think what you’re doing is absolutely great. Keep this going, it’s very
important.
Henrik: [14:32] Thank you so much. I appreciate that.
Jennifer: [14:33] You’re welcome.
Henrik: [14:35] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, log
onto AnotherDAMblog.com. Another DAM Podcast is available on Audioboom
and iTunes. [14:43] If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to
email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.

Related Articles

Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic, Spotify, TuneIn, and wherever you find podcasts.

Need Digital Asset Management advice and assistance?

Another DAM Consultancy can help. Schedule a call today


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Another DAM Podcast interview with Mitch Brodsky on Digital Asset Management

Mitch Brodsky discusses Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • How does the Philharmonic use Digital Asset Management?
  • What are the biggest challenges and successes you have seen with DAM?
  • What advice would you like to share with DAM Professionals and people aspiring to become DAM Professionals?

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor: [0:00] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset
Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, I’m speaking with Mitch Brodsky.
Mitch, how are you?
Mitch Brodsky: [0:09] Great. How are you?
Henrik: [0:11] Good. Mitch, how are you involved with Digital Asset
Management?
Mitch: [0:14] I work for the New York Philharmonic. My official title here is Digital
Archives Manager. I was hired to manage the three year project with support
from the Leon Levy Foundation to digitize 1.3 million pages of historical material
here in the archives between the years 1943 to 1970. My role has largely been
project manager for that project. However, I have branched out into other responsibilities,
such as web archiving, electronic records management, and other
sorts of Digital Asset Management issues here within the organization.
Henrik: [0:52] How does the Philharmonic use Digital Asset Management?
Mitch: [0:55] As the result of our digitization project, we have a website that was
launched in February 2011. You can find it at archives.nyphil.org. That is a site
where you can view the 1.3 million pages that we’ve digitized, and that is under
an Alfresco Repository. That’s one element of what we do, is to manage that
large repository and continue to grow it into the future. [1:22] We have printed
music, which includes scores and orchestral parts used and marked by Leonard
Bernstein, Andre Kostelanetz, and other conductors. And, of course, the parts
are marked by the orchestral musicians. We also have every printed program,
which you can flip through online. We are beginning to go back and complete
the digitization of 1842 through yesterday’s program. We do have online right
now everything from 1943 to 1970.
[1:58] In addition, we have all of the photographs from that time period, glass
lantern slides that were used in the first Young People’s Concerts, and business
records, which is actually the bulk of the material. What we call business records
are correspondence, contracts, financial documents, anything related to the
daily running of the Philharmonic. This is really what we, as records managers,
accession every day from the administration of the organization.
[2:33] We have digitized everything in TIFF and JPEG . All the images that you’re
seeing online are JPEGs that are being represented in the Internet archives
book reader, which I believe now is hosted on the Open Library. We adapted
that book reader to pull the JPEGs associated with assets you’re looking for
into it so you can flip through it as though it’s on the reading room table in
front of you.
[2:58] That said, since we have digitized everything from 1943 to 1970, we are
continuing to go back and digitize everything from 1842, now, to 1943. We will
be eventually completing the digitization of all of the historical assets owned by
the Philharmonic.
[3:20] In addition to that, we’re beginning the process of sessioning born digital
material into the archives. The idea is that, at one point in time, we will have a
single repository that contains all of the intellectual assets of the organization
from 1842 through today. We’ll be able to facilitate the discovery of items that
follow certain themes throughout the entire history of the institution.
[3:47] We do utilize assets relating to certain issues through time. This will be
one day a discovery tool to be able to pull things out that relate to overall topics
as we might be dealing with today, but we had also dealt with in the ‘70s or the
‘40s or the ‘20s, and so on.
Henrik: [4:08] What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with
Digital Asset Management?
Mitch: [4:12] The biggest challenge is definitely workflow. Now, our case in
Digital Asset Management might be a little bit different from what first would
appear to someone’s mind when hearing that term. [4:27] To me, Digital Asset
Management largely means born digital material that is sessioned into a repository
and managed and then later leveraged however the organization sees fit.
[4:41] What I’ve had most experience with here is digitizing analog material into
digital assets. There’s an enormous amount of challenge from the workflow, because
we have to prepare items for digitization, then it has to be photographed
by our in house photographers. Then every page has to be proofed, which
means compared with the original item.
[5:09] We have this very complex workflow, both in terms of physical logistics,
but also, software, where in between those steps, I have to ingest all these
assets into the system at an enormous rate, create derivative files, and then
put approved items into a queue for release and then finally, release when we
decide to do our point releases.
[5:36] My job as the project manager is to make sure that all the people involved
here have work to do every day and that we’re not backed up or too far
ahead in one part of the process or another. That’s the biggest challenge from
where I sit.
[5:53] The biggest success, well, it’s amazing when you work so hard on a project
