How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
You were recently awarded a fellowship on Digital Asset Management. Tell us more about this.
What are the biggest challenges and successes 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: [0:01] This is Another DAM podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with JA Pryse. JA, how are you?
JA Pryse: [0:10] I’m good. Thank you for having me on, Henrik.
Henrik: [0:13] JA, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
JA: [0:17] I was hired by the Oklahoma Historical Society in 2010 to process the [00:23] Carmen Gee collection, which is a very large collection. By process I mean the manuscripts, audio, video, and photographs. The project contained over 91 linear feet of manuscripts, close to 350,000 images, 207 mixed audios, and a number of video and some recordings. My job was to digitize and process the collection.
[0:47] That was my first introduction into Asset Management.
Henrik de Gyor: [0:51] You were recently awarded a fellowship on Digital Asset Management. Tell us more about this.
JA: [0:57] Oklahoma is pretty new on the digitizing field, and we’re relatively new as far as policy and procedures go. Of course, we have a huge collection especially with the five million image Gateway to Oklahoma history newspaper project, and the OPUBCO collection that we do have.
[1:14] My proposal was surrounding long‑term Digital Asset Management. I felt the Smithsonian Institute Archives, the way that they run their program and the way that they manage their assets, is something that I definitely want to model and bring back to the Oklahoma Historical Society.
[1:32] The proposal I wrote was concerning that, and the research that I will do for two weeks while I am residing there.
Henrik: [1:39] Is this in Washington DC?
JA: [1:40] Yes, April 5th through the 19th this year [2014].
Henrik: [1:44] Sounds very exciting.
JA: [1:45] It is. I’m looking forward to it, I’ve never been to Washington DC. My mission is to develop a management plan and best practice strategies for all of our assets that we have here.
Henrik: [1:55] Fantastic. What are the biggest challenges and successes with Digital Asset Management?
JA: [2:00] For the Oklahoma Historical Society and for myself and my department, there is pretty much one person handling each media format. And of course, we always go through budget cuts and we’re the first one to be cut in the state since we are a state agency.
[2:18] There’s only one of me, and the ethics grant has a total of one scanner ‑‑ which is a part‑time scanner ‑‑ one part‑time indexer, one volunteer indexer and I. Also, I like to say I moonlight as an audio engineer, an archivist, but have taken a lot of classes and lot of educational steps to get into the audio engineering field and audio archiving in the oral history collection.
[2:45] Whenever we do acquire new audio collections such as the Clara Luper collection, where it was an audio tape…every one of Clara Luper’s…who’s an African‑American archivist in the region. She had a radio show. We acquired that collection. It had 19 linear feet of audio tapes and cassettes. We’re going to digitize those.
[3:07] The biggest challenge is not having more than one me to handle the newspaper project as well as the audio digitization projects that we have.
Henrik: [3:17] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
JA: [3:22] I spoke to a class this morning that was doing a tour of the archives that we have here at the Oklahoma Historical Society. I was asked the same question. What I spoke to them about is becoming more familiar with all digital formats as much as possible, taking as many classes as you can.
[3:40] I mentioned earlier taking classes in audio engineering, taking online classes in video and film production, and getting familiarized with library processes. All different kinds of scanning and digitization as well as the preservation of that material that we are digitizing.
[3:57] Whenever I speak to students or aspiring archivists, I always want to say, “Keep studying. Keep studying everything that you can. Build your knowledge base.” The more that we know about the material that we’re digitizing, the more beneficial we’re going to be with managing that material. Whenever we speak with community colleges or the different universities, I always like to say, “Concentrate on the efficiency as well. Quantity, quality, and efficiency.”
[4:28] I think that we become more efficient as digital assent managers as we educate ourselves more along the different processes, which is one of the reasons why I’m looking forward to going to the Smithsonian for that fellowship. It’s primarily to learn how we can manage our material better.
Henrik: [4:47] There’s still a lot of analog material out there to be digitized.
