Another DAM Podcast

Audio about Digital Asset Management

Category Archives: Information Architecture


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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.

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Seth Earley on Digital Asset Management

Seth Earley discusses Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • How does taxonomy relate to Digital Asset Management?
  • 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 Seth Earley. Seth,
how are you?
Seth Earley: [0:09] I am terrific. Thank you for having me.
Henrik: [0:11] Great. Seth, how are you involved with Digital Asset
Management?
Seth: [0:15] Well, I’ll tell you. We have been doing work with Digital Asset
Management for probably the entire 15 years that I’ve been doing this kind of
work. I’ve been involved in content management, in document management, in
knowledge management for that period of time. Throughout the entire career,
we’ve always had to deal with nontextual assets. We’ve always had to deal with
some rich media. [0:40] I remember at the beginning when we were doing work
with Lotus Notes. The first time you could drop an image into a rich text field, I
was like, “Wow. This is so amazingly cool. I cannot believe you can drop a picture
into a rich text field.” Ever since then we’ve been dealing with digital assets
and Digital Asset Management Systems.
Henrik: [1:02] Excellent. Seth, how does taxonomy relate to Digital Asset
Management?
Seth: [1:13] You can infer something about text assets. You can derive something.
You can do text mining. There are is-ness and about-ness inherently
within the content. [1:20] When you build an index, when you’re doing search,
you’re searching text assets by inferring something about the nature of the
content. You can create a forward index by looking at the words in a document.
You invert that index, which gives you the pointers to specific documents
based on the words. And then, that’s derived metadata about the text, about
the document.
[1:43] You don’t have that ability to do that with any kind of Digital Asset
Management, with digital assets, with rich media, with images. There’s no inherent
is-ness or about-ness, so, of course, we have to use metadata.
[1:56] The way we look at metadata and taxonomy, taxonomy is really the way
of beginning to organize your metadata. We don’t look at taxonomy in a very
narrow sense of navigation. We look at taxonomy from a perspective of classification
and overall information architecture.
[2:15] When we start looking at taxonomy, we want to begin thinking about the
types of fields and the ways that we can start to tag the assets with metadata.
Then we want to populate those fields with reference data, with the drop downs,
with the controlled vocabularies, with the lists and attributes.
[2:36] Taxonomies are considered to be hierarchical in nature. We can certainly
have hierarchical lists of controlled values, but there’s all sorts of different ways
of looking at information architecture that references taxonomies. Taxonomies
are the overall organizing principles around your metadata fields.
[2:58] Of course, whenever you think about metadata, if you have a large list of
attributes or a large list of values, you have to break those up for human consumption.
We can only deal with fairly short lists, maybe 5, 10, or maybe 15
items. If you start to get into lists that are 100 terms long or 200 terms or 500
terms, how do you deal with that? Well, you have to break it up. That’s where
you have to use hierarchies.
[3:25] You can even think of metadata fields as the top-level terms of your hierarchy.
A doc type will be a top-level term of a hierarchy. Maybe an asset type
would be a top-level term, or maybe a channel, a region, a language, or any of
those other types of attributes. Those can all be considered top-level terms of
the taxonomy. Really, all of the metadata is an expression of the taxonomy.
Henrik: [4:01] Makes complete sense. Seth, what advice would you give to DAM
professionals or people aspiring to be DAM professionals?
Seth: [4:12] Well, I think the best advice that I can give would be to get experience,
even with projects that are nonprofit organizations or organizations
that don’t have a lot of money, so that you can build your skills. Get a broad
understanding of information architecture, including things like wire frame development,
metadata schemas, and taxonomy development. [4:41] Look at the
semantics of your structures, and try to understand a little bit about library
science. Library science is the core foundation for all of these organizing principles.
I heard someone recently say that a Digital Asset Management system is a
Metadata Management System that does fancy things. I totally agree with that.
[5:04] You really do need to understand metadata structures and metadata schemas,
and understand things like Dublin Core. Look at the different ways that you
can organize those assets using various types of technologies. Look at how the
various technologies leverage organizing principles and leverage information
architecture.
[5:28] I would get some very practical experience, though. Find a nonprofit organization
that doesn’t have a lot of resources, that would like to get your elbow
grease and your hard work to help them fix a system or help them organize their
assets. That’s a great way to build your resume.
[5:50] If you’re more experienced, definitely broaden your expertise by looking
at some training in library science and metadata schemas. Have a good, broad
understanding of the technologies.
Henrik: [6:04] Great idea. Well, thanks, Seth.
Seth: [6:07] Thank you.
Henrik: [6:08] For more on Digital Asset Management, log onto
anotherdamblog.com. Thanks again.

