Listen to Another DAM Podcast interview with Iqvinder Singh about Digital Asset Management
Here are the questions asked:
How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
How does a distributor of creative products use Digital Asset Management?
What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Transcript:
Henrik de Gyor (00:00): This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, I’m speaking with Iqvinder Singh. How are you?
Iqvinder Singh (00:09): I’m great. How are you?
Henrik de Gyor (00:10): Great. Iqvinder, How are you involved with digital asset management?
Iqvinder Singh (00:14): I’m the DAM Librarian and Taxonomist for one of the country’s largest art supplier. MacPherson’s are based out of Emeryville, California. So my role is to manage all the assets associated with our over hundred thousand products. So our products are distributed through companies like Michaels, Blick Art and thousands of other art retailers across the country. And I basically activate three areas and in the DAM ecosystems. So I manage the day to day asset management. I define the taxonomy. I also manage the eCommerce business that comes out live on sites like Amazon and walmart.com. So that’s kind of what I do digital asset management.
Henrik de Gyor (01:12): Iqvinder, how does a distributor of creative products use digital asset management?
Iqvinder Singh (01:17): We get digital assets from many different sources. The main one is we get the product imagery directly from our manufacturers. So they send us anything and training videos through actual product photography. And then, we take those assets, we bounce it against our brand standards to make sure that it aligns with what we need to publish for our retailers. And at times, we also do our own in house photography and video to make sure that we have the needs for anything that a supplier or our vendors can supply to us. So we take the products and then we send it out to companies like Michaels, they might have needs for their catalogs. They might have needs for their social media. They might have needs for their website. And each one of these thousands of retailers across the country, they might have unique needs, which might be, you know, different in size, you know, some, it’s like a product from one angles. Others like it from a different angle, some prefer videos, you know, some prefer JPEGs and PDFs and TIFs and all kinds of different attributes. In our DAM we have total of, I would say, close to 200 different attributes tied to each product. So anytime a retailer comes back to us and say, Hey, we need the following for this particular product, we can easily automate that process and send them exactly what they need. And so, you know, at one point all of this was done manually, but we have the tools where we can output all this information automatically and we can do it for thousands of items at once.
Henrik de Gyor (03:23): And just to clarify, the attributes you’re speaking of, is that metadata fields?
Iqvinder Singh (03:26): Exactly. It’s a metadata field.
Henrik de Gyor (03:31): What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Iqvinder Singh (03:36): Right now? You know, we, we are in the process of cleaning our DAM libraries, so we have assets that are outdated. You know, we have products that were shot, you know, 20 years ago. And so it’s, it’s somewhat of a manual process to get some of the newer imagery for these product and deactivate some of the old product imagery. And oh, so, you know, when you have over a hundred thousand assets, you know, it’s, it’s hard to identify which ones are new and which one are outdated. We do have a process in place where anything that’s older than five years, we are reaching out to our distributor to validate, to make sure that there’s no newer packaging out there. So getting the product out to the market in a speedy manner is always a challenge. We have to make sure we’re not only getting first in the market, but also we have the latest and greatest product imagery and just, you know, simplifying some of our own internal processes.
Iqvinder Singh (04:52): And, we still have so much, um, metadata sitting in spreadsheets and antiquated old tools and drives. So we’re just trying to flush out our own system too have the latest and greatest in our central hub.
Henrik de Gyor (05:11): And what advice would you like to share with them professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Iqvinder Singh (05:15): I would say anybody who’s coming into or even thinking about becoming a DAM Specialist, I would say is learn. Learn the life cycle of a product. In a lot of organizations nowadays you’re going to end up wearing many different hats. You’re not going to be just strictly a digital asset manager. You’re going to be providing creative feedback, you’re going to be managing, you know, assets for both web and print.