JA: [4:52] Absolutely. Now that it’s become the time…the archivists before us that have worked here with the Oklahoma Historical Society for 37 years or for 40 years. That material that they have taken care of is expiring. They’ve all retired now and left it to us, which is just the natural progression/evolution of all the material.
[5:11] We’ll do our part, and then in 30 or 40 years, somebody will come in and do their part. Things keep expiring. The new advances that we see every day, I believe…If we fall behind, we fall behind.
Henrik: [5:25] I’ve heard once it is digitized, it may be transferred into a different format eventually because to your point, before it gets expired.
JA: [5:33] Absolutely. One of the other things I was speaking to students this morning is the importance of having a master copy, an access copy, or clones of the master copy for different uses. Online use, copy use, press release use, all different sorts of uses, but securing that master copy just in case anything ever happens to the original format such as fire, flooding, or in our parts, tornadoes. But definitely to have that master copy.
Henrik: [6:05] Thanks, JA.
JA: [6:06] Thank you for having me, and I enjoy your podcast quite a bit.
Elizabeth Keathley discusses Digital Asset Management
Here are the questions asked:
How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
You recently authored a new book called Digital Asset Management: Content Architectures, Project Management, and Creating Order out of Media Chaos. Explain why you decided to write this and why people should read it.
What are the biggest challenges and successes 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: [0:00] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, I’m speaking with Elizabeth Keathley. Elizabeth, how are you?
Elizabeth Keathley: [0:09] I’m well. How are you?
Henrik: [0:12] Great. Elizabeth, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Elizabeth: [0:17] Wow. [laughs] I’m involved a lot with Digital Asset Management. I’m on the board of the DAM Foundation. I’m currently head of the education committee. I’m also an author. I have a book that just came out.
[0:31] Didn’t you see that on Amazon? Gosh, I write a lot about Digital Asset Management, and I own Atlanta Metadata Authority which helps people with staffing for Digital Asset Management, and I also go in and do a lot of arrangement and description of large sets for people.
[0:47] When you work in Digital Asset Management for a while, you get to this point where you grow the skill set or you can start manipulating thousands or even tens of thousands of assets at a time instead of touching individual ones. Although, you’re still going to do that from time to time anyway.
[1:04] I help people with their metadata modeling and flip everything into CSV sheets usually and help them with their controlled vocabulary and making everything standard and maybe some digital preservation concerns and, evening out their library so they can find things basically which is really just called metadata management. Some people call it metadata cleanup. In the old days, we used to call it library cataloging. Now, we just call it Digital Asset Management work mostly, I guess.
Elizabeth: [1:45] Yes, I did and you were the technical editor on that book, Henrik.
Henrik: [1:49] I was.
Elizabeth: [1:50] Yes, I was so glad to have somebody who gets it there and make me mind my Ps and Qs as we went through. I’m really glad the book is out. If people are thinking about buying it, I highly recommend trying to get hold of the PDF copy. I think that’s the best copy because it’s in color and all the links are active.
[2:08] I’m making the audio copy. It’s an abridged audio version, free on my website. If you go to atlantametadata.com, you can get the abridged audio version and the reason it’s abridged is that the book and its other forms has all these charts and graphs and illustrations and photos, but of course in the audiobook, you don’t get those and that is also part of why I made it free, because there is a substantial amount of the content missing in the audio version, but I wanted to do an audio version anyway because I remember when I was student I wanted to read these kind of books and I didn’t have the money, so I thought, “I kind of want to learn how to do podcasting and this kind of thing anyway, so a free audiobook version of my own work is a good way to start.”
Henrik: [2:52] Can you explain why you decided to write this book, and why people should read it?
Elizabeth: [2:56] I decided to write the book because for the past couple of years, I’ve been writing some articles for the Journal of Digital Media Management and working for the DAM Foundation. I realized that I have a lot of knowledge that people were interested in, and I really like writing about Digital Asset Management. I actually enjoy that process as masochistic as that may seem.
