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Another DAM Podcast interview with Ron Richardson on Digital Asset Management

Ron Richardson discusses Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • How does an energy company use a DAM?
  • What were the drivers for your organization to get 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 am Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Ron Richardson.
Ron, how are you?
Ron Richardson: [0:10] Doing great. It’s nice and warm here in the Bay Area.
Henrik: [0:14] Excellent. Ron, how are you involved with Digital Asset
Management?
Ron: [0:18] I’m a Digital Asset Management Analyst for the Chevron
Corporation, and I have a specific focus on the metadata used in the application
we have.
Henrik: [0:28] Great. How does an energy company use Digital Asset
Management?
Ron: [0:32] Well, we have over 60,000 employees and as you can imagine there
are a lot of images out there, everything from oil rigs to stock images of offices,
and then we’ve got a lot of design pieces and a lot of presentations. So there is
a great need throughout the corporation for images to be used in this collateral
in presentations, and then also there’s a need from specific groups to store it,
manage it, and keep track of it within the application.
Henrik: [1:07] Great. What were the drivers for your organization to get a DAM?
Ron: [1:12] Of course, there’s the attempt to get a good return on their investment
on images that were taken by vendors for Chevron and then also for the
stock images that we were licensing. But a larger image is really around compliance.
[1:29] The obvious is retention, but also risk management. We were trying
to educate people on using images properly, not taking images from the web,
not cannibalizing old presentations where they don’t know the rights.
[1:45] Within our application, we can manage the rights. We have a pretty sophisticated
metadata set up where we can specify the type of rights that each
image has and put in approvals for images, if there are conditions related to
them. Really, trying to mitigate risk and liability so that people aren’t violating
copyright by using images improperly.
Henrik: [2:11] Excellent. What advice would you like to give to DAM professionals
and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Ron: [2:20] I can tell you what worked for us in implementing the application for
our company. That’s really to start with core groups within your own company
and build a case. We started with five groups that had an interest in Digital
Asset Management and really built on the success there and then opened it up
to the rest of the company. It’s really scaled well that way. [2:48] Findability is
always an issue for us, for anyone I think, because people expect you to have
Google installed or a Google-like return for results, and that’s just not the way it
is with images. So we have to look at who is tagging, and how they are tagging.
You expect SMEs …
Henrik: [3:12] SMEs, you mean subject matter experts?
Ron: [3:14] Exactly. To really be able to tag images properly, so that they’re
findable, but you don’t always find that is the case. So providing them with
tools so that they can put the right tags, put the right keywords to make things
findable, If that doesn’t work then to have an elite A-Team of librarians there
that can properly tag images and put the descriptions in, and make them really
findable for you. [3:42] Then finally metrics is something that is always going to
be important. We want people to just see the logic of having a good Digital
Asset Management application within a company, but we know that’s not the
way business works.
[3:59] You have to have good metrics, so that the business people, the finance
people, understand what you are trying to accomplish here and how successful
you’re being. So numbers around imagery use, downloads, adoption, the
amount of uploads, they’re going into the application.
[4:17] We’ve estimated that we’ve saved the company on reuse of images alone
about $2 million. So we consider that to be very successful for an application
that’s been around for just over three years. So we’re pretty happy about that.
[4:38] Finally the key is just getting the application in front of the users that need
it most. For us, we are looking at obviously training groups, admins, who might
put together presentations, and then design teams within the company who
would have a use for images and other collateral that we could provide to them.
[5:03] So I think that’s a good way to make it useful.
Henrik: [5:08] Excellent. Well, thank you, Ron.
Ron: [5:11] Thank you.
Henrik: [5:12] For more on Digital Asset Management, log onto
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 Matt Shanley on Digital Asset Management

Matt Shanley discusses Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • Why does a museum use Digital Asset Management?
  • What were the drivers for getting 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 am Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Matt Shanley. Matt,
how are you?
Matt Shanley: [0:09] Very well, and yourself?
Henrik: [0:10] Good. Matt, how are you involved with Digital Asset
Management?
Matt: [0:14] I am the Digital Asset Manager for the Photography Department of
the American Museum of Natural History. They brought me on in 2006 to develop
a photography workflow that would stand savvy. [0:30] Basically, what they
were doing at the time is just taking everything they shot, burning it to a CD or
DVD, and putting it into a binder, and keeping an Excel spreadsheet of what
CDs were where. As you might imagine, that quickly became unmanageable.
[0:44] So when they hired me in 2006, it was a priority for them to have me redesign
their workflow and then research what hardware and software we would
need to get a Digital Asset Management system that was going to be usable
and scalable to the amount of assets that we would eventually accumulate.
