Another DAM Podcast

Audio about Digital Asset Management

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Jennifer Griffith and Elizabeth Keathley of UPS

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • Congratulations on winning a 2010 DAMMY Award. Why does a shipping and logistics company use a DAM?
  • What advice would you like to give to DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor: [0:02] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset
Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Jennifer Griffith and
Elizabeth Keathley. [0:11] How are you?
Jennifer Griffith: [0:12] Great, how are you?
Henrik: [0:13] Great! How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Jennifer: [0:18] OK, well, I manage the Digital Asset Management system for
UPS for our global communications function. That includes all communications,
employees, and our agency to create collateral on our behalf around the globe.
[0:37] I’ve managed the team for about three years now. Prior to that, I produced
and directed video for UPS and served in a project management role.
[0:49] During that time, I spent…I guess about nearly 10 years learning about
DAM, starting with a field trip down to CNN in the late 1990’s and was sort of
hooked after seeing the setup they had there.
[1:04] Continued to kind of teach myself about the industry and attend conferences
when I was able, usually when they were in Atlanta or the Southeast.
[1:14] Sort of self-taught in the industry of asset management. A lot of reading of
online materials, a lot of benchmarking with some of my peers here in Atlanta.
[1:25] I advocated for a DAM system here in the communications function pretty
much every year, up until UPS turned 100.
Henrik: [1:34] Wow.
Jennifer: [1:35] We celebrated our centennial anniversary in 2007. Following
that centennial anniversary and trying to find 100 years’ worth of stuff without
a Digital Asset Management system, the company finally made a decision to
officially form the team, named me to management, to manage it, as I’d been
advocating for years. [1:56] Was able to hire a team. We had some dedicated
budget to get a system off the ground.
[2:03] That’s what I do. I’ll turn it over to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Keathley: [2:05] I got into Digital Asset Management by way of
library and archive work. [2:10] I’ve got a degree in archive management out
of the library science school at Simmons College. I graduated the fall/winter
semester of 2002, I guess…2001? I’m not even sure. I’d have to go back and
look it up.
[2:27] I just love making information accessible. The definition of an archivist is
somebody who arranges and describes collections for preservation and access.
[2:36] That pretty much also describes all of my DAM work. I’ve come to it just
through my work in librarianship and archives.
Henrik: [2:45] Congratulations on winning the 2010 DAMMY award.
What was the DAMMY award for, specifically?
Jennifer: [2:50] Well, thanks, Henrik. We won in the category of Best
Storage, Archive, and Preservation Solution. We’re really excited to be recognized
in that category. [3:01] We’ve got a lot of focus on preservation because
of the metadata models and the Dublin Core Metadata models that we follow.
Elizabeth can, I’m sure, add more to the preservation focus that our team has.
Elizabeth: [3:16] Before I worked at UPS, one of the jobs I had was as a preservation
field services officer for a now defunct corporation called SOLINET,
which was the Southeastern Library Network. I helped people get grants from
the National Endowment for the Humanities to preserve their collections. [3:32]
During that time, I saw a lot of both successful and failed systems. I was able to
take what I had learned on that job, from traveling around the Southeast and
helping people set up their systems.
[3:47] The standards that the American Library Association and SAA and
Digicure and all these other people have put together to come up with a very
stable metadata modeling system for UPS.
[4:00] It’s XML based, like every good system should be. We’ve got a modified
Dublin Core account logging system.
[4:08] It doesn’t matter what happens in the future. No matter what, we can
always suck all of our metadata out of there and put it in any other system.
Henrik: [4:16] Great, that’s very important. Excellent! [4:18] Well, congratulations
again on that reward. Why does a shipping and logistics company use a DAM?
Jennifer: [4:23] Well, Henrik, at UPS we’re a very big company around the
globe. [4:28] In order to communicate globally to our customers and to our
employees, our communications professionals have to overcome differences in
language and culture and time zones to maintain that consistency of brand, to
have access to that central repository of brand assets and to all the guidelines
that go along with the proper use of those assets.
[4:55] Risk mitigation is a big part of what we do. Making sure we’ve got all our
rights management documents and our agreements tied to the assets in our
system within the communications group at UPS.
Henrik: [5:09] Great! What advice would you give to DAM professionals or
people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Jennifer: [laughs] [5:15] Wow. I would say attend the conferences…a big fan of
Henry Stewart, obviously a big fan of Createasphere. [5:25] The DAM community
has always been very open to sharing. Sharing best practices, sharing mistakes,
sharing lessons learned.