Elizabeth: [3:16] Some people find it really painful but I kind of enjoy it, because when I sit down to write about Digital Asset Management, it makes me think about the things that I know in a different way and it forces me to express sort of the tenants of the practice of the systems that we work on in a way that I ordinarily wouldn’t do for myself. Honestly, it helps me remember things more.
[3:40] I have had the experience, and I don’t know if you’ve had this Henrik, where I would be working on a DAM and I would go back to do a task that I had done before, maybe altering a metadata model or getting beyond the code base of something. I couldn’t remember how to do it, and so I would email one of my workers and ask them, “Hey, could you just remind me how we do this?” They would forward me back the instructions I had written them a couple of years earlier on how to do that task. It’s just because if you don’t do it everyday, you forget the steps and that kind of thing.
[4:17] The book is very general. It doesn’t go with any specific systems because I think that the evolution of DAM systems is moving so fast that any book on that would be quickly dated. It’s more of a overview of what DAM systems are and how they work and how you can set one up and this sort of common issues. I want to get it all down in print form before I forget it, because we’re always learning new things and working on different things. I think it’s fun.
Henrik: [4:43] What are the biggest challenges and successes with Digital Asset Management?
Elizabeth: [4:48] Gosh. What are the biggest challenges and successes? I think the biggest challenges with Digital Asset Management are simply change management. In particular, I think that the way that we do hiring and promotion and human resource, in general right now, is really broken across corporate America.
[5:07] We have these human resource officers, and I tried to address this a little bit when I did the DAM Foundation Salary Survey, but I address it more in the book. We have these human resource officers and they want to put people in a category. They want to say either you’re a tech worker or you’re a marketing worker or you work in creative services or you work in print. Digital Asset Management is all of these things and more.
[5:32] We see this weird problem where people spend all these money on these solutions and they don’t necessarily get adopted across organizations because there’s this division of labor and this categorization of labor that in a lot ways is very artificial.
[5:47] The other thing that we see is that quite often, people who maybe are younger or coming at this as their first career or maybe even their third career, the job has been typed one way or the other and they can’t get there because it’s perceived to be wrong rung on the ladder, either too low or too high. That’s just ridiculous [laughs] . We can do the work and you’re good at the work. You should be allowed to have that position.
[6:11] This is something we are just going to continue to struggle with. There’s a lot of societal shifts going on with that now. I really like this Zappos model. Have you heard about this?
Henrik: [6:19] Yes.
Elizabeth: [6:20] Where there’s no hierarchy?
Henrik: [6:22] Mm‑hmm.
Elizabeth: [6:23] Can I tell you why I think it’s brilliant?
Henrik: [6:24] Please.
Elizabeth: [6:25] I think it’s brilliant because what I saw during my time in corporate America is that you have people who are maybe at the end of their career and they want to dial it back. They want to dial the responsibilities back. A lot of times, you see people saying, “Oh, they’re just sitting out their time or whatever.”
[6:41] Unfortunately, they’re sitting out their time in the management position and that can really mess everybody else up. What they should really be allowed to do is retain that seniority because they are valuable to the company for being there, but they shouldn’t be in a position of power but at the same that shouldn’t be viewed as a demotion.
[7:01] We want to keep those people in the workplace. They’re very valuable. There’s no reason they can’t continue to contribute, but why are we insisting that these people are senior management? At the same time, you might have people lower down the scale who don’t have a lot of project management skills because they’re new to the workforce or maybe because they’re younger, they’re starting a family.
[7:22] There’s all these different reasons why you might be given more responsibility, or less responsibility, but that doesn’t necessarily fit with the title of associate or newcomer or middle manager. You need to be able to take up steps up and down in responsibility in relation to what’s going on at your stage of life and not view that as having you take a hit, or for my generation of women who tend to be super educated, they shouldn’t have to drop out of the workforce at any point. They should just be able to dial it back for a little while.
