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Another DAM Podcast interview with Kate Jordan Gofus on Digital Asset Management

Kate Jordan Gofus on Digital Asset Management

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 Kate Jordan Gofus. Kate, how are you?

Kate Jordan Gofus:  [0:09] I’m well, how are you?

Henrik:  [0:10] Great. Kate, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management (DAM)?

Kate:  [0:14] I’m the digital librarian for a healthcare software company. My company focuses on and we primarily use videos to help educate patients and empower them in their healthcare journeys. I manage the video library for this company. We’re a pretty small shop, so I’m involved in all phases of the Digital Asset Management process. That includes rights management and vendor relations. I am a client resource. I work with implementation, our product and development teams. I work with our support teams, troubleshooting. We also use a homegrown Digital Asset Management system so I do work with our development team quite a bit.

Henrik:  [0:53] Kate, how does a company focus on interactive software to help hospitals get patients more involved in their own healthcare use Digital Asset Management?

Kate:  [1:01] Because our software solution primarily uses videos to educate and empower patients, we have a large number of videos to manage. This includes version control, distribution, everything about the Digital Asset Management. We have well over a hundred client sites, facilities, hospitals who are using our software platform, and thus, our videos. We use the Digital Asset Management system to centrally manage files, and also metadata, for thousands of videos that are going to the software platforms in these hospitals. The videos are about various topics, ranging from oncology to relaxation content, like nature videos. We use the Digital Asset Management system to manage key wording metadata so we can know what we have available, and also as a means of distributing that in a streamlined and efficient way. Healthcare changes really quickly. We need to be able to update our content in a quick and efficient way and we need to be able to update that content at the hospitals, not just in one place. We use the Digital Asset Management system to do that. The needs of our hospitals vary widely, so we needed a way to be able to distribute what a hospital wants or what a hospital needs specific to that hospital. The Digital Asset Management system allows us to maintain consistency across almost 200 hospitals and also control what is there, what isn’t there. It also has allowed us to support growth. When I started with the company a couple years ago, we had one‑third the number of client hospitals that we do now, and if we were still FTP‑ing video files to all of our hospital sites and then manually configuring the videos…

Henrik:  [2:53] That sounds more painful that way.

Kate:  [laughing] [2:55] My life would be really terrible. Right now we use the Digital Asset Management system to distribute files to all of those sites, and we also distribute the metadata, and the way in which the files and metadata are transferred, eases the configuration process at the individual hospital very much. We are constantly moving more towards automation and improving processes to make this less and less painful. That’s what we use it for, intellectual and physical control of our video files.

Henrik:  [3:26] Kate, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with DAM?

Kate:  [3:30] I think that one of the biggest challenges I’ve seen is finding the right tools or system to manage your assets. Every organization is different and is going to have different needs and different ideas of what DAM is and what it can do for them. I have seen purchased DAMs, I have now seen a homegrown DAM, there is always the argument between hosting your own content and having your content hosted externally. I think that it’s really difficult and important to make sure that you’re using the right solution for your needs. I think that one of the challenges is that sometimes people jump into Digital Asset Management without doing a background research first.

[4:11] Another challenge that I’ve seen is people expecting technology to fix everything and to do so immediately. A lot of Digital Asset Management is improving processes and documentation and writing and enforcing rules. That means dealing with people. Sometimes, I will be asked, “But I thought the Digital Asset Management system was supposed to fix this!” The answer is often, “Well, it did fix it. It made it possible, it didn’t make it necessarily instantaneous.” I think that, that is another challenge and that’s a perception thing. We are very lucky that we definitely have buy‑in on our Digital Asset Management system at my organization. We existed for a long time doing the same kind of work without a Digital Asset Management system, so I think there is an appreciation for ours.