[5:34] You’ll hear it said that no DAM system is like another. Every company has a
system unique to their needs, customized to their needs.
[5:45] Still always very open to saying, oh, you might try this, or don’t do that, or
think of this. I would never hesitate to call on a DAM manager at any company
and say, hey, can you tell me about your system or give me some advice.
[6:02] I would also say obviously define your requirements. Then don’t budge
from those requirements. Early on, we wrote our use cases, defined our
requirements.
[6:14] It’s easy to say, well, I guess we can live with that or we can live with that.
That always comes back to sort of haunt you afterward.
[6:23] Another thing that some of us in the DAM industry tend to do is forget
that these systems require updates. They require maintenance and budget for
enhancements every year. Budget for new user requests every year, where you
can, as you can.
[6:40] I think the large part of why we won the DAMMY award this year for Best
Storage, Archive, and Preservation Solution is really our team.
[6:49] As Elizabeth said, she’s got a masters’ degree in library science. We’ve got
Mary Katherine on our team who has the same degree.
[6:57] I’ve got a background in video production and project management. I can
navigate the politics in a large corporate company.
[7:06] Somehow, between us, we really make it work. We often take a vote in
making a change to our metadata models and in our taxonomies. We’ll argue
about a naming convention for hours on end.
[7:21] It’s having that right team together that helped us be successful.
Elizabeth: [7:24] That is absolutely true. When we were working on
our metadata modeling, we actually agreed then I think why we won the award.
[7:30] We were talking about making changes because we’re taking it in a new
kind of format or a new kind of asset or a group had a different set of requirements
than another. Often, Jennifer will argue for the change. Mary Katherine in
the balance…
[laughter]
Jennifer: [7:44] She breaks it.
Elizabeth: [7:45] Yeah, to break it. She’s the nicest one! We hired her right out
of the program at UNC Chapel Hill. [7:54] She was writing her masters’ thesis on
DAM. We hired her before she turned her thesis in, because we knew she was
the right person on the team.
[8:02] It really is a combination of people.
Henrik: [8:05] She wrote her thesis on DAM specifically? I’m sorry. Was she an
archivist or a library science person?
Elizabeth: [8:11] Yeah, she was in their library science program, studying to be
an archivist.
Henrik: [8:16] Well, great!
Jennifer: [8:17] Thank you so much, and thank you for doing these podcasts,
Henrik. We appreciate the time you put in to sharing this educational information
across the DAM community. It’s really helpful.
Elizabeth: [8:27] Yeah, and we actually listen to them, so…
Jennifer: [laughs] [8:29]
Henrik: [8:29] That’s always helpful. I appreciate that. Thank you so much! For
more on Digital Asset Management, log onto [8:32] anotherdamblog.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 Abby De Millo on Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • Why does an information and media organization use a DAM?
  • What advice would you like to give to DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor: [0:02] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset
Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Abby DeMillo. Abby,
how are you?
Abby DeMillo: [0:10] I’m fine. How are you doing today?
Henrik: [0:12] Good. Abby, how are you involved with Digital Asset
Management?
Abby: [0:17] At the McGraw Hill companies, we view Digital Asset Management
as one component of what we call the digital supply chain. We’re not looking at
Digital Asset Management purely as an archival tool or as a brand management
tool. We’re looking at it as really a component of our content delivery ecosystem
so to speak. [0:48] It’s very much integrated in with our Content Management
Systems, our delivery platforms, our enrichment tools, so on and so forth. It is a
key component, but we look at it as a component of that whole chain.
Henrik: [1:03] Great. Just to reiterate, why does an information and media organization
use a DAM?
Abby: [1:10] We use it to help deliver content. Digital Asset Management
through the years has grown and matured, and the technology has matured as
well, to really offer more than just the storage and delivery out of rich media
assets. [1:30] It still does that. It still does that very, very well. I highly recommend
any company that has branding, marketing assets, rich media assets,
or any object related content to really invest in a repository, invest in a Digital
Asset Management. That is the best way to keep track of your master assets.
[1:54] B to B business are using it really in terms of delivering out and reusing
those components. You can supply a B-to-B site and web channel delivery of
content without a Digital Asset Management. It is completely possible to do
that, but you’ll find that you’ll be wasting a lot of infrastructure.