[7:55] I think the Zappos model really allows for that. I think it’s going to allow for much more intergenerational harmony. Also, it’s going to compensate for the fact that we have this weird thing that’s happened for everybody who’s younger has all the educational credentials because they’ve had to get them with the baby boomers who are still in the workforce. It’s very weird right now. I think with that Zappos model is kind of brilliant. I hope it works and I hope it gets adopted, but I’m not holding my breath either. What do you think of it?
Henrik: [8:25] It’s an interesting idea of having people being able to try new things, which is a struggle younger people, who are more junior in their career. Also, more senior people, to your point, going back down to basics, which I’ve seen many people try to do towards their retirement is they want to go back down the basics and not be remembered as ‘the boss’.
Elizabeth: [8:47] If you have some 27‑year‑old who’s really got a good idea and just lighting it on fire and wants to work those 50‑hour weeks and manage a product, let him. I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t harness that energy. Rather than say, “You need to slow down because you’re not going to be a manager for another 10 years and you just need to wait.”
Henrik: [9:13] That’s primarily one of the reasons why the younger generation may leave a job.
Elizabeth: [9:19] Because they’re not getting the chances that they want to take.
Henrik: [9:22] Because the growth isn’t there.
Elizabeth: [9:25] Yeah. I love the Zappos model. I hope that moves on. I guess the biggest challenges that I see in Digital Asset Management are just that human resource thing, and the biggest successes that I see, oh, my gosh, really, in the field of photography. Period. I’ve seen a lot of people that have able to start their businesses because they get Digital Asset Management in a way that no one else does.
[9:49] I saw this earlier in my life in the ’90s. There were a lot of people my age who just got the Internet early on in a way that other people didn’t and were able to make a good living out of it while being self‑employed. I see that a lot with Digital Asset Management, too, and it makes me really happy.
Henrik: [10:07] I’ve noticed that the creation of photography doesn’t pay as much as the management of photography?
Elizabeth: [10:14] Absolutely. When you have these kids now who’ve grown up with digital photography, which means they’ve always gotten instant feedback on lighting and composition, they never have a wait for a film to get developed, to learn what makes a good photograph. If they have the capacity to understand visual composition and light, they’re going to instinctively get it just by having a phone.
[10:36] The creation of great photography is less technical as it used to be. The value of that has dropped, but the management of photography, you’re right, that’s a rare skill. If you can do that, you could have your own business and you can travel the world and do what you want to do.
[10:51] I actually did a talk at Henry Stewart, New York in 2013 last year called ‘DAM in the Post‑Modern Workplace’, and I don’t remember if you saw that or not, I knew you were there.
Henrik: [11:02] I did.
Elizabeth: [11:03] I’m re‑releasing that as a video sometime in the next couple of weeks. I don’t know if anybody is going to watch it. It’s going to be weird because it’s going to be me talking over like a bunch of film clips and stuff, but I’m going to put it out there on YouTube because I really enjoyed giving that talk, and I think the people who got it got it and people who didn’t didn’t. I’m hoping it’ll get a wider audience. The people who need to pay attention to that will.
Henrik: [11:26] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Elizabeth: [11:32] Never stop reading. Read the Journal of Digital Media Management, listen to this blog, read the transcripts of your blog, which by the way, there’s a ton of quotes from your book in my book. Keep learning. It is moving so fast that if you stop for minute [laughs] or maybe not a minute, if you stop for 6 months or 12 months, you would not know what was going in Digital Asset Management.
[12:00] It’s moving so fast. If you don’t pay attention, you’re going to get left behind. The great way to make money on the Internet, of course, is to try to stay just a little bit ahead of what conventional practices are so that you know how to do the things that maybe other people don’t and then they can pay you to do them.
Henrik: [12:20] Thanks, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth: [12:22] Thanks, Henrik.
Henrik: [12:23] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, just log on to AnotherDAMblog.com. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at AnotherDAMblog@gmail.com
How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
How does a magazine publisher use Digital Asset Management?