[5:00] I also think that a challenge I’ve seen is that organizations are always evolving. Digital Asset Management systems, especially homegrown Digital Asset Management systems, are always evolving. You have customization, you have enhancements, improvements, things like that. It’s a delicate line to walk between improving your DAM and trying to force your DAM to do things that it wasn’t meant to do and shouldn’t do. It’s hard to draw the line sometimes and say, “Well, the DAM could maybe do that, but it’s not the best tool to use for that, and it’s not going to make our DAM better.”

[5:37] Some of the successes we’ve had, using the Digital Asset Management system and using it correctly, has increased our turnaround time on new video content by over a factor of four. It used to take significantly longer when we would get new content from either our partner vendors or from our clients. It used to take a really long time for us to get that loaded on all sites. That’s a big problem in health care because you always want the most up‑to‑date information, patients deserve the most up‑to‑date information. We’ve significantly cut down our turnaround time for loading video content. We’ve also improved consistency and control. I know for a fact that all of my sites have the most up‑to‑date videos that we have. I don’t have to go to every client site, every hospital, to figure that out. I can access all of that information through our Digital Asset Management system because our Digital Asset Management system is linked very closely with the software platforms that are installed at all of our hospitals. It has made it easier to manage the content, its also made it easier to answer questions. Internal and external stake holders have lots of questions about videos and sometimes they want to know if there’s other content available. It makes it easier when I can quickly look at what content they do have so I can tell them what they might want to add.

[7:04] We have almost 200 hospitals. They sometimes want to create their own videos or they have found some relaxation video that they think is really great and they want loaded on their software platform. They submit that to us and we will load it and configure it on their software platform for them. It has to be ingested through the Digital Asset Management system and encoded properly and we need metadata and all of that stuff, but we encourage our hospitals to add any content to their facility that they think will make their patient population happy or improve outcomes for their patient populations. Sometimes, I get questions from one of our hospitals asking if I know about any music programs that their patients may be interested in. I can look in our Digital Asset Management system and say, “Yes, actually. This other facility in a completely different part of the country has found this great vendor that they love and we already have the videos encoded and if you got the licensing rights on your own, through the Digital Asset Management system, I can transfer those to you and you don’t have to get the videos encoded on your own, you don’t have to buy DVDs from anybody, all you need is to give them a call and maybe a PO number.” That makes our clients really happy and it makes patients really happy and that makes me really happy.

Henrik:  [8:23] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Kate:  [8:27] I think that something really important to remember is that a Digital Asset Management system, in my experience, never operates on its own. It’s never the only system that an organization is using. It is often seen as a support system, really. I think that it’s really important to continue to focus on interoperability and making it so that your system plays nicely with others and is not cogging up the works for your organization. I think that’s something that we need to continue to focus on as a DAM community.

[9:03] I also think its really important to focus on sustainability and scalability. We have a homegrown Digital Asset Management system, so I have a lot of input into how our DAM system evolved. That’s good, and that’s also dangerous. We need to make sure that any changes that we make are in the interest of sustainability and scalability so it doesn’t bite us in the bum later. I would say to people who are looking to get into the DAM profession, that you should be tenacious. Just try to fix the problems that you face in your organization as well as you can and recognize that it’s going to take a while and you’re probably going to have to try the same thing over and over a few times. Maybe differently, maybe the same way so that it works. Don’t be discouraged by big wigs who have fancy letters after their name. There are lots of different backgrounds in this field, and you don’t have to have gone to school for Information and Library Science to be good at this job, though I did. I think that, at the end, we’re really trying to fix problems and fixing them along the way. I think that if you are flexible and creative, you’re going to have more success fixing the problems. That’s what I would say.

Henrik:  [10:14] Well, thanks Kate.

Kate:  [10:15] Oh, you’re so welcome.

Henrik:  [10:15] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, go to anotherdamblog.com. For this podcast, and 150 other podcast episodes, including transcripts of all the interviews, go to anotherdampodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Alex Struminger on Digital Asset Management and Storytelling 3.0

Alex Struminger on Digital Asset Management and Storytelling 3.0

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 Alex Struminger. Alex, how are you?

