Henrik de Gyor: This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Dan Piro. Dan, how are you?
Dan Piro: Good. How are you?
Henrik de Gyor: Great. Dan, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Dan Piro: I’m the Director of Digital Asset Archive with the National Hockey League. I oversee a team that’s responsible for ingesting video, digitization projects, metadata application, metadata integrity, and we work alongside of the post-production team here, NHL Studios to support their media needs and also the NHL Network and work together, solve problems, and help them create compelling content.
Henrik de Gyor: Dan, how does a professional ice hockey league use Digital Asset Management?
Dan Piro: Primarily we use it to send and receive media and to archive it. We have coming in from 30 arenas around the continent every game and you can have up to 15 a night. You get three feeds of the game from the time they press record, you’re talking four or five hours which can add up to 250-300 hours in a single night. So, you have all that material coming in and where you used to have to wait for tapes to come in by FedEx and that type of thing, now we have all the previous night’s games available for the start of the next work day. Our broadcast partners, our internal departments can use it. We get our photos coming in from photographers around the league and just bringing all this material together and having it at our fingertips in a very short timeframe allows us to like I said earlier, create compelling content, create it sooner and get it out the door.
Henrik de Gyor: Dan, what are the biggest challenges and success you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Dan Piro: Well, the biggest challenge I was cast with when I came aboard here at the NHL a little over two years ago was to digitize all the physical archives ahead of our centennial anniversary. If there’s any hockey fans listening, they would know that we got the NHL 100 branding all over the league this year. And to prepare for that, we had a very short timeframe to digitize 150,000 or so videotapes, a half a million still images, slides, negatives prints, over a million documents that our PR department had and that’s game sheets which are the scorecards that the official scorer keeps in the arenas. That dates back to the second season, so we’re talking as far back as 1918.
And statistics records back to the very beginning of the league. Back then, they kept these huge ledgers throughout the season and every goal was marked down, every assist was marked down in these huge ledgers and we had to get all that content scanned and have it all ready to go so that we could celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the league. So as you can imagine, just the logistics of moving all that physical material around from various locations to various vendors; that’s a nightmare in and of itself. But we have a great team, our archive manager is the most organized guy I think I’ve ever met in my life and his system to track all this stuff and make sure we got everything back really saved the day for us.
I had a team of 15 people working to ingest this content, QC it, verify that we’re getting a file back for everything that went out the door. It was just a massive, massive undertaking which at the same time that we were doing all this work, we were setting up a new DAM system. With the new DAM, we’re bringing all this content into the new DAM trying to dig into all of our legacy databases from our videotape database, to our scoring database and pull as much of the information that we can from there and map it to the data fields in the new DAM. Just a massive, massive project to get this thing stood up and ready to go and bring in future and current content at the same time. It was a huge challenge and I’m happy to say that from physical archive perspective, it was very successful, but going forward, there’s always new challenges and new things to tackle when you set up a system like that.
One of the other things we had to deal with in bringing all this content in, these half million images that was scanned, much of it had no data associated with it as far as who the players were, who the teams were that were pictured in these photos. This team of 15 hockey experts, subject matter experts came in and were able to look at these phots one by one and when you might not be able to tell just by looking at something, who these players are, these guys did incredible research to … if a player was shown taking a shot and he’s half-turned and you can see that his jersey number ends with either a three or an eight and his name ends with E-R, and it’s a blue jersey, who is he? And what year is it? And judging from the equipment the guy is wearing, whether they’re left-handed or right-handed, the advertisements on the boards in the background, all these things went into researching who these guys are and tagging them and giving those photos values. When you’re setting up these systems there’s no point if you don’t apply the proper metadata along with that. Kind of all one project but all these different spokes to the project were really the challenges that we faced and at the same time, some of the success that we had.