[2:20] Your technology footprint will be greater, because you will not have control
of your parent and child assets. The value to B-to-B business is to really keep…
you’ve heard of master data management. There’s not an acronym for this but
it’s really keeping track of your master rich media assets and delivering versions
of those assets.
[2:45] Rather than keeping the same asset in 100 different places, you keep it in
one place and deliver out renderings of that same asset. It saves a lot of money.
It saves in operations. It saves in human processes, business processes. That’s
why B to B businesses are very interested still in this technology.
Henrik: [3:08] It makes a lot of sense.
Abby: [3:09] It sure does.
Henrik: [3:10] What advice would you like to give to DAM professionals or
people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Abby: [3:15] For people aspiring to become DAM professionals, you can go to
school in library sciences. You can go to school and get your degrees in taxonomies
and all of these great things today. Don’t think of it as a siloed discipline.
[3:32] You can’t really today think of Digital Asset Management without thinking
of the related fields and the related technologies that help deliver content
including enrichment, which we haven’t really touched on. In other words, creating
metadata structures, and taxonomy structures that deliver that content and
make it reusable in a number of different systems, delivery platforms, and the
ability to transform those assets into a number of different channels.
[4:03] Be able to, if you’re holding video assets, because Digital Asset
Management today you can hold video assets or flash assets. Are you planning
on transcoding those internally and delivering them out? Or are you planning on
really just holding the end product in your depository?
[4:21] No matter where you work those are the types of questions that will be
asked of you. If you are aspiring to become a Digital Asset Management professional,
don’t think of it truly as an archival tool. Think of it really part of that
whole ecosystem. You really have to have an understanding, at least at a high
level, of how those other systems play into this.
Henrik: [4:46] Great. Thank you, Abby.
Abby: [4:48] You’re welcome.
Henrik: [4:50] For more on Digital Asset Management, log onto
AnotherDAMblog.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.

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Julie Maher on Digital Asset Management

Julie Maher discusses Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • Why does a jewelry company use a DAM?
  • What advice would you like to give to 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 Julie Maher. Julie,
how are you?
Julie Maher: [0:09] Doing great, how are you doing?
Henrik: [0:13] Good. Julie, how are you involved with Digital Asset
Management?
Julie: [0:15] I’ve been involved with Digital Asset Management for over 10 years.
I first started at Ralph Lauren. A little bit of background, I’ve always been very
interested in photography and the preservation of those types of assets. Digital
Asset Management happened to be something that I naturally fell into. It was
the natural next step for me. [0:39] At Ralph Lauren, they have an extremely
extensive collection of photographic assets, video assets and they were at the
point where everyone in the art department was keeping the same types of
images on different servers. It was really clogging up their space. It got to a
point where we really just needed to clean everything out and put it into one
system that the entire company could access.
Henrik: [1:10] Makes sense.
Julie: [1:14] Yeah, we started building this DAM system. It was highly customizable.
A company like Ralph Lauren is not going to have anything straightforward.
They’re very lifestyle driven, so you can’t just search for photographs by a
photographer. It has to be by thoroughbred, Nantucket, things like that as well
as searching as by location, photographer, model, season, year, that type of
thing. [1:42] It was extra special, because that’s really their whole thing. And also,
at Ralph Lauren, as in fashion in general, is very cyclical. A collection from the
80s will return and be very popular, and you need to pull those assets again as
inspiration for a new collection.
[2:00] It’s a huge, huge database. They had about 750,000 assets when I left in
2006. They were adding approximately 60,000 assets a year. It’s massive. I was
in the corporate archives department. My boss and I, Pat Christman, who had
been with the company since the very beginning, she was more like the company
historian, we worked with this team for this.
[2:30] We had a very rigorous schedule. We’d meet weekly. We really built up a
beautiful, beautiful system. I love it. To this day people always comment about
it. Anybody who has interacted with that system knows that it’s very fine tuned
and it works really well.
[2:49] Yeah, that was my entre into the Digital Asset Management world. From
there, I’ve worked with the NFL. I worked with them last year for their youth division.
They needed to organize their assets. It seems to be a problem in these
art departments where people download these high res assets and keep them
on their individual servers or desktops. It starts clogging up the system again.
[3:23] Companies are starting to realize that they need one place for these
assets to stay so they’re easily accessible but, again, not everywhere all over the
company. You know things start to happen. Was this the final approved one? Is
it cropped correctly? You don’t have that information in a simple file sitting on
your desktop. Do you know what I mean? It hasn’t gone through all the stages
of approval.
