Frank DeCarlo moderated a virtual panel discussion about Digital Asset Management (DAM) Onboarding and everything remotely connected, sponsored by My DAM Services.
Abbe Wiesenthal, Matt Dean, Spencer J. Harris, and Henrik de Gyor share how to achieve faster and even more successful DAM user engagements remotely.
Interview with Giovanni Benigni about Digital Asset Management
(Duration: 10 minutes 40 seconds)
Questions asked
How are you involved with Digital Asset Management (DAM)?
How does the Vatican Museums’ Digital Transformation project involve Digital Asset Management?
What are the biggest challenges and successes you have seen with Digital Asset Management?
What advice would like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM
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 Giovanni Benigni.
Henrik de Gyor (0:08): Giovanni, How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Giovanni Benigni (0:12): Well, before starting, I have just to say that I’m speaking on my own, of my personal experience in the Vatican. All the opinions expressed not necessarily reflect ones of the institution.
Giovanni Benigni (0:32): That said, I started working for the Vatican Museums at the end of last century. And in the early 2000s, I directed for the Governorate of Vatican City State several software development projects related to image storage and retrieval systems. But such projects, unfortunately, at the time had no fortune for several reasons that would be too long to say here, and went into oblivion. Moreover, since coming to Museums, I dealt with several software systems used to catalog and store images, without any direct connection to our CMS. Also, since the advent of digital high-resolution imagery had just been conserved on file shares, without any way to retrieve it, other than using [file] path and file names. So since then, my obsession has been to put all the information we had in a single system to get to a single access point directory of everything. This is shortly how I started my involvement with DAM in the Vatican.
Henrik de Gyor (1:50): Giovanni, how does the Vatican Museums’ digital transformation project involve Digital Asset Management?
Giovanni Benigni (1:57): The digital transformation project of Vatican Museums started some years ago with a larger, seemingly never-ending, technical renewal project involving all our seven kilometers [~4.35 miles] of galleries and working spaces, and all the systems from communication to remote surveillance, access control, networking, and so on. In this framework, we started several projects as, for example, the 3D scanning project of all said spaces, that is now completed, and a long-awaited scanning project of our historical pictures on glass plates strongly wanted by our new director, Dr. Barbara Jatta. It appeared immediately that for the pictures we needed both a new cataloging system and long-term storage to accommodate forever their digital copies.
Giovanni Benigni (2:15): And fortunately, I had a good experience with what we shouldn’t do. We looked for solutions offered by big tech, but it seemed not likely to be valid ones, because although they were flexible, and metadata rich, generally stored the images on database blobs. And I had a good experience with blobs and I knew that were not good for large files that we needed to store. That’s why we started to search for a solution that wouldn’t store large files on a blob, but just on disk on shares, on other support, but directly, physically on disks. And we identified among a large number two possible products, [a] commercial one and an open-source project.
Giovanni Benigni (3:47): The first appeared to be more aimed at companies that had to manage images for commercial purposes, while the open-source seemed built for research institution libraries, and for sure, museums, because, also, it was validated by the Musées de France. It gave us a good perspective to be able to use it satisfactorily, and, most important, being an open-source platform, it was inexpensive, which is a word always loved by management.
Giovanni Benigni (4:18): So we started a test and we had a nice surprise. It appeared every day more and more suitable to contain every information we already had. And a new possibility arose. Finally, get to a unique access point for every artwork-related information in our possession. It was my dream coming true. So, in brief, we started migration. First moving existing CMS data to the new catalog, followed by images and all the other conservation and historical data we had. Today, we are still ingesting images, the last 100,000, more or less, audio files, conservation and analysis reports, and we are planning to ingest also videos starting from the most recent digital, going back to older on tapes. Here we could open another chapter, talking about formats no more easily readable, like Betacam.