Alex Struminger:  [0:09] Fine, Henrik. Thanks for having me again.

Henrik:  [0:12] Alex, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Alex:  [0:15] Henrik, in the last time we spoke, we talked a lot about the big enterprise rollout of the UNICEF Digital Asset Management System. That was a big project. It was terrific the way it came off, but one of the things that wasn’t happening then, that’s happening a lot now is the focus on transmedia storytelling. This has shifted my focus and the focus of a lot of folks in that direction.

[0:38] One of the areas I’m working on right now is the idea of storytelling. Storytelling supported by technology. I’m calling it Storytelling 3.0 to acknowledge the advent of semantic web, search and taxonomy, DAM enabled technologies, and you got to include mobile apps in that as well.

Henrik:  [0:59] How is storytelling supported by DAM?

Alex:  [1:01] It’s always been important. It’s one of the most engaging things you can do as a human being, I think. If you’re talking about engagement, you can point to the track record of stories as being the longest and best measurable forms of communication engagement out there.

[1:17] That runs the gambit from the famous “Star Wars” franchise and its success. If we go back 3,000 years and talk about The Iliad and The Odyssey, we’re still talking about that 3,000 years later. I think that that’s a measurable success.

[1:30] We’re talking a lot more about storytelling now in the digital world. And of course, Storytelling, especially the storytelling as it supports brands, has to be done in a way where you can manage the story across the franchise. Everybody took a different approach to how they did it, but it all required technology support, partly because there’s a lot of digital assets involved now in storytelling. We’re not squirting ink on paper like we did in the old days. We’re not even doing the digital form of that, which is the old web. We’re doing a lot of rich, layered media, and managing a tremendous number of assets to make that happen.

[2:06] I heard one person talk about 80,000 pieces of video that had to be managed. That didn’t even include the metadata or the supporting brand assets. So digital asset management is needed on the scale that we’re trying to do it with brands, especially global brands.

Henrik:  [2:22] What is a co‑creation network and how does it fit with DAM?

Alex:  [2:26] Co‑creation network are things to talk a lot about these days. Essentially, the idea behind a co‑creation network is if you have a group of people who are working on different kinds of product sharing a similar story. This could be for the Star Wars example. We talked about transmedia being something that literally transcends different kinds of media. I don’t know if transcends is the word I’m looking for. It is transmedia.

[2:51] It’s transmedia in the sense that there’s no uber story in any particular media so it’s not like “OK, I created the film. The film’s got all the bits in it. We’re just going to then repurpose those bits in these other places. I got the book, and I’m going to take all the stuff of the book.”

[3:06] The idea in Star Wars, again, is a great example, is that there are bits that are in one area and other bits in other areas, and they don’t quite overlap, but they share a common story. You can tell if they’re wrong.

[3:22] A great example of that, there’s the Star Wars films. I’m a big fan of them. I watched all of them several times. There’s the cartoon series about the Clone Wars, then there’s action figures, the product, there’s comic books, the novels, and all that stuff.

[3:39] Five years old at the time, my step‑son came in and he was trying to throw off the yoke of the homemade costume. After a lot of battling back and forth, and a good effort on the part of my wife and I to try and do the homemade costume thing for a few years, we finally capitulated.

[3:56] When he comes in with the costume catalogue from the online store, or the mail‑order store, and he’s got this whole page, there’s like six different bounty hunters he can be in Star Wars. He names every single one of them. I’ve seen every single one of the movies many times. I only knew the name of two of those.

[4:14] This is a great example of how the uber story and transmedia isn’t carried by one particular media type. It’s literally in that sense transmedia. In order to accomplish this, you have to have a co‑creation network in the sense that you’ve got to have a network of people who understand the brand, who understand the story, and who are essentially stewards of that canon, so that you don’t go over here and make that piece about the brand and the cartoon, or on the online thing, or this video over here, or an event in the physical world, and have it not be completely in line with the story. This is how the network has to be brought together.