Henrik de Gyor: What advice would you like to share with young professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Dan Piro: I think we talked about this a little bit, a couple years ago when we did the podcast, and in the digital world that we’re living in now, I think everybody’s kind of a media manager. I sort of equated it to managing an iTunes library back in the day. And now with your DVR and backing up your phone and having an iCloud and all of these things that are part of everyday life and becoming more and more ubiquitous are really just a small scale of what media managers do professionally. You just have to scale that up to what the needs are in a multi-billion dollar corporation.
In terms of advice, if you’re organized with your personal media and you understand how to handle those practices, you can start to apply that at the entry level and then learn how larger companies do this type of thing. I think the interesting thing that’s happening in the DAM industry is that people are now coming out of school having studied to do this kind of work where historically, I think people from the era when I got into it were people that were industry professionals and they fell into it. Whether you were running a tape, library, or you’re a production manager and you fell into this asset management world, now these people are coming up studying how to do it. That’s great but I think that people that come in with that type of background are probably going to be very stuck in their ways a little bit. “This is how I was taught it should be done, this is how we need to apply these procedures”.
I would say that they should reach out to the many departments and people that they’ll be interacting with and learn how they work because in most cases, a DAM is a supporting role much like a supporting actor is trying to help the lead shine. That’s kind of what we’re doing. We’re finding ways to help the company shine and generate revenue off of what we’re doing. But we’re not necessarily the revenue generator. I think you need to keep that in mind and understand that you’re part of a larger team and it’s not just about the best way for you to manage assets, but the best way for the assets that you manage to serve the company that you work for.
Finally, the one thing that I beat like a dead horse to all of the more entry level people that I work with is network and don’t burn bridges. Your network is what helps you succeed in the industry. That’s how you get jobs, that’s how you meet people, that’s how you make the contacts for the job that you want. It’s very important to have your Linkedin account set up and have it up to date and make sure that you’re constantly keeping in touch with all of the people that you interacted with professionally. It’s very easy today to contact people that you’ve worked with in the past without being a pain in their butt.
I remember when I was getting in making phone calls to people that I’d run into and they just don’t have the time of day to take calls and do that type of thing. But you can easily send a message that they can get back to you at their convenience. The current era is the easiest era to network ever because you just have to search people, and use that to your advantage. Networking is really the key factor that I’ve had in my success I think.
Henrik de Gyor: Great. Well, thanks Dan.
Dan Piro: Thanks.
Henrik de Gyor: For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, go to anotherdampodcast.com where you’ll find another 190 other episodes like this. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.
Henrik de Gyor: This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Julia Kim. How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Julia Kim: Sure. I’ve been working, managing digital assets at the American Folklife Center for a little over a year. I also worked in preservation previously at New York University and with a commercial company as well. At the American Folklife Center, we received not only a lot of born digital collections, but we also have a large ethnographic folkloric multiformat collections that span from 19th century Edison cylinders that have been digitized multiple times as technologies increase to stuff like application, programming interface, grabs from https://storycorps.me. That all falls under the purview here.
Henrik de Gyor: How does the largest library in the world use Digital Asset Management?
Julia Kim: Sure. Here at the library, it supports our basic core functions and mission to preserve and provide access to Congress as well as the people of America here. Digital Asset Management here really encompasses a number of different systems, so we actually use, not only some in-house, homegrown repository systems, but a lot of different collection management systems that support our ability to locate, provide intellectual controls, do things like mass folk migrations, for example, or off of older servers or older systems or even formats. Of course, serve that up. One of the big pushes this past year in order to serve at a larger public is taking a lot of collection material that was previously analog and digitizing it in bulk, so we’re talking about 20 terabyte collections, easily, and putting them online.
All this requires a lot of management and control in terms of understanding the derivative creation. Also, managing the different staff, people involved throughout this process, and that includes not only vendors, but multiple departments external to the archive here that work with the larger library initiatives. It’s just really the core of what we do. We are a library. We are an archive. Without Digital Asset Management, whatever its forms may be, we would not be able to function. It’s not periphery. It’s the core function of … without it, the library would not be our library. The archive would not be our archive, I would say.