[1:06] We decided to go with an Apple Xserve with a 10.5 TB X RAID, and we
decided to use Extensis Portfolio as our DAM. That has a MySQL back end with
a portfolio governing the front end.
[1:25] We started cataloging from 2006 on and then I redesigned the workflow
of the photographers to use Lightroom. It was embedding copyright metadata
on import.
[1:39] We came up with a standardized file naming and folder naming protocols
that were DAM savvy. Basically just formalized the workflow, because the photographers
were pretty much just doing their own thing and there was no real
organization to it. Had to standardize what they were doing in the workflow that
they used.
[2:05] From the time it left the camera and went onto the computer, data preservation
protocols were put in place so that things would get backed up onto
the server, so that if their local hard drive ever crashed, they would at least have
unretouched backups of everything, etc., etc.
[2:23] Then, I have to, when they finish a job, they move it to an area on the
server that I know that they’re done with that job. Then I move it over into the
portfolio sys, catalog it in portfolio. That’s how we do it.
Henrik: [2:43] Why does a museum use Digital Asset Management?
Matt: [2:45] I would say that while we are a museum photography department
we are actually a division of the communications department. We do all of the
press photography, anything that goes out to the press, advertising, marketing,
all of that stuff. We document all of the educational events that happen here.
We documents all of the development events that happen here. [3:12] What
we don’t do is we don’t, for the most part, photograph the collections for the
purposes of cataloging the specimens and artifacts that we have. That’s up to
the scientific department themselves. What museums would probably use it for
would be actually like a collections resource, management. But that is not what
this department does.
Henrik: [3:35] What were the drivers for getting a DAM?
Matt: [3:39] The bottleneck that was happening where it was just taking too
long for photo requests to be fulfilled. Once we got up over a couple hundred
thousand images, that system of burning stuff to CD and DVD became unwieldy.
It was just taking too long. Anything that wasn’t done recently it would
take someone doing much research and going through DVDs and the Excel
spreadsheet. [4:13] There was no controlled vocabulary as far as search and
keywords and stuff like that. It was just a mess. It made it very, very hard to
find things. We needed a centralized storage system that was well organized.
Keywords needed to be standardized with a controlled vocabulary. Once we did
that, it turned image requests from taking days to minutes. It was a huge efficiency
boost for us.
Henrik: [4:45] I bet. Are any of these requests you get paid requests?
Matt: [4:49] Yes. Our business development department and our museum
library both deal with requests coming in mostly from education book publishers.
We do get some of what I would call commercial requests, but it’s mostly in
the educational realm. [5:04] I don’t know how much they’re actually charging for
this stuff, but we’ll get a call. “Do you have a picture of an Apatosaurus thigh or
something like that, a thigh bone?” We’ll look through the collections and see
what we have. We’ve been shooting a mix of digital and film since around 1998.
I think by 2000 or 2002 we were shooting exclusively digital. Considering that
the museum has been here since about 1875 or so, the bulk of our collections
are shot on film.
[5:44] When we went digital the museum library did not have the manpower or
the technical expertise to handle and archive our photos, which is what, back in
the film days, we did. We always turned everything over to the library and they
would put them into the photo archive. When we went digital there was nothing
they could do with the stuff and we did what everybody did, just burn everything
to CD and DVD and store it that way. It was really the only economically
feasible solution at the time.
[6:23] But, like I said, once we got up over a couple hundred thousand assets
it was not working. Sometime in 2007 this new DAM system went online. I’ve
cataloged approximately 328,000 assets. At any given moment there’s about
100,000 assets that I haven’t gotten to yet.
[6:53] That legacy system, we had all of those CDs and DVDs copied onto the
server over a period of time and tried to clean it up as much as we could with
the limited manpower that we have available to be spending time doing that.
That’s somewhere around 210,000 assets in the legacy system.
[7:17] It’s never going to get smaller. We keep everything. So, pushing a million
assets total in no time. We have to make sure that are hardware and software
stay scalable to handling those kind of numbers.
Henrik: [7:33] Wow. Great. What advice would you like to give to DAM professionals
and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Matt: [7:39] I sort of tripped and fell into it. My background is photography.
It was my photography background that got me hired into this photography
department. Photography, digitally driven photography or organization, Digital
Asset Management is a necessity just like having an IT guy to keep your computers
working is a necessity. [8:09] I would say Higher Education is definitely the
way to go. I had to learn it from scratch, kind of on the job, on the fly. There’s
definitely a market for it out there. Anybody who deals with digital content has
to keep it organized because if you can’ find it then it’s like not having it.
[8:38] I think it’s a growing field. As more digital content is created better solutions,
on a larger scale, are going to become available. I think, even if you get
an education in it now, people who work in this field are going to have to get
reeducated in it multiple times over the course of their career. I think the technology
is going to keep changing at a rate that if you want to stay competitive
you’re going to have to keep up with it.