Iqvinder Singh (05:49): So I would recommend learn all the ins and outs of those… how your product’s going to be outputted so you have a better understanding of what you know, what you’re working with. And it will also make you a better communicator when you’re dealing with vendors and internal creative and marketing teams. because it’s, you know, your role as a DAM manager, it’s, it’s not a standalone role, at least not in my world. You’re going to be dealing with merchandising teams and marketing teams and logistics outside third party agencies. So kind of learn the whole ecosystem of where your role sits, learn the ins and outs of marketing and creative. And it will just make you a not only great digital asset management, you know, you’re going to be a librarian and a day to day and you’re sort of the role of a taxonomist and a lot of those companies that I worked with didn’t have that particular role, so I had to quickly speed up myself to kind of understand, uh, how the product is being used and what it means to the internal teams, what it means to people outside of our company that will be using this product and learning the proper terminology to house these products in a hierarchy that’s easy to understand and download by all different parties. There are great tools out there, but the one thing to kind of keep in mind is that, you know, all products have a lifecycle and at some point a new product comes in and we discontinue something else. So a lot of DAM Managers, they make the mistake of fulfilling their hub with all the products, but there’s not a cleaning up. There’s gotta be a process in place for a continuous cleanup of all the different assets we have in our libraries. Just in the last year, we wiped out over 30,000 assets either they were dated or no longer carried by our company. So you get to keep those kinds of things in mind. Otherwise, if the wrong product gets out in the market, that means you have to send retraction letters and could cause some other indirect issues. So just kinda keep that in mind.
Henrik de Gyor (08:30): Good point. There’s a lot of lifecycle management challenges because things keep evolving and it is not a one and done, to your point, in the world of DAM.
Iqvinder Singh (08:39): Exactly.
Henrik de Gyor (08:40): Well, thanks for your advice. Appreciate it.
Henrik de Gyor interviews Alan Gottlieb about Digital Asset Management
(duration 8:43)
Questions asked:
How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
How does a nonprofit environmental organization use Digital Asset Management?
What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people who aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Transcript:
Henrik de Gyor (00:00):
This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Alan Gottlieb. Alan, how are you?
Alan Gottlieb (00:08):
I’m doing well, Henrik. How are you?
Henrik de Gyor (00:10):
Good. Alan, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Alan Gottlieb (00:14):
So I’m the Digital Asset Manager at a national environmental nonprofit. I maintain and develop a DAM system that serves upwards of 600 users at our headquarters in New York and in Washington and at state and local offices across the country. I’m something of a one-man-band. I’m currently doing much of the ingest, description and creating rules and standards as I move ahead of with development of the system while also identifying new content providers and monitoring users on the system.
Henrik de Gyor (00:50):
Alan, how does a nonprofit environmental organization use Digital Asset Management?
Alan Gottlieb (00:55):
So, on the downstream side, our contact team includes photography from the DAM to illustrate stories in our beautiful magazine and our websites and with reports that we share with the public. We’re a nonprofit, so we also use assets for fundraising and marketing. And we use assets for communication. Communications with media organizations and on social and we also have a large outreach and education component to our organization. So educators use these assets to help create public programs. On the upstream side, our organization runs a popular nationwide wildlife photo contest for amateurs and professionals and contestants who enter photos may as part of their of their entry grant just rights to reproduce their images to further our mission. The photography from that yearly contest is at the core of the wildlife photography on our DAM. And many people use those assets and you know, our efforts. We also maintain an ever expanding collection of creative photography shot by our photo department staff and network photographers. They shoot activities and events across the country, conservation efforts, legislative initiatives and local programs or citizen science events. Also scientists may do field work and contribute photography that documents that.
Henrik de Gyor (02:33):
Alan, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Alan Gottlieb (02:38):
So when I arrived at the organization, the DAM was about two years old and it was still in a pretty early stage of development. People who knew about it were using it. It was, you know, clearly meeting a need for high quality, interesting wildlife photography, but not everyone in the network was aware of the DAMs existance and if so, how it could work for them? Also, you know, initial metadata profile had been set up, but largely abandoned, you know, say for one important searchable field. There were really no controlled vocabularies, just backlog of assets and there was really no file naming convention either. So, since then I’ve worked to establish basic DAM design and good practices, you know, establishing workflows, creating system rules and governance structures and improving security and establishing, controlled vocabularies. You know, because there was a lack of metadata fields.