This past year, we’ve also switched from a previously … what was a rich, multiformat collection with a lot of sound recordings, actually, quarter inch audio or different tape formats, magnet media to primarily being born digital, about 2015, we totally flipped to being 98% in coming acquisitions being born digital, and that’s because, in some ways, with the born-digital shift, there has been much more. It’s so easy to create. The collections we get are becoming more, more massive in size, so scaling up and creating more flexible Digital Asset Management systems has also been a big shift in this past year. Again, that includes not only systems but staff as well, so cross-training so that using Digital Asset Management is not only just something I do, but it’s across our staff and our archivists where it’s something that all archivists have to do here, now.
Henrik de Gyor: What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Julia Kim: Some of the biggest challenges include trying to talk across these different systems, I would say. One of the pushes this year is actually creating more robust microservices for bashing actions that simultaneously update different parts of the Digital Asset Management systems that were previously isolated from one another, required more human intervention and, therefore, were more prone to human error, I would say. Another challenge is simply the fact that Digital Asset Management changes so quickly where the field was several years ago, where it is now, especially with more complex content to formats, means that you constantly have to educate yourself and to learn and understand and stay involved with the field in a way that you might not need to in other areas. One example of that is where you’re receiving DPX files, which is massive file type for movie image formats for scanned cellulite film, where it’s literally a image by image that it’s drawn together.
The standards in this are just evolving right now and being created. The standards bodies are trying to understand embedding metadata and appropriate ways to do that in creating tools, so this means there aren’t clear answers all the time for some of these things, which is also what I would say is the most exciting part of this profession and why I’ve been drawn to it.
Another success is the integration of digital forensics applications from more of the law enforcement computing fields to archival workflows in recent years. Just this morning, I was taking some old floppy discs, zip discs, for example, and I was able to migrate content off of that and read it, and I will ingest it later to our content management system, which is a great success because before really I would say that, at least in the archival field, these tools weren’t readily available, so a lot of this, what is really foreign digital content, was locked on this folder physical media and there weren’t the protocols in place to safely retrieve and ingest that content.
Henrik de Gyor: Julia, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Julia Kim: My advice to existing DAM professionals is to stay involved in the field because it does change so quickly. Whether this means coursework or conferences or simply networking and finding people in the field that you can talk to and talk these issues out, it’s, I would say, totally necessary involvement to be able to keep up as the field changes. My advice to people aspiring to become DAM professionals is to get a little taste of what it means to become a DAM professional. At least, in my experience, it means a lot of communication as well as technical issues and the technical troubleshooting.
That can mean a lot of meetings and a lot of advocacy across different departments. Trying to explain why things like metadata, for example, matter so much, or trying to explain why automation is important, but I think I’m just basically echoing a lot of what other people say and you got to stay involved. You have to maintain. You cannot just go to work and expect bigger data to work, necessarily. Since a lot of our work is tied up with the way different other technology, different shifts in vendors, different shifts in the consumer market. You have to just stay involved in a way that you, maybe, at least in the archival world, may not need to with analog stuff, or analog collection, necessarily, I think.
Henrik de Gyor: This is Another DAM podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Jan Delos Santos. How are you involved with the Digital Asset Management?
Jan Delos Santos: I’ve been involved with Digital Asset Management for over a decade now. Currently, I’m the digital asset manager for RPA, which is Rubin Postaer & Associates. Prior to my stint here, I’ve worked as the Digital Asset Management for Saatchi & Saatchi LA for two years. Prior to that, I was an art producer/digital asset manager at TBWA\CHIAT\DAY for about eight years. Really much of my experience has really been on the agency side of things. Back in 2003, when I first became involved with DAM, I was just starting out as an art producer and was responsible for commissioning various artists for the different campaigns that came through. The agency needed a way to keep track of these assets that were being produced, especially as the amount of digital files grew. Because I was one of the most tech-savvy members of the team, they pretty much charged me with creating the system. I worked with our internal IT department at that time to create an in-house solution.