like this and the site goes online and it’s living and breathing. The most amazing
thing, to me, is the comments that come in from people, how much they’re
using this now in their research.
[6:15] Only a year, I guess, a year and a half into the project, we are working with
some Columbia sociologists to look at subscription seating through the history
of our ticket sales. They’ve been crunching some of or data and transcribing our
subscriber feed books to determine where people sat in the association to their
status in New York society. It’s a really interesting project that we would never
have dreamed would’ve come out of this, especially so soon and after the initial
release of the digital archives.
[7:03] That’s just one example of many very serious researchers write us and tell
us that they want to use our data for some extraordinary project that will add to
the information that’s out there. I’m just very proud of that.
[7:19] I suppose that’s the greatest success that I see, is just that this thing is out
there and people are utilizing it and they’re responding to it. Every time we’ve
done a release, we’ve seen our numbers almost double in terms of our analytics,
and this has been very telling for us, that people really are interested in this.
[7:42] We are in a really good position with our metadata when we started the
project. Our metadata is housed in two different databases, depending on the
type of material, but these databases have been curated and utilized since the
‘80s. Our metadata is in very good shape.
[8:04] What we do is we have metadata on what we call the asset level. For business
folders, we have metadata on the folding level. For music scores, we have
it on the score level, so each bound volume is described with metadata.
[8:21] We don’t do page level description because we simply would never have
gotten it done. When we started out with the project, our metadata was pretty
clean and so as part of the proofing process, as we were proofing images, the
people who were doing that were also checking to make sure that the metadata
was standardized and cleaning up whatever needed to be cleaned up.
[8:51] Our printed music and our performance history for program metadata
are in an in-house, homebuilt, multivalue database system. Our business records
and metadata is in Inmagic’s DB/TextWorks. We’ve had good success
with those.
[9:14] The way the process works is, when we photograph the analog material,
and I ingest those JPEGS into our Alfresco repository. I also do an export of the
metadata from our legacy systems and import those as well. Everything is tied
by ID. If we do have to revise metadata, we do it in our in-house databases and
then re-import again.
[9:44] One day, we will be doing direct metadata entry in the Alfresco interface,
although we just haven’t started that yet. It’s important to note that these are
not archival databases. The databases that we use, that feed into our digital
archives, are used really by the entire organization for different purposes. For
those people who are listening to this as archivists, we don’t distinguish between
what is our archival and what is current.
[10:15] I think that goes to the same point of, the purpose of this project, to
make one large repository, one continuum of information of history of the
Philharmonic. The information that was being created by the institution in 1842
is just as relevant and just as important as the documents that are being created
right now by our executive director or managers of various sorts.
Henrik: [10:45] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and
people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Mitch: [10:49] I would say learn as much as you can about different systems,
different types of repositories and different program languages. I’m not a “developer.”
That’s not my training background. I have a degree in library science,
that I also have a music degree. [11:13] I was also a geek. I loved tinkering with
computers for my whole life. In the early ‘90s when HTML started to become
a thing and the web started to happen, I had a big book of…the HTML Bible. I
went front to back and I learned it. I had no idea, then, that that would form the
foundation for my career in the future. Now, it doesn’t stop. I go home and I
do online JavaScript tutorials and I do online jQuery tutorials and whatever else
because it just never stops, the amount that you can learn.
[11:53] The benefit of being a professional, especially a technology-oriented
professional in today’s world is that there’s so much open source software and
there’s so much community around learning these things. There are plenty of
free or very inexpensive ways, if you’re willing to put the time in, to keep up with
what’s going on out there.
[12:16] I love Codecademy. It’s not huge yet, but the examples in the tutorials
that I have on there have really helped refresh some things for me and in other
cases, learn from scratch. I would definitely recommend it. I try to take my own
advice, in that case, and do it myself.
[12:36] It’s so easy. For instance, Alfresco is a great example. You can download
for free, community version of Alfresco and learn how it works and what are the
pros and cons of it. You can do that with any number of repository systems.
[12:53] Knowing about what’s out there is really important because when an
option comes up in your job, you have to make a decision between one system
or technique or another system or technique. To know all the options that are
out there and why one would choose one over the other is just really important.
Henrik: [13:12] Very true. That sounds like a great example of how you made a
personal commitment to invest in yourself in learning those skills.
Mitch: [13:20] Absolutely. There’s no reason not to.
Henrik: [13:22] Excellent. Well, thanks, Mitch.
Mitch: [13:25] You’re welcome.
Henrik: [13:26] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics,
log onto AnotherDAMblog.com. Another DAM Podcast is available in
Audioboom and iTunes. If you have any comments or questions, feel free to email
me at AnotherDAMblog@gmail.com.Thanks again.

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