Henrik de Gyor (5:20): Giovanni, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Giovanni Benigni (5:26): We have a very ancient museum. Our history starts a few centuries ago, more or less. You can well imagine how much information we have accumulated in such a long time. One of the biggest challenges is being able to digitize the answer pictures and documents in our possession. Their quantity exceeds any idea you may have, for sure. And this reverses in time necessary to do the scanning because the items must be handled with extreme care, must be cleaned, and so on. Moreover, you know, it was 1997, and I had just joined the Museums, when I first heard about a project for scanning our ancient photos on glass plates. Well, we definitely have been able to start such a project only in 2017. Twenty years later. And although the scanning job is being practically completed today, the curator still has to check all the archival information related to them and this takes a lot of time. We are going a bit slow in this moment. Really for we have moved objects, entities, and all the assets into a unique system, where everything is directly related to inventory items with meaningful relationships, now searches are simpler and more efficient, although people have had to get used to a new way to enquire. The new CMS uses Lucene syntax, and there’s a faceting capability, so people today, unlike before, when they had to ask our inventory to make searches, now they are able to make top-down searches and, listen, they are able to find for themselves what they are looking for. And this is a really big step forward, together with the capability to see in a glance the documents, pictures, analysis, and so on in a single application. Finally, I can say that the new catalog has made possible a true collaboration between departments that today they can easily share information of every kind about inventory objects without printing paper or sending emails, but directly inside the catalog using the sharing capabilities of the system.
Henrik de Gyor (7:59): Giovanni, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Giovanni Benigni (8:05): Well, I think that if you want to get out alive from a DAM project, you must build your project on a strong metadata base. So take your time to think and rethink and rethink it as many times as you need to be strongly convinced it will work. Really, this is not as hard as it seems, because the hard work to reduce data to a common structure will be limited to no more than 15 metadata [fields], but you must take it into consideration very seriously.
Giovanni Benigni (8:44): Second, you must define DAM and long-term preservation policies. When I say DAM policy, I say policy about ingestion, about acquisition, about tagging, about descriptions, and so on, also about vocabulary. This is crucial, to pass onto people the concept that they must follow the rules. Otherwise, you will have a fantastic system filled with objects without any capability to find what you’re looking for.
Giovanni Benigni (9:23): Third, drop an eye to interoperability, because for sure you will need it internally to develop products based on your assets. For example, our system has a built-in IIIF server, which makes it possible to superimpose more than one image and then, for example, we have visible light, infrared, X-ray images, and we can superimpose and look to particulars by switching immediately from one layer to another, and this is very useful. Very useful for curators, for restorators, and also for the public. So, interoperability, I think should be a must. And that’s all.
Giovanni Benigni (10:20): Indeed, if you are crossing over troubled water, feel free to contact me. Thank you.
Henrik de Gyor (10:26): Thank you, Giovanni. For more on this, visit anotherdampodcast.com.
If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.
Henrik de Gyor interviews Alan Gottlieb about Digital Asset Management
(duration 8:43)
Questions asked:
How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
How does a nonprofit environmental organization use Digital Asset Management?
What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people who aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Transcript:
Henrik de Gyor (00:00):
This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Alan Gottlieb. Alan, how are you?
Alan Gottlieb (00:08):
I’m doing well, Henrik. How are you?
Henrik de Gyor (00:10):
Good. Alan, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Alan Gottlieb (00:14):
So I’m the Digital Asset Manager at a national environmental nonprofit. I maintain and develop a DAM system that serves upwards of 600 users at our headquarters in New York and in Washington and at state and local offices across the country. I’m something of a one-man-band. I’m currently doing much of the ingest, description and creating rules and standards as I move ahead of with development of the system while also identifying new content providers and monitoring users on the system.
Henrik de Gyor (00:50):
Alan, how does a nonprofit environmental organization use Digital Asset Management?
Alan Gottlieb (00:55):
So, on the downstream side, our contact team includes photography from the DAM to illustrate stories in our beautiful magazine and our websites and with reports that we share with the public. We’re a nonprofit, so we also use assets for fundraising and marketing. And we use assets for communication. Communications with media organizations and on social and we also have a large outreach and education component to our organization. So educators use these assets to help create public programs. On the upstream side, our organization runs a popular nationwide wildlife photo contest for amateurs and professionals and contestants who enter photos may as part of their of their entry grant just rights to reproduce their images to further our mission. The photography from that yearly contest is at the core of the wildlife photography on our DAM. And many people use those assets and you know, our efforts. We also maintain an ever expanding collection of creative photography shot by our photo department staff and network photographers. They shoot activities and events across the country, conservation efforts, legislative initiatives and local programs or citizen science events. Also scientists may do field work and contribute photography that documents that.