I was hired by RPA to revamp the system they currently have and just develop their workflow processes for DAM. Prior to my arrival here, there wasn’t anyone devoted solely to the Digital Asset Management who understood the particular needs of an advertising agency. The system was basically being used as file storage. The taxonomy was out of date. There was no overall structure to the system. Since there was no clean ingestion workflow, many of the assets in the DAM were either incorrect or never even made it to the DAM. That’s been my challenge to leverage the technology already in place, to introduce some best practices, and to broaden the agency’s understanding of the benefits of having a DAM. Anytime you’re going through this type of DAM revamp, restructure, and expansion, it’s never a quick fix. It’s been really important to me, through this transition, to work nimbly and have flexibility, but at the same, stick to a well-thought-out roadmap for implementing the new processes, technologies, and operating procedures.
Henrik de Gyor: How does an independent advertising agency use Digital Asset Management?
Jan Delos Santos: As a creative agency, we’re responsible for generating many individual visual assets used. Even though we’re an independent agency, we still have to work with a number of different client partners that rely on the assets we create. Because we have so many different teams, clients, or client partners that need these assets, we use DAM to keep track of the product metadata, usage rights, and to distribute those assets across the network. In that may, being in an independent agency is not that different from working at other agencies. We run into similar issues and have similar needs, so standardizing our workflow and getting users to adopt the system is key. Much of my experience has been with the various automotive clients, so it’s vital that they DAM keeps track of the product information for the vehicles featured in the assets. What’s product correct for one model year could change in the next. Depending upon the nature of the marketing, users may need a vehicle with very specific options. By centralizing and keeping these assets on the DAM, it ensures that users are locating the correct image for their needs. Also, it helps to make the branding consistent across the different media channels, whether it’s print, digital, or social media.
Henrik de Gyor: Great. What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Jan Delos Santos: I think that although awareness is growing, I still find that many companies don’t understand what Digital Asset Management is and what the benefits are for having a DAM system in place, or if they have heard of DAM, they focus all their efforts solely on the technology when really there’s so much more to it than that. You can have the greatest technology in the world, but you still have to adapt it to your needs, especially as they change, and have people behind it to support, maintain, and grow the system. It’s not uncommon for a digital asset manager to be hired onto to clean up a previous situation. Often those responsible for creating the system don’t communicate clearly to all necessary holders involved, so no one utilizes the system either correctly or at all.
In one case, I had to cull down the required meta data fields from 140. After meeting with different stakeholders, I quickly realized that none of the users ingesting assets had the time nor were there a need for this huge set of data. I was able to pare it down to the essentials, and I reduced the number to 38. By doing this, it made the process significantly more efficient and made the option of this step less of a concern for others. Because I was focused on their needs and valued their input, those stakeholders became more willing to work with me and through me to solve future problems and eliminate future technical roadblocks.
I think that success for me happens as our user adoption grows. I love it when the light bulb clicks on for people when they work with their DAM and realize how it can make their work life easier. They’re no longer bogged down by spending so much time digging for files, and they can find what they need quickly and can move on to the more important stuff.
Henrik de Gyor: Great. Sounds like a great investment. What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Jan Delos Santos: As much as the industry is growing, I still think it’s a niche area that even some long-time agency veterans aren’t aware of. There’s certainly not a lot of information to new, prospective candidates unless they have been in this type of role previously. Most digital asset managers don’t start out as such, and they’re coming into the field from very diverse disciplines. I think that it’s important for someone aspiring to work in DAM to always be curious. You never know what experiences will help you along the way, so you have to be open to a variety of challenges. It’s not just learning about new innovations and technology. You have to be proactive and get to know your users and their needs. Also, never underestimate the value of the human part of DAM. The more you’re able to connect with people, the more successful you’ll be.
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