Alan Gottlieb (03:46):
A search wasn’t very flexible and people were getting, you know, I thought very incomplete search results. So as an interim solution, identify the info that we wanted to maintain and, you know, use a free text keyword fields to answer those values. And finally, now I’m in the midst of making more permanent changes by establishing metadata profile, finalizing controlled vocabularies and developing rights metadata. And you know, I think establishing this should make a lot of things easier, including, you know, ingest and just further stabilizing description. Oh. So I think managing rights on our systems is a challenge. And one I’m also tackling now, less than half of the photography on the DAM was shot by employees, is work for hire or is otherwise owned by us. The rest of the photography was a shot by some combination of contestants, freelance photographers on assignment and other employees. That is, you know, people who still own their work and also the rights that we requested from contestants change somewhat from year to year early on.
Alan Gottlieb (05:05):
So we have a big variety of rights situations that we’re trying to grapple with. And I’m in the midst of setting up rights metadata fields so we can maintain a self service model where users can understand that at glance, I hope, how they can use the assets at least for, you know, various editorial uses. And in the more complex uses usage situations, we’re going to have users come to us and request permission. I’m trying to get a bead on all our upstream content producers and media, you know, and that’s a challenge maybe in part because we have a kind of a nod, entirely centralized structure. Our DAM is administered in the photo department so we have that large amount of content being driven by our shooters. But we have shooters and videographers among our communications people and social media people and scientists may have content that our national local users would find useful.
Alan Gottlieb (06:09):
And identifying those people I think is also a work in progress for me. Our organization is also not entirely centralized for a historic reasons. I think I just mentioned that for example, our local chapters and there are a lot of them are each independent nonprofit organizations themselves and though the national organization support salmon, we coordinate so well. There was initially strong adoption by the people who knew about it. Making more people in these chapters aware of us in what we offer is a challenge and we’re using internal newsletters and web pages to make our presence known. And there’s been some word of mouth growth. Also. New initiatives brought us new users and, and between us, between it all, we’ve tripled the number of users or almost tripled the number of users and doubled the downloads on the system. And the time that I’ve been there.
Alan Gottlieb (07:09):
And I think a last challenge that we’re grappling with is trying to understand how people in the organization are using the system. What are they downloading? What are they doing with those files? Once downloaded, our vendor gives us a robust audit trail so we can understand a lot of what a search for viewed and downloaded and who’s doing it, but creating reports, consolidate this information to give us a broader understanding of subject use is another current initiative. Also conducting user interviews to bolster our understanding of what’s being done downstream.
Henrik de Gyor (07:51):
Alan, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people who aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Alan Gottlieb (07:57):
Well, I’d say if you’re coming out of library school, library world, working a basic cataloging internship in the library or museum, be it with digital media, but also analog media. I think that’s really very helpful. Also, if you’re on a system, understand your users. Use system statistics, interview people, do outreach. Find those people who are using your DAM, you know, and let them give you information about what’s happening.
Henrik de Gyor (08:32):
Thanks Alan. For more on this, visit anotherdampodcast.com. Do you have any comments or questions? Please feel free to email me at
Henrik de Gyor (00:00):
This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Alan Gottlieb. Alan, how are you?
Alan Gottlieb (00:08):
I’m doing well, Henrik. How are you?
Henrik de Gyor (00:10):
Good. Alan, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Alan Gottlieb (00:14):
So I’m the Digital Asset Manager at a national environmental nonprofit. I maintain and develop a DAM system that serves upwards of 600 users at our headquarters in New York and in Washington and at state and local offices across the country. I’m something of a one-man-band. I’m currently doing much of the ingest, description and creating rules and standards as I move ahead of with development of the system while also identifying new content providers and monitoring users on the system.
Henrik de Gyor (00:50):
Alan, how does a nonprofit environmental organization use Digital Asset Management?