Henrik: [3:48] So, there’s centralization basically?
Julie: [3:51] Yeah, definitely. I basically work with luxury brands. My other job
that I do is I produce fashion videos. Now I’m starting to work with those clients
who have all these video assets and photographic assets, and they have no idea
what to do with them. [4:11] It just amazes me, maybe because I’ve been doing
this for 10 years it’s not shocking, but it just really surprises me that people don’t
have things more in order. They’re starting to catch on and realize that this is a
very vital part of their business, which is good. This area with the fashion sector,
luxury brands, it’s really totally booming right now.
Henrik: [4:42] Julie, why would a jewelry company, for example, use a DAM?
Julie: [4:47] Currently I am consulting at the second largest jewelry company
in the country, not the world actually. A jewelry company is like any other company
that has assets. In this particular case there is a jewelry designer for this
company that is pushing this project. [5:12] She herself realizes how valuable it
is to have her assets organized and located in one place. They’re preserved.
They’re getting digitized at very high resolution. They’re going to be preserved.
Everything is going to go to cold storage. Her actual physical assets are going
to be protected.
[5:32] I really saw the jewelry company as any company like a Ralph Lauren or
a NFL. It’s not even about the industry. It’s about preserving your assets and
making sure everything is taken care of. I could do this in any industry.
[5:50] I tell people all the time, “Yes, I work in a luxury brand sector, but I could
be doing this for anyone who has that need.” It’s a major, major need. This is
a great project that I’m working on now, because the company is 100 percent
behind it.
[6:09] We have a very nice budget, which you also often don’t get with these
projects because it’s so new on the scene, it seems. Again, as with Ralph Lauren,
the team I’m managing, we have a very rigorous schedule.
[6:29] We meet every Wednesday, and on Thursdays we action everything that
we talked about on Wednesday so it gives the team that is actually building out
the system five days to get it going. It’s a very, very strict schedule. Everybody is
totally committed to it.
[6:46] I think that’s what makes it work and makes a DAM system really effective,
if you’ve got a team that’s just as passionate as you are, knows the end goal,
knows what it’s going to look like and can see what it’s going to look like.
[7:00] Again, it’s highly customizable. We can just bring this right into the PR
department and use it for exactly what we need. What’s very exciting about this
project is that there are other modules that have already been developed within
the company, but they did it backwards.
[7:19] They uploaded photos first, and then they attached some data and everything
else. We’re doing it like the old school way. We are building it up nice and
slowly, very clean. Then we’re going to add assets. This is now going to serve as
the model for the rest of the company going forward.
[7:35] They have a very, very nice, clean system. It’s going to work perfectly. It’s
going to totally be across the company. It’s going to be one large system with
all these different modules, and it’s very, very nice.
Henrik: [7:52] Julie, what advice would you like to give to DAM professionals or
people aspiring to become a DAM professional?
Julie: [8:00] I thought about this a little bit. I said I worked in fashion for a long
time, luxury brands. I feel that the DAM community is very inviting. I don’t feel
like it’s a very competitive group. People are always sharing ideas and going to
each other. [8:18] I think that’s really key in this industry, not to be afraid to contact
your colleagues and talk about things. Chances are they’ve already been
through it, and they can give you some pointers. I go to these Meetups, and I
meet these fantastic people.
[8:36] You keep in touch, and you come across some situation, like I met someone
last week and I’m going to contact them about these video assets I’m working
on for this current collection. I just think you should be really open and not
be very competitive about that type of thing.
[8:53] I know a lot of industries are competitive, but I feel like this is a knowledge
sharing group, and it’s just natural to want to talk about, discuss, and
share information. Do you know what I mean? It’s one of those industries that
work that way.
[9:06] For the aspiring professional, I just feel like you should go to these meetups.
Go to these networking events. I hear so many people say they don’t want
to go. They’re shy or whatever. But it’s like this is one group of people who are
so passionate about what they do that somebody is going to talk to you.
[9:30] That fear of social anxiety that people experience when going to these
events, people shouldn’t even worry about that. I find that younger people I run
into don’t want to do these things. I’m like, “It’s the best thing going. Are you
kidding me? I meet people every time I go. I meet wonderful people.” You just
expand your network.
Henrik: [9:51] Thanks, Julie.
Julie: [9:53] You’re welcome. It’s a pleasure.
Henrik: [9:54] For more on Digital Asset Management, log onto
AnotherDAMblog.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