Henrik: [9:06] Never stop learning.
Matt: [9:07] Yeah.
Henrik: [9:08] Good point. Great. Thanks, Matt.
Matt: [9:11] Thank you. I enjoyed talking to you.
Henrik: [9:14] Me too. 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


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Another DAM Podcast interview with Tony Gill on Digital Asset Management

Tony Gill discusses Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • What challenges do you face using Digital Asset Management within a marketing organization?
  • 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 Tony Gill. Tony,
how are you?
Tony Gill: [0:10] I’m good. Thanks Henrik. How are you?
Henrik: [0:12] Good. How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Tony: [0:15] My job title is Global Director of Library Science and Information
Management. I work for an advertising agency that is part of one of the large
global advertising conglomerates. [0:28] We have a single client which is a very
large technology company. My role is theoretic quite general.
[0:35] In practice, I spend the vast bulk of my time running a large multi server
Digital Asset Management System that’s shared between us, our client, and
about a dozen of our sibling agencies within the same conglomerate, all working
on the same account.
[0:53] After defining the initial information architecture for the system such as the
metadata schemer and the control vocabularies, the folder hierarchy that we use
for storing the assets, asset ingest and work flow procedures.
[1:10] I now manage a team, a small team of Digital Asset Librarians who perform
the day-to-day act of managing the flow of assets throughout the system and
throughout their life cycle.
Henrik: [1:20] Great. Tony, what challenges do you face using Digital Asset
Management with a marketing organization?
Tony: [1:26] The challenges are many and varied. One of the biggest challenges
we face is just the sheer volume of assets coming into the system all the time
from a wide variety of different sources both from within our agency groups and
also from the client and from beyond. [1:43] We do have fairly well established
asset ingest procedures that require metadata to be provided with the assets.
But because there are always new users and new communities wanting to
upload assets to the system, it means there’s a constant need to keep training
people and keep bringing them up to speed on the ingest procedures. That’s
fairly challenging.
[2:05] Another factor of my job is that we have a very demanding client and
often times they will make requests to have assets organized for their particular
needs.
[2:18] Often, it’s down to me to say politely but firmly that we can’t do that because
the system has to meet the needs of a very, very broad user community.
We have something like 3,500 users on the system globally, at the moment.
[2:31] We can’t just reorganize areas of it for one group, or one individual’s requirements.
Sometimes I have to be able to politely and tactfully say, “No,” and
explain why we can’t change the structure of the system for individual user’s
needs because of the whole broad range of different user needs.
[2:55] Obviously, rights management is a perennial problem in this field. We have
to make sure we have detailed usage right information for anything where the
usage rights are not just straight forward global unlimited usage rights.
[3:13] Communicating that to people that are uploading assets is also sometimes
challenging because sometimes they haven’t even considered the usage rights.
[3:23] You have to end up doing a little mini tutorial about copyright and usage
rights and explaining why, as the publisher effectively of these assets, if we
publish them and we don’t have the correct usage rights, then we’re effectively
liable for copyright infringement even though we may have had no part in acquiring
these assets in the first place. Of course, that’s also a challenge.
[3:47] Then, the general symptom of working in the advertising industry is that
deadlines are always very short and often missed. People tend to wait until the
last minute and tend to get very anxious when we say that things are published
in a timely fashion.
[4:08] They often leave things to the last thing on a Friday night before they
upload them. We often find ourselves scrambling at the last minute to get the
stuff posted that’s urgently needed by teams all around the world right at the
last minute.
Henrik: [4:21] Sounds like a bunch of challenges there.
Tony: [4:23] Yeah.
Henrik: [4:27] What advice would you like to give DAM professionals or people
aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Tony: [4:33] From my part, if you want to come work on my team, you will need
a Library Science degree. That’s a graduate degree in Library and Information
Science. That’s a really good grounding in the kind of disciplines that are very
good in the Digital Assets Management field. [4:51] It teaches you the importance
of information architecture and information management. It teaches you
to be rigorous and to follow standards. It also teaches you an observance for
finickiness and attention to detail.
[5:05] In the job description that I wrote recently for the Digital Asset Librarians, I
said, “An almost obsessive attention to detail would be a useful attribute in any
of the successful candidates.”
[5:20] I tend to find that there are certain people that are drawn to the librarianship
role, and they also make very good digital managers. Those are the main
things that I can think of just off the top of my head.
Henrik: [5:31] Great. Thank you, Tony.
Tony: [5:33] You’re very welcome, Henrik. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.
Henrik: [5:36] Any time. For more on Digital Asset Management, log on to
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