Alan Gottlieb (00:55):
So, on the downstream side, our contact team includes photography from the DAM to illustrate stories in our beautiful magazine and our websites and with reports that we share with the public. We’re a nonprofit, so we also use assets for fundraising and marketing. And we use assets for communication. Communications with media organizations and on social and we also have a large outreach and education component to our organization. So educators use these assets to help create public programs. On the upstream side, our organization runs a popular nationwide wildlife photo contest for amateurs and professionals and contestants who enter photos may as part of their of their entry grant just rights to reproduce their images to further our mission. The photography from that yearly contest is at the core of the wildlife photography on our DAM. And many people use those assets and you know, our efforts. We also maintain an ever expanding collection of creative photography shot by our photo department staff and network photographers. They shoot activities and events across the country, conservation efforts, legislative initiatives and local programs or citizen science events. Also scientists may do field work and contribute photography that documents that.
Henrik de Gyor (02:33):
Alan, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Alan Gottlieb (02:38):
So when I arrived at the organization, the DAM was about two years old and it was still in a pretty early stage of development. People who knew about it were using it. It was, you know, clearly meeting a need for high quality, interesting wildlife photography, but not everyone in the network was aware of the DAMs existance and if so, how it could work for them? Also, you know, initial metadata profile had been set up, but largely abandoned, you know, say for one important searchable field. There were really no controlled vocabularies, just backlog of assets and there was really no file naming convention either. So, since then I’ve worked to establish basic DAM design and good practices, you know, establishing workflows, creating system rules and governance structures and improving security and establishing, controlled vocabularies. You know, because there was a lack of metadata fields.
Alan Gottlieb (03:46):
A search wasn’t very flexible and people were getting, you know, I thought very incomplete search results. So as an interim solution, identify the info that we wanted to maintain and, you know, use a free text keyword fields to answer those values. And finally, now I’m in the midst of making more permanent changes by establishing metadata profile, finalizing controlled vocabularies and developing rights metadata. And you know, I think establishing this should make a lot of things easier, including, you know, ingest and just further stabilizing description. Oh. So I think managing rights on our systems is a challenge. And one I’m also tackling now, less than half of the photography on the DAM was shot by employees, is work for hire or is otherwise owned by us. The rest of the photography was a shot by some combination of contestants, freelance photographers on assignment and other employees. That is, you know, people who still own their work and also the rights that we requested from contestants change somewhat from year to year early on.
Alan Gottlieb (05:05):
So we have a big variety of rights situations that we’re trying to grapple with. And I’m in the midst of setting up rights metadata fields so we can maintain a self service model where users can understand that at glance, I hope, how they can use the assets at least for, you know, various editorial uses. And in the more complex uses usage situations, we’re going to have users come to us and request permission. I’m trying to get a bead on all our upstream content producers and media, you know, and that’s a challenge maybe in part because we have a kind of a nod, entirely centralized structure. Our DAM is administered in the photo department so we have that large amount of content being driven by our shooters. But we have shooters and videographers among our communications people and social media people and scientists may have content that our national local users would find useful.
Alan Gottlieb (06:09):
And identifying those people I think is also a work in progress for me. Our organization is also not entirely centralized for historic reasons. I think I just mentioned that for example, our local chapters and there are a lot of them are each independent nonprofit organizations themselves and though the national organization support salmon, we coordinate so well. There was initially strong adoption by the people who knew about it. Making more people in these chapters aware of us in what we offer is a challenge and we’re using internal newsletters and web pages to make our presence known. And there’s been some word of mouth growth. Also. New initiatives brought us new users and, and between us, between it all, we’ve tripled the number of users or almost tripled the number of users and doubled the downloads on the system. And the time that I’ve been there.
Alan Gottlieb (07:09):
And I think a last challenge that we’re grappling with is trying to understand how people in the organization are using the system. What are they downloading? What are they doing with those files? Once downloaded, our vendor gives us a robust audit trail so we can understand a lot of what a search for viewed and downloaded and who’s doing it, but creating reports, consolidate this information to give us a broader understanding of subject use is another current initiative. Also conducting user interviews to bolster our understanding of what’s being done downstream.