What are the biggest challenges and successes 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: [0:01] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor, and I’m speaking with Ed Klaris. Ed, how are you? Ed Klaris: [0:10] Fine, thanks. Thanks for having me. Henrik: [0:12] Ed, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management? Ed: [0:15] I am Senior Vice President in charge of Editorial Assets and Rights at Conde Nast, which includes asset management and rights management across the entire portfolio. Conde Nast owns 18 consumer titles and three B2B titles, all of which have articles and photographs from the traditional print publications. We also produce a lot of video, blogs, and web content, all of which I’m responsible for taking after publication and putting it into a repository.
[0:49] We use our Digital Asset Management system to house, search and discover previously published assets, so that we can reuse them for various purposes. I’m not a technologist, I’m a manager. I’m an executive at the company and I oversee Digital Asset Management. In fact, under my management, we created asset management here at the company and we converted print titles backwards, back to 2002 into XML, and every month that the print titles are created here, we convert them to XML and then put them into our repository. Henrik: [1:26] How does a magazine publisher use Digital Asset Management? Ed: [1:29] Similar to what I just said, we convert all of our content into a structured format. We use our PRISM Spec XML format to house all of our previously published content. It’s a video or Web‑based content that can go into the asset management system fairly cleanly. However, we do try to add metadata so that it’s easily discoverable. We use Digital Asset Management as a repository so that we can reuse content as broadly as possible. We can distribute digital content across the world to our publishers around the world, to our licensees, our content syndication partners, etc.
[2:09] It’s a repository discovery device and a distribution mechanism. Henrik: [2:14] What are the biggest challenges and successes with Digital Asset Management? Ed: [2:18] The biggest challenge that we face are combining asset metadata with rights data around exactly what we can and cannot do with a given asset. As an IT publisher, we tend to not acquire all rights to all content, we have limited rights. Many of the pieces of content have different use cases. We can make a book out of one title’s photograph, but not out of another.
[2:43] We can crop a photo here, and another photograph we might not be able to. We can use an article on the Web, and another article, we cannot. The biggest challenge is, I’m not discovering the asset, it’s knowing how you can reuse it, and having pretty easy access by the user into the asset and exactly its suitability.
[3:04] Then, the biggest successes so far have been our ability to take a robust database. We use an underlying database for our Digital Asset Management system and building a DAM app on top of it, which is the underlying database is an unstructured database that has great search capability, but it really didn’t have a lot of specified magazine publishing needed asset management tools, like a front end. It didn’t have carding, or reuse capabilities.
[3:37] It didn’t have the ability to segment and use taxonomies quite as well in our specific field, so we have been able to build on top of our unstructured database, a thin app that is very robust and serves the magazine publishing business very well, but when in fact this industry has really not had a DAM product that did serve our needs. Henrik: [4:00] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals? Ed: [4:04] I think that DAM requires a great knowledge around search and discovery. It’s an undervalued skill set, and with search and discovery, I mean the ability to create and employ taxonomies to use segmentation and granularized search in a way that makes your assets findable. I think the people who are going into the field don’t know, just need to know how to manage binary assets, but also need to be very familiar with search and discovery, and they need to be able to be technologists.
[4:38] Not necessarily everybody needs to be able to code, but they need to be very familiar with technology around these databases and such, because otherwise, it maybe kind of get lost. They need to know what they’re getting into. What it was, if was they were really interested in, are they interested in that, more so content management than Digital Asset Management as a repository, and really know what direction they want to go in.
[5:02] Often times I find that people are ultimately interested in creating content rather than figuring out how to store it and find it and re‑purpose it, it’s the latter that people in this field really need to focus on. I’m looking for people who are both content specialists and people who can convert content into XML or HTML, mostly XML, and also technologists who understand search primarily, and can do front‑end development. Both of those skills are very useful and especially the technology side. Henrik: [5:31] Thanks, Ed. Ed: [5:31] You’re welcome, it was a pleasure. Henrik: [5:33] More on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, logon to anotherdamblog.com. Another DAM Podcast is available on iTunes and AudioBoom. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.
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.
Another DAM Podcast 