[4:55] The role of DAM plays here is this is a really difficult thing to do. The challenge has been not just different skillsets with people doing different kinds of product, but they also span things like different localities. “I may need to have this done in French,” or “I may need to have this done in Chinese”. We have to make sure that that local translation works. Where do we keep all this stuff? In the DAM.

[5:21] The rights, the ability to use things for certain purposes, all that stuff has to be put somewhere. Otherwise, this whole thing has become way too expensive. DAM supports the co‑creation network in that sense.

Henrik:  [5:32] It sounds like brand consistency.

Alex:  [5:34] Brand consistency, brand protection, licensing. You don’t want to be shadowing the door of the lawyer’s office all the time, because you didn’t know you couldn’t use the product in China, or whatever it is. In this sense, I think the co‑creation is where the people, the creative people who are making the product, and all of the rules, the availability of the assets, their application, and who can do what with what come together. That’s technology‑enabled.

[6:05] That makes us better, faster, and more accurate doing what we’re doing, hopefully cheaper.

Henrik:  [6:10] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Alex:  [6:14] One thing that’s really caught my attention recently, that I think is super important. Zach Brand of NPR has mentioned it as he ralled against the monolithic giant one‑size‑fits‑all system. We really want to avoid that kind of thing.

[6:27] This has been back and forth for various reasons. There have been times when a standardized platform has benefitted the organization, but there’s also a give‑and‑take with it. There’s a cost. I think that we’re seeing now more bespoke or custom tools for particular creative tasks. You don’t want to force the creative talent to use a tool that’s a one‑size‑fits‑all and therefore going to compromise the quality of the product.

[6:57] More than anything else, we see that in the world of storytelling, and in the world where brand engagement has to come to entertainment and storytelling, mistakes and lower quality products are noticed.

Henrik:  [7:09] In a negative sense.

Alex:  [7:10] Right. In the sense that the technology of the co‑creation network can support all of the things that help us make use of the assets, find them, use them correctly, and stay on story. At the same time, we don’t want that technology that’s helping us to get in the way of us doing quality work.

[7:26] Caitlin Burns said Starlight Runner talked to me a little bit about the idea of an arts and crafts approach to content creation. We really have to be craftsmen in order to make the kind of product that people are going to consume. If you’re going to be a craftsman, you’re going to have to have the right tools. I am seeing more and more custom tools being made.

[7:47] But here’s the thing. Interoperability is still very important. If we take away the monolithic system that’s supposed to tie everything all together, how are we going to tie everything all together? Are we now back in our silos? We don’t want to do that. What seems to be the approach that is working is the same kind of approach that worked for web 2.0 in a lot of ways. Standards, APIs, interoperability.

[8:13] So if I’ve got a toolset over here that’s working really good for the person who’s curating my digital media video, and I’ve got another toolset over here that’s working really well for somebody who’s creating cartoons, so forth and so on, managing print assets. I don’t want to force them to use one tool that doesn’t do any of that quite as well, but I need them to talk to each other.

[8:34] I don’t want redundant assets. I don’t want redundant metadata. I want to tie it all together, in case I need to bring something from here, and something from over there together to create a product on the web, or through an app, or through any place I want to be able to publish out the content.

[8:51] We can do that by letting the systems talk to each other. We don’t have to insist on the monolithic system. In fact, we’re not dead in the water. We can take a very agile approach to this and knock out little things. Let’s make this system talk to that system. We did this when I was in UNICEF. Tie together taxonomy management with web search engines and web content systems, and basically creating APIs that let them talk to each other and it that turns out, it can do it. Everybody’s happy because I didn’t make the guy over here use something he didn’t like, the data is shared, and it works.

[9:24] That’s the bit, I think, to keep in mind. Stay over the monolithic. The bespoke system. You could do an awful lot that’s not bespoke but still custom these days. Just let them talk to each other, and think about the process, and the people involved.

Henrik:  [9:38] Thanks, Alex.