Henrik de Gyor (07:51):
Alan, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people who aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Alan Gottlieb (07:57):
Well, I’d say if you’re coming out of library school, library world, working a basic cataloging internship in the library or museum, be it with digital media, but also analog media. I think that’s really very helpful. Also, if you’re on a system, understand your users. Use system statistics, interview people, do outreach. Find those people who are using your DAM, you know, and let them give you information about what’s happening.
Listen to Another DAM Podcast interview with Ralph Windsor on Digital Asset Management
(Duration – 13:17)
Here are the questions asked:
How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
What are Digital Asset Management Open Specifications?
What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Transcript:
Henrik de Gyor: 00:00 This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Ralph Windsor. Ralph, how are you?
Ralph Windsor: 00:08 Hi Henrik. How are you?
Henrik de Gyor: 00:11 Good. Ralph, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Ralph Windsor: 00:15 Yeah, that’s a good question. I’ve been doing DAM for about 25 years now. if you can believe, originally when I first started in this, I was a freelance multimedia software developer. This is sort of back in the days of multimedia CD-ROMs in the mid-nineties. I had a client around that time there was a photo library and they wanted a searchable catalog of all their images with a lightbox where you can select favorites and so on. And I built that for them. And then I had a few other similar sort of clients, so smaller, medium-size stock media libraries. They wanted the same kind of thing. That progressed later. We had design agencies and some enterprise clients. We wanted what used to be called corporate style guidelines, which is where basically that like a logo, print artwork, a key photos, people put all that onto a CD-ROM and instead it’s sort of like early forerunners of the kind of enterprise DAMs that you get these days.
Ralph Windsor: 01:22 And then around 2000, we were mainly doing web-based catalogs. Most of the clients were corporate and we were essentially looking to build in house media libraries rather than kind of yeah, going to stock video libraries and are there around that time we’re still doing offering all the sorts of services. So developing the software, doing scanning, because a lot of the images were still non-digital at that time. Sometimes managing digital asset libraries and also consulting, which is a big part of the service that needed to be provided then. And now I would argue also around 2012, we sold off the software side of the business to another vendor. We’re interested in taking that on for their own platform. And we focus now entirely on consulting since things like managing DAM implementations, vendor selection, metadata analysis, troubleshooting. We usually get asked to participate across the whole sort of range of, yeah, the DAM delivery life cycle you might say. And the thing I’ve probably worked on, I work this out, about 120 unique projects and each one of them has, yeah, I’ve learned something new from each one of them. So yeah, there’s a fair bit, yeah. In terms of my involvement with DAM, it’s pretty much defined my professional life you might say.
Ralph Windsor: 02:56 Yeah. No, that’s not a good question. there’s been a lot talk about standards in the DAM over the years. Various initiatives kind of come and gone tend to go anywhere because there isn’t really the kind of commercial motivation for the vendors to make the products work together. And the other sort of participants don’t really have the time or necessarily the inclination to make things happen. I know that the DAM Foundation, when that was still going, they set up this thing that the 10 core characteristics, I believe that was around 2014 and that’s not actually a bad first attempt at some sort of standard to work to. And it does cover the basics. But one thing I notice as you go through this towards the latter half of it, some of the areas of it get quite vague. So you’ve got sections like administrative capabilities, which are sort of quite broad and open to interpretation.
Ralph Windsor: 03:59 And there’s other things about being able to handle many types of files, which isn’t particularly a unique feature. I just kind of got the feeling there as they were coming up with this they maybe had the realization that this is quite a deep and complex sort of subject and just the fact that, you know, there are 10 characteristics rather than five or four or something. It gives you a clue that this is sort of an in-depth subject that doesn’t lend itself very well to a kind of static list so to speak. And just following on from that. Yeah, there’s things like APIs, reporting, audit trials…they’re not actually addressed by the 10 core, which I think they were aware of DAM Foundation and there was maybe an expectation that they might add those in later on.