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Leala Abbott on Digital Asset Management

Leala Abbott discusses Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • Do you do documentation and process?
  • Do you like particular standards?
  • You write a blog which recently you have written some posts which have been quite popular. Tell us more about this.
  • Is it fair to say that Digital Asset Management is not a temporary task?
  • Where can we find your blog?
  • 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 Podca st about Digital Asset
Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, I’m here with Leala Abbott. Leala,
how are you?
Leala Abbott: [0:09] Hello. How are you?
Henrik: [0:11] Good. How are you involved with Digital Asset Management, Leala?
Leala: [0:15] I am the Senior Digital Content Analyst for the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. In other circles, it’s known as Digital Asset Manager. It’s basically
the same role. It just has more of an information science bent because I
love metadata. I like working with metadata schemas and information architecture
and the documentation of standards, along with usability for Digital Asset
Management systems or other information retrieval systems. I do branch out
from time to time and strategy for Digital Asset Management, big picture stuff.
Educate people on what Digital Asset Management is, as a practice, and to understand
that it’s not just an application. That’s really my educational charge.
Henrik: [1:07] Do you do documentation and process as well?
Leala: [1:11] Yeah, I do. Because of my information science bent, I’m really into
metadata schemas and the cataloging of the assets and what taxonomies that
we leverage. I like to write that stuff all up so other people can read it. Imagine
that. Somebody can just pick up that document, and pick up right where they
left off. I like to provide guidance for people that are the future Digital Asset
Managers in that particular organization or institution, guides for the catalogers.
I’ve written many librarians’ manuals.
Henrik: [1:46] Do you like particular standards?
Leala: [1:48] I do. I’m a big fan of Dublin Core. I don’t know how you
couldn’t be.
Henrik: [laughs] [1:54] True.
Leala: [1:57] Because it really is very much in line with my pragmatic approach
to Digital Asset Management.
Henrik: [2:02] Excellent. Leala, you write a blog in which recently you’ve written
some posts about DAM, which have been quite popular. Tell me a little more
about that.
Leala: [2:11] I’m excited about that. I’m glad they’re popular. My last two postings
have been, “What kinda ‘Who’ do you need to make DAM work?” I go
into descriptions of the types of roles that are necessary to do Digital Asset
Management properly. I think a lot of times, people think, “We’re just going to
buy this wonderful application, and it’s going to fix the fact that we’re drowning
in all of this digital information.” [2:38] There’s very little understanding out there
that it’s not just an application, it’s a process. It’s a business need, and there is
technology to help with that business need, but you also have to have the right
staffing. I think because it’s very cross disciplinary in the practice of DAM, it
brings together professions that weren’t normally at the same table before.
[3:00] Business analysts and creatives, production managers, librarians and information
science people in rights and usage experts. You have your programmers
and developers, and all these people do have to actually work closely together.
[3:16] I think that that’s something very new. There are a lot of professional stylers
out there, so I think that breaking those down and having to come together
on a project was a really new thing for a lot of organizations.
Henrik: [3:29] That sounds like there is a lot of collaboration involved. Is it fair to
say that Digital Asset Management is not a temporary task?
Leala: [3:34] I believe that it is not a temporary task. I think that it takes, depending
on the size of the organization, one to two years in terms of having
the experts that you need onboard. Consultants, integrators, to get the project
rolling, and the process rolling. [3:52] Again, depending on the size and what
you are really ingesting. Once you have most of the process nailed out, you can
have other staffing involved, and take over where the experts left off.
Henrik: [4:03] As long as you have accountability and governance, is that
fair to say?
Leala: [4:07] Yep. As long as you have your standards that can be used as a
guide, and as long as you continue to revisit your processes. I think it’s really
important that your staff have a professional development chart. That should
be part of their role. [4:24] To make sure that they’re continually educating themselves
on the process and the DAM landscape. That way they stay current.
Henrik: [4:31] Leala, where can we find your blog?
Leala: [4:33] It’s actually my name, I’ve tried to keep it simple. That’s my approach,
and it’s lealaabbott.com. That’s L-E-A-L-A-A-B-B-O-T-T dot com.
Henrik: [4:46] Excellent. What advice would you have to share with other DAM
professional, or even people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Leala: [4:54] Particularly when I look at resumes, I like to see that people that
worked in different types of organizations. From big ones to small ones, to
cultural heritage organizations to for-profit organizations. [5:09] I find people
that have more multidimensional experiences bring a lot more new ideas,
fresh ideas, innovative and more creative solutions to problems than someone
who’s just been in the same place or organization or field of work the length of
their career.
Henrik: [5:33] Makes sense. Thank you, Leala.
Leala: [5:35] Yeah.
Henrik: [5:37] For more on Digital Asset Management, you can log onto
anotherdamblog.com. Thanks again.

Related Articles

Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts,  RadioPublic, RSS, Spotify or TuneIn

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