Alex:  [9:39] Thanks, Henrik. It’s always a pleasure to be with you.

Henrik:  [9:41] For more on this and other digital asset management topics, logon to anotherdamblog.com.

Another DAM Podcast is available on iTunes and AudioBoom.

[9:49] If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com.

Thanks again.

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

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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.

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Norman Paskin on Digital Asset Management

Norman Paskin discusses Digital Asset Management
Here are the questions asked:
  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • In May 2012, the ISO released a new standard regarding a Digital Object Identifier system. Can you tell us more about this new standard you helped develop?
  • Now, DAM systems (among many other Enterprise Content Management solutions) often use various kinds of Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) or Unique Identifiers (UID). How is this standard applicable across organizations and vendors currently using DOI or UID for a variety digital media?
  • What advice would you like to share with 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 Norman Paskin.
Norman, how are you?
Norman Paskin: [0:10] I am fine. Thank you, Henrik. Thank you for the invitation.
Henrik: [0:13] Norman, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Norman: [0:15] I guess my principal involvement is, I manage something called
the DOI system DOI is “digital object identifier” run through an organization
specifically setup to do that, the International DOI Foundation, which I was
involved in founding and I’m currently managing. [0:33] The reason for that is,
if you’re managing digital assets, the first thing you need to do is to be able to
refer to each asset unambiguously and precisely using a short string. Give it an
identifier. That’s what the system was conceived to do back in 1998. It came
out of the publishing industry, but it was deliberately developed with wide
applicability.
[0:56] If I drill down a little bit into that involvement, I think there are three sorts
of involvement I have with DAM. The first is using identifiers on digital networks,
what we call resolution. The DOI system actually uses the Handle System. That’s
Handle.net from CNRI , which is the Corporation for National Research Initiatives.
I do work with them, just to be clear, on a consultancy basis.
[1:25] The Handle System was developed by Bob Kahn, who was one of the
co-inventors of TCP/IP to be highly scalable, efficient, extensible, secure and so
forth. It’s ideal for persistent identifiers and managing unique identifiers. That’s
the first area of involvement.
[1:45] The second involvement with DAM is associating descriptions with those
identifiers. For us at management, obviously it’s not sufficient to have an identifier,
you’ve also got to say what that identifier refers to precisely and unambiguously,
particularly if someone else is going to be using it. That takes us into the
world of metadata, particularly for intellectual property assets or what people
call content.
[2:15] I’ve been involved with a number of initiatives dealing with metadata for
enabling persistence and interoperability for well over 15 years. The first was
the INDECS project, 1998. That set the scene for a number of later initiatives.
The most recent of those just starting is something called the Linked Content
Coalition, run by the European Publishers Council.
[2:44] What these all have in common is recognizing that in the digital world,
convergence means you can be dealing with many different types of things, different
content from many different communities with different sets of standards.
They may not have previously had to work with each other, but they now need a
common framework.
Norman: [3:03] Also, what’s come out of that, I think, is recognizing that assets
as intellectual property are much more than digital objects. For example,
Beethoven’s “Fifth Symphony” is more than an MP3 file. It’s an underlying abstraction,
a creation with all sorts of rights that may be different from the specific
digital manifestation. People have investments in all sorts of different data
schemes, so the aim has to be to enable people to reuse what they have. That’s
part of the effort that we’ve been involved in.
[3:35] One of the things that’s come out of that is something called the
Vocabulary Mapping Framework, VMF. A fundamental basis of things like that is
a structured ontology approach, the same principle as behind the semantic web
and link data. What we’re offering with DOI is a tool to give you a set of data
which is both curated and managed to be reliable.
[4:00] Just to wrap, the third way I’m involved is in social infrastructures and
governance. The DOI Foundation operates as a federation of independent
agencies. We have a governance model and a set of policies and procedures. It