Ralph Windsor: 04:56 But obviously the DAM Foundation’s not around anymore. So that doesn’t happen. The way I looked at it was this is less like a kind of fixed list or list of sort of characteristics. And it was more like something like an open specification, a functional specification of what a DAM system might be would be something that would be more appropriate just because of the fact that if it’s open, anybody who’s involved in the DAM community can in theory, contribute and comment on it and participate. And also cause it’s open-ended if there is new functionality becomes important in DAM systems, like some of the areas that I’ve mentioned or even if it’s simply just a missed off, it’s quite easy to develop those and it’s far more organic and dynamic as well. So, yeah, that that’s one of the things we’ve been looking at is I can open specification for DAM systems that you can benchmark when is against that can kind of grow and evolve as the industry does.
Ralph Windsor: 06:02 Obviously there are going to be caveats with it just like there are anything else. Just cause the system maybe ticks all the functional boxes doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be superior to another one because things like usability and so on. And there’s the whole question of how to interpret whether or not a system has the functionality where it doesn’t. But yeah, open specification seem to be more suitable as a framework for evaluating and assessing DAMs. going forward then was we’ve got with the, the current initiatives, which were, were good at the time, but I think they’re becoming less fit for purpose than they were when they were originally envisaged.
Henrik de Gyor: 06:48 Ralph, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Ralph Windsor: 06:53 I think on the challenges side, there are two of them. The first would be user adoption and the second one would be interoperability. Just taking the user adoption first. I’m persuading as you know and we both participated in the webinar at the end of last year on user adoption with Lisa Grim, Ian Matzen and Frank De Carlo. What we talked a lot about a lot of these issues, but yeah, getting people to actually use a DAM once it’s been implemented and set up and so on remains one of the biggest challenges. I think that that affects everybody across, across the industry. it’s almost, it’s kind of chicken and egg conundrum. If you’ve got an organization where the DAM gets widely adopted, then it kind of almost, it generates a spark which maintains interest in it and a lot of buzz and activity and it becomes kind of self-sustaining.
Ralph Windsor: 07:57 but if you don’t get that right, then it never actually touches people’s imagination and it almost seems like it doesn’t matter what you do, it doesn’t actually get taken up. I think I’ve, I’ve mentioned this, made this comparison a number of times before. It really is DAM user adoption is a lot like a kind of sales and marketing activity and there’s definitely a lot of similarities between those sorts of activities with adoption and getting people to take up the DAM. So that’s, that’s one of the main challenges and I think that that’s always going to remain the case as well. yeah, so certainly on that side, the other big challenge has been interoperability. I was talking about standards earlier and basically, there aren’t our interoperability standards in DAM and on top of that there are hundreds, literally hundreds of systems.
Ralph Windsor: 08:54 Where this really becomes a challenge is it’s less about two DAM systems talking to each other. Although that does come in, it’s more where you’ve got third-party component that has to integrate a DAM with something else like a web content management system or you just want to build some plugin. Some functionality is going to extend upon a DAM to develop it in a way that the vendor didn’t envisage. If you one of these sort of tool vendors or you want to integrate with something, you’ve got a hundred products which you potentially got to develop a component for. Then what happens then is that the developers of those tools kind of have to make a choice about which ones they’re going to support, which ones are not. And profile, you know, using numbers and all kinds of things like that.
Ralph Windsor: 09:43 And, and I think yeah, interoperability, yeah. Is a big challenge for this asset management right now. And in terms of the successes, it’s almost like the flip side of, of the interoperability point. I think a lot of people now have, I’ve realized I’m certainly in the last six or seven years. I’m the integration and this whole digital asset supply chain piece which is coming in now is really important. And the, the advantages of being able to integrate and connect DAM’s, we’ve lost different systems and put your DAM’s system kind of like at the heart of the enterprise in terms of its, its role as a kind of media construct content hub. That’s been a massive success. That’s really what’s kind of keeping them in the game as an enterprise technology at the moment. So yeah, those would be my three or my two top 10 challenges and and top success.