Henrik de Gyor (02:33):
Alan, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Alan Gottlieb (02:38):
So when I arrived at the organization, the DAM was about two years old and it was still in a pretty early stage of development. People who knew about it were using it. It was, you know, clearly meeting a need for high quality, interesting wildlife photography, but not everyone in the network was aware of the DAMs existance and if so, how it could work for them? Also, you know, initial metadata profile had been set up, but largely abandoned, you know, say for one important searchable field. There were really no controlled vocabularies, just backlog of assets and there was really no file naming convention either. So, since then I’ve worked to establish basic DAM design and good practices, you know, establishing workflows, creating system rules and governance structures and improving security and establishing, controlled vocabularies. You know, because there was a lack of metadata fields.
Alan Gottlieb (03:46):
A search wasn’t very flexible and people were getting, you know, I thought very incomplete search results. So as an interim solution, identify the info that we wanted to maintain and, you know, use a free text keyword fields to answer those values. And finally, now I’m in the midst of making more permanent changes by establishing metadata profile, finalizing controlled vocabularies and developing rights metadata. And you know, I think establishing this should make a lot of things easier, including, you know, ingest and just further stabilizing description. Oh. So I think managing rights on our systems is a challenge. And one I’m also tackling now, less than half of the photography on the DAM was shot by employees, is work for hire or is otherwise owned by us. The rest of the photography was a shot by some combination of contestants, freelance photographers on assignment and other employees. That is, you know, people who still own their work and also the rights that we requested from contestants change somewhat from year to year early on.
Alan Gottlieb (05:05):
So we have a big variety of rights situations that we’re trying to grapple with. And I’m in the midst of setting up rights metadata fields so we can maintain a self service model where users can understand that at glance, I hope, how they can use the assets at least for, you know, various editorial uses. And in the more complex uses usage situations, we’re going to have users come to us and request permission. I’m trying to get a bead on all our upstream content producers and media, you know, and that’s a challenge maybe in part because we have a kind of a nod, entirely centralized structure. Our DAM is administered in the photo department so we have that large amount of content being driven by our shooters. But we have shooters and videographers among our communications people and social media people and scientists may have content that our national local users would find useful.
Alan Gottlieb (06:09):
And identifying those people I think is also a work in progress for me. Our organization is also not entirely centralized for a historic reasons. I think I just mentioned that for example, our local chapters and there are a lot of them are each independent nonprofit organizations themselves and though the national organization support salmon, we coordinate so well. There was initially strong adoption by the people who knew about it. Making more people in these chapters aware of us in what we offer is a challenge and we’re using internal newsletters and web pages to make our presence known. And there’s been some word of mouth growth. Also. New initiatives brought us new users and, and between us, between it all, we’ve tripled the number of users or almost tripled the number of users and doubled the downloads on the system. And the time that I’ve been there.
Alan Gottlieb (07:09):
And I think a last challenge that we’re grappling with is trying to understand how people in the organization are using the system. What are they downloading? What are they doing with those files? Once downloaded, our vendor gives us a robust audit trail so we can understand a lot of what a search for viewed and downloaded and who’s doing it, but creating reports, consolidate this information to give us a broader understanding of subject use is another current initiative. Also conducting user interviews to bolster our understanding of what’s being done downstream.
Henrik de Gyor (07:51):
Alan, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people who aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Alan Gottlieb (07:57):
Well, I’d say if you’re coming out of library school, library world, working a basic cataloging internship in the library or museum, be it with digital media, but also analog media. I think that’s really very helpful. Also, if you’re on a system, understand your users. Use system statistics, interview people, do outreach. Find those people who are using your DAM, you know, and let them give you information about what’s happening.
Henrik de Gyor (08:32):
Thanks Alan. For more on this, visit anotherdampodcast.com. Do you have any comments or questions? Please feel free to email me at
Henrik de Gyor (00:00):
This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Alan Gottlieb. Alan, how are you?
Alan Gottlieb (00:08):
I’m doing well, Henrik. How are you?
Henrik de Gyor (00:10):
Good. Alan, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Alan Gottlieb (00:14):
So I’m the Digital Asset Manager at a national environmental nonprofit. I maintain and develop a DAM system that serves upwards of 600 users at our headquarters in New York and in Washington and at state and local offices across the country. I’m something of a one-man-band. I’m currently doing much of the ingest, description and creating rules and standards as I move ahead of with development of the system while also identifying new content providers and monitoring users on the system.
Henrik de Gyor (00:50):
Alan, how does a nonprofit environmental organization use Digital Asset Management?