works very well. We’re very pleased with progress, although sometimes it seems
like herding cats. We have agencies from a number of sectors US, Europe,
China, Japan so very different views coming forward.
[4:27] Also in the social infrastructure area, I’ve been involved in a number of
standards activities. Most recently, ISO 26324, which is an effort to take the DOI
system and put it into an ISO framework.
[4:40] Technical involvement in identifiers, metadata, and governance that’s my
involvement.
Henrik: [4:46] In May, 2012, the ISO, or International Standards Organization,
released a new standard regarding a digital object identifier system. Can you
tell us more about this new standard you helped develop?
Norman: [4:58] Yes. I was the convener of the working group that did that, but
the DOI system, which has now been standardized, actually preceded the ISO
working process itself. In fact, the ISO standard 26324 is codifying what already
existed. [5:16] In the early days of the DOI system, 1998, we worked with ISBN,
the International Standard Book Number people. Through them, we came to
the attention of the ISO group involved in that whole topic of bibliographic
identifiers. They invited us to consider taking the DOI system and putting it
into an ISO standard to gain the advantages of international recognition and a
degree of autonomy and independence.
[5:43] The system that’s now being standardized is, in effect, the DOI system
as it was. The DOI system really took off in 2000. ISO got involved in 2004, a
number of years later. It finally passed as a standard in 2010, quite a number
of years after that. It’s actually only been published now, in May, 2012. The
reason for that delay is purely an ISO thing. They wanted to review all of their
generic registration authority contracts. We got rather caught up in that whole
framework.
[6:18] Seven and a half years from door to door, but in effect what IS O has done
is taken the DOI system and put it into the ISO framework. There’s been a lot of
advantages to that, by the way, from our point of view. In the working group, we
had a number of suggestions for how to improve the wording, for how to consider
in particular interoperability with other standards, make sure that was fully
recognized in the wording, and avoid some initial misunderstandings, I think,
that were about.
Norman: [6:47] Which was that in some way, DOI was trying to replace existing
systems. In fact, that’s far from the case. Actually, we’ve encouraged the creation
of new registries and new sorts of identifier standards. We’ve also been
involved in new IS O standards like IS TC, which is a standard for textual abstractions,
and ISNI , the international standards and name identifier.
[7:11] It’s been quite a long story, but I think our involvement with IS O has all
been good. What it means for the community is, I don’t think the ISO standardization
makes a big deal of difference to people already using DOI . By the time
the standard was published, we’d already assigned 60 million DOI s. Clearly,
people weren’t waiting for the standard to come along to use it. But that was
actually a help in the standards process, the benefit of practical experience of
implementation of what worked.
[7:41] We were able to say, when we, for example, were talking about the metadata
standard that we wanted to associate, “In our experience this is what’s
practical. This may be a better design over here, but we have to deal with reality
at the moment.” That’s been quite a helpful process.
[8:00] ISO standardization is just one of a number of events that’s taken place
with DOI since we started in 2000. We’re quite pleased that we’re still around
after all this time and we haven’t had to make any U-turns. We seem to be getting
a lot of recognition. The publication of the standards actually generated
quite a bit of interest from people who may not have been aware of it before.
For example, this interview is a sign of that.
Henrik: [8:25] Digital Asset Management systems, among other enterprise content
management solutions, often use various kinds of digital object identifiers,
or DOI s, or unique identifiers, UIDs. How is this standard applicable across organizations
and vendors currently using DOI or UIDs for a variety of digital media?
Norman: [8:47] It’s a good question. I think I need to tease apart a couple of
the terms there. When people talk about digital object identifiers and imagine it
all in lower case, they’re using it generically. When they talk about it with capitalized
DOI , they’re specifically referring to the DOI system, which has got its
own set of rules, policies, and principles. DOI is a trademark, simply because we
wanted to preserve the consistency of the system for that reason. [9:15] If you
want to work with others to manage or you want to pass onto other parties in a
supply chain or you want to simply make available to third parties that you may
not yet know about, you want to simply make them discoverable, then you’ve
probably got to find a way of interoperating and ensuring persistence of your