Henrik de Gyor: 10:46 And Ralph, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Ralph Windsor: 10:52 Yeah. This is quite a broad-based one. I think to be a successful professional digital asset manager, you’ve really got to be self-reliant perhaps more so than the many other roles. You’ve got to take on a lot of different activities. They’re all quite different from Italia, quite unique terms of the skills that chances are you’re probably not going to have a team. And even if you have, it’s going to be a very small one. So, yeah, you’ve definitely got to be a self-starter or one of these people who’s prepared to learn a lot of different stuff and kind of get on with it without other people kind of yes, sort of coming along and spoon-feeding you or helping you. So the work kind of covers all sorts of different subjects. You’ve got to be a bit of a technical expert, you’re going to have very strong metadata skills.
Ralph Windsor: 11:44 I [have] at least an understanding of library science and some of the best digital managers I’ve come across all got MLIS library science qualifications. I talked earlier about sales and marketing knowledge for you getting people to adopt DAM systems. And there’s, there’s an element of that as well. You’ve got to be a bit of a kind of marketer and you’ve got to be constantly demonstrating to your senior management though that DAM and what you do does generate huge amounts of value for the organization. So there’s all those sorts of skills that have to get thrown into the mix. And I think if you really need to be as a professional, digital asset manager you’ve got to be honest with yourself and look at where you’re strong, where you’re weak, and if there are areas that you’re weak at, then you have to work on those. Yeah, keep your skills and the knowledge up to date. And if I make a plug here, I would obviously recommend you look at publications like DAM News and also, yeah, the DAM section on CMSwire and stay up to date with what’s going on in the industry so you can learn a lot more and, and develop your expertise as your career progresses.
Henrik de Gyor: 13:02 Great. Well, thanks Ralph.
Ralph Windsor: 13:04 Thank you Henrik. Thanks for the opportunity.
Henrik de Gyor: 13:06 For more on this, visit anotherdampodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, feel free to send me an email at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.
Listen to Another DAM Podcast interview with Yonah Levenson about Digital Asset Management
Here are the questions asked:
How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
You were involved with the Language Metadata Table. Tell us more about this.
What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Transcript:
Henrik de Gyor: 00:00 This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, I’m speaking with Yonah Levinson. Yonah, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Yonah Levenson: 00:11 I work in the broadcast and media space and I work on metadata strategy and terminology governance. In my past, I’ve also worked in the publishing industry. That’s where a lot of my background is from and I’ve been heavily involved at DAM throughout my career because it’s very important to make sure that your assets are managed properly. My particular area of specialty is metadata because without the metadata it’s really hard to manage your digital assets in your DAM system.
Henrik de Gyor: 00:42 Yonah, you were involved with the Language Metadata Table. Tell us more about this.
Yonah Levenson: 00:47 The Language Metadata Table, which we refer to as the LMT is basically a table of codes that describe the different languages that can be used throughout really any industry. The initial focus has been on the, in the broadcast and media space. And it came about because I was in meetings at my company where people were talking about, you know, what code were they going to use for Latin American Spanish. And in one system it was Lat Am and another one was LAS for Latin American Spanish and other one was Lat Am Span. And I thought to myself, being the metadata geek that I am, I said, this is crazy. We need something consistent. So we began looking at what codes could be used that would be standard across the industry. You know, I don’t like to reinvent the wheel when it comes to metadata. So if something’s out there that exists already, let’s use it.
Yonah Levenson: 01:42 And at the end of the day, we determined that, IETF BCP 47. So that’s the Internet Engineering Task Force Best Current Practice number 47 fit the bill for what we needed in-house. And we created a table that had about 128 different languages included in it. Now, the next part was that I was at a meeting at MESA Alliance, which is the Media Entertainment Support Alliance, which is very useful in the broadcast immediacy base. And they said we would love you to present this LMT and we think it’s so good that it should become an industry standard. Or a couple of years ago, we published the initial LMT and we’re now on version two and there should be another one coming up in the near future. So basically, there’s over 200 languages in the language metadata table now and it’s being, we have a tremendous amount of support and participation across the, not just the broadcast and media industry, but also standards organizations and other groups as well.