Alan Gottlieb (00:55):
So, on the downstream side, our contact team includes photography from the DAM to illustrate stories in our beautiful magazine and our websites and with reports that we share with the public. We’re a nonprofit, so we also use assets for fundraising and marketing. And we use assets for communication. Communications with media organizations and on social and we also have a large outreach and education component to our organization. So educators use these assets to help create public programs. On the upstream side, our organization runs a popular nationwide wildlife photo contest for amateurs and professionals and contestants who enter photos may as part of their of their entry grant just rights to reproduce their images to further our mission. The photography from that yearly contest is at the core of the wildlife photography on our DAM. And many people use those assets and you know, our efforts. We also maintain an ever expanding collection of creative photography shot by our photo department staff and network photographers. They shoot activities and events across the country, conservation efforts, legislative initiatives and local programs or citizen science events. Also scientists may do field work and contribute photography that documents that.
Henrik de Gyor (02:33):
Alan, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Alan Gottlieb (02:38):
So when I arrived at the organization, the DAM was about two years old and it was still in a pretty early stage of development. People who knew about it were using it. It was, you know, clearly meeting a need for high quality, interesting wildlife photography, but not everyone in the network was aware of the DAMs existance and if so, how it could work for them? Also, you know, initial metadata profile had been set up, but largely abandoned, you know, say for one important searchable field. There were really no controlled vocabularies, just backlog of assets and there was really no file naming convention either. So, since then I’ve worked to establish basic DAM design and good practices, you know, establishing workflows, creating system rules and governance structures and improving security and establishing, controlled vocabularies. You know, because there was a lack of metadata fields.
Alan Gottlieb (03:46):
A search wasn’t very flexible and people were getting, you know, I thought very incomplete search results. So as an interim solution, identify the info that we wanted to maintain and, you know, use a free text keyword fields to answer those values. And finally, now I’m in the midst of making more permanent changes by establishing metadata profile, finalizing controlled vocabularies and developing rights metadata. And you know, I think establishing this should make a lot of things easier, including, you know, ingest and just further stabilizing description. Oh. So I think managing rights on our systems is a challenge. And one I’m also tackling now, less than half of the photography on the DAM was shot by employees, is work for hire or is otherwise owned by us. The rest of the photography was a shot by some combination of contestants, freelance photographers on assignment and other employees. That is, you know, people who still own their work and also the rights that we requested from contestants change somewhat from year to year early on.
Alan Gottlieb (05:05):
So we have a big variety of rights situations that we’re trying to grapple with. And I’m in the midst of setting up rights metadata fields so we can maintain a self service model where users can understand that at glance, I hope, how they can use the assets at least for, you know, various editorial uses. And in the more complex uses usage situations, we’re going to have users come to us and request permission. I’m trying to get a bead on all our upstream content producers and media, you know, and that’s a challenge maybe in part because we have a kind of a nod, entirely centralized structure. Our DAM is administered in the photo department so we have that large amount of content being driven by our shooters. But we have shooters and videographers among our communications people and social media people and scientists may have content that our national local users would find useful.
Alan Gottlieb (06:09):
And identifying those people I think is also a work in progress for me. Our organization is also not entirely centralized for historic reasons. I think I just mentioned that for example, our local chapters and there are a lot of them are each independent nonprofit organizations themselves and though the national organization support salmon, we coordinate so well. There was initially strong adoption by the people who knew about it. Making more people in these chapters aware of us in what we offer is a challenge and we’re using internal newsletters and web pages to make our presence known. And there’s been some word of mouth growth. Also. New initiatives brought us new users and, and between us, between it all, we’ve tripled the number of users or almost tripled the number of users and doubled the downloads on the system. And the time that I’ve been there.
Alan Gottlieb (07:09):
And I think a last challenge that we’re grappling with is trying to understand how people in the organization are using the system. What are they downloading? What are they doing with those files? Once downloaded, our vendor gives us a robust audit trail so we can understand a lot of what a search for viewed and downloaded and who’s doing it, but creating reports, consolidate this information to give us a broader understanding of subject use is another current initiative. Also conducting user interviews to bolster our understanding of what’s being done downstream.
Henrik de Gyor (07:51):
Alan, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people who aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Alan Gottlieb (07:57):
Well, I’d say if you’re coming out of library school, library world, working a basic cataloging internship in the library or museum, be it with digital media, but also analog media. I think that’s really very helpful. Also, if you’re on a system, understand your users. Use system statistics, interview people, do outreach. Find those people who are using your DAM, you know, and let them give you information about what’s happening.
Another DAM Podcast 