identifiers.
[9:37] That’s where we come in. We offer a framework which is effectively out of
the box. It’s a shared infrastructure, both technical and social, with the benefits
of economy of scale. You can keep your own identifier system and your own
metadata, but put it into that framework. You can keep your own autonomy of
the community that you’re looking after, but take advantage of a system that’s
becoming increasingly widely known, standardized with standard tools.
[10:09] A couple of good examples. One of the earliest implementations of
DOI was something called CrossRef it’s all one word, CrossRef.org which uses
DOIs to link scholarly publishing articles. That’s a community of now, I think,
approaching 4,000 different publishers, but they have their own rules. The DOI
system, as they use it, is the same as anyone else would use the DOI system,
just the common rules of the road.
Norman: [10:35] Another example is the Entertainment Identifier Registry, EIDR.org. They’re using DOI s in the movie assets, commercial television broadcasting area. Again, they’re using the same system technically, same social infrastructure,
but they also lay on top of that their own social infrastructure for their own
community and their own rules about what they cover.
[11:00] What the DOI system offers, I think, is an ability to not throw away what
you’ve already been using, but to make it more usable with other systems and
to make it persistent. Of course, in detail, we offer some common tools free of
charge, licensed to the Handle System for resolution, tools of the Vocabulary
Mapping Framework, some common technical infrastructure and so forth.
[11:23] But that’s not the most important thing. Anyone can build their own
infrastructure if they want to. I think what we offer really is a community, a very
large community of interest, greater together than people would be working on
their own.
Henrik: [11:37] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and
people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Norman: [11:41] I’ve thought about this. I think a number of points, really.
Almost at the top of the list, I would say don’t reinvent the wheel. I don’t just
mean use DOI s. A lot of useful work has already been done. [11:51] When we
designed the DOI system, again, we didn’t reinvent the wheel. We used existing
components. I think what a lot of technical people don’t necessarily realize is
that things like ontologies and classification work in the ‘60s things like library
cataloguing tools, which people may consider to be rather old fashioned actually
solve an awful lot of problems about organization, information, and contextual
ontologies. Things like FRBR, which the libraries came up with some time
ago. That’s one point. Don’t reinvent the wheel.
[12:21] I would say also look beyond your immediate community. Digital convergence
means you can’t afford to think only about your immediate problems if
you’re going to have something that lasts and is extensible. I do realize there
is a tension there, of course. If you’re looking for cost justification, there is a
tendency to look first of all to your own community and secondly to be relatively
short term.
[12:44] A related point is, think for the long term. You’ve got to use a technology,
but don’t forget the possibilities for migration to other technologies. Don’t
forget things like thinking at the right level of abstraction, extensibility, and
scalability.
[12:58] A further point is, we often talk about persistence identifiers as being
around for a while and we often talk about interoperability. I think they’re two
sides of the same coin. Persistence is simply interoperability with the future.
Norman: [13:12] I would say also something that I found running the social organizations
that I’ve been involved in for 15 years. It’s very easy to get involved
in arguments about definitions. That’s pointless. Don’t argue about definitions.
It’s futile.
[13:25] What you do need to do is try to be explicit. Clarify what you mean, and
understand what someone else means. They may have a legitimate reason for
thinking differently than you. Common terms, I think, like identifier, like stakeholders,
like community. When people use them, they often have a vested interest
or a shading towards their particular understanding of what that term means.
Try to understand where they’re coming from.
[13:55] The final thing, which is not my motto but was attributed to Einstein.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. Don’t assume
that the obvious solution is always the right one.
Henrik: [14:07] Great points. Well, thanks, Norman.
Norman: [14:09] Pleasure.
Henrik: [14:11] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, log
on to AnotherDAMblog.com. Another DAM Podcast is available on Audioboom,
iTunes and the Tech Podcast Network. 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.

Need Digital Asset Management advice and assistance?

Another DAM Consultancy can help. Schedule a call today