Henrik de Gyor: 02:50 Yonah, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Yonah Levenson: 02:55 I’ve been in this space for a while. That’s a really good question, by the way, Henrik, I appreciate that question. I’ve been in this space for quite a while and what I have noticed is the evolution of DAM. So initially, people had their assets, you know, on their local computers. They would push them up to shared drives, when I started at one of my jobs working in the publishing industry, we were looking for some files. And one of the people on my team said, Oh, I know where those are. They’re at, they’re at Rocky’s house. And so Rocky had them and you know, the assets copied onto a CD or DVD at his home and happened to not have thrown it out yet. So we were able not to have to recreate the entire, it was like a statistics book or something really complicated with Math, there was just.. that would’ve been expensive to recreate.
Yonah Levenson: 03:48 Other assets were in boxes, you know, again, on movable media, under people’s desks. And so what I have seen is that first was getting the assets onto a DAM and then there were challenges in how to better describe them and to get people to put the metadata, to apply the metadata to the assets that they have. So that’s when those are some of the big challenges. I mean, people now understand, are starting to understand better about the value of reuse of assets. They’re looking to monetize what they have already and in a different way. Whereas in metadata, I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. People don’t want to reinvent the wheel with the assets that they may own already. So those are some of the challenges.
Yonah Levenson: 04:37 So the successes end up being that people are because they do understand more. There is more of a metadata capture is included in workflows. Maybe not everything that we need, but it’s getting there.
Henrik de Gyor: 04:53 Yonah, What advice would you like to share with them professionals and people inspire to become DAM professionals?
Yonah Levenson: 04:57 What I have found in my experience is that there are many people who did not necessarily choose a career in DAM. Many of us fell into it, you know, DAM systems were being set up in companies. Somebody needed to run it. Maybe they were working in and you know, just an archival space or some kind of storage or a library. And then it moved over into DAM as people realize that they could do more with the assets if they were available. And not just, you know, tucked away in a, you know, in a system where somebody had to go and retrieve it and burn it to media or to, you know, to call it back from some other kind of system.
Yonah Levenson: 05:42 But really to have it available. So what I have seen is that the whole field of DAM has really been evolving quite a bit. And I do encourage people to study DAM in a more formal setting in some cases, especially those who are new and coming up in space, you know, or wanting to participate in some kind of an IT field. But they may not necessarily be programmers or developers. Not everybody wants to do project management. And so you need these actual people who are going to do the hands-on work of managing a DAM making sure that the content is, you know, the assets are retrievable. So along those lines, one of the things that I’ve been involved with recently is I’m the co-founder and co-director of Rutgers University’s Online Digital Asset Management Certificate Program. And this is a series of six courses.
Yonah Levenson: 06:42 Each course is four weeks long, where at the end of the six month period of taking all these courses, then you end up with a DAM certificate in Digital Asset Management. So that can really go a long way towards for people who are new to DAM but are interested in it this way. They have the background and awareness of what is needed in either setting up a brand new DAM or updating an existing one and you can come out with a portfolio piece. In addition, I also see a very strong need for people who have the, you know, library science background, particularly, you know, taxonomists and ontologists because in order to really get the most that you can out of your DAM, the content in the DAM and it really needs to be described well, there are many different industry standards that I also encourage people to participate in.
Yonah Levenson: 07:39 You know, first of all, you have to know a little bit about, or a good amount about what area you’re in and what your subject matter is. But, participating in standards and having a voice in the creation and the updates of those standards also could go a long way because you could make sure that your organization’s needs are being met through metadata standards and, and therefore the requirements of what’s needed to describe the assets in your DAM. So, and always read a lot, keep listening to important things like podcasts and other kinds of presentations that are out there and be active and participate so that you can learn lots of great articles out there as well.
