Listen to Susan Wamsley speak about Digital Asset Management
Here are the questions asked:
How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
How does a Museum where radical Arts and Architecture meet 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 0:00 This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Susan Wamsley.
Henrik de Gyor 0:09 Susan, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Susan Wamsley 0:13 Hi, Henrik. I am currently the Digital Asset Manager at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum here in New York. And previously, I’ve worked as a Digital Asset Manager, and Photo Archivist for civil engineering firms and architecture firms in New York City. And I was thinking, what the differences between those those days of yore and now and previously, there was more of a focus on kind of a mass digitization of photography collections, and then making them accessible. And now we have the undercurrent of mass digitization of archives. But on top of that, we have the proliferation of born digital assets, photography, as well as audio and video these days. So that’s what we’re dealing with at the Guggenheim.
Henrik de Gyor 1:04 Susan, how does a Museum where radical Arts and Architecture meet Digital Asset Management?
Susan Wamsley 1:11 We use the DAM in many different ways. One, we organize and reuse our assets for our public facing projects. These would be marketing projects, our website, social media, our app, any educational programs, virtual tours, publishing, licensing, that sort of thing.
Susan Wamsley 1:33 We also use it for documentation of the collection. We have our condition documentation for our artworks. We have treatment documentation, install and de-install photographs. And we also have documentation of our beautiful building, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The architect was Frank Lloyd Wright. And we have going back to the construction of the building, William Short, was the project manager, I believe, for the construction, and he photographed the building, as it was being built. So that’s fascinating information. And then we also, of course, document the building to this day, that that up to our Wayfinding signs that relate to our pandemic preparedness. So we document all different kinds of things in there.
Susan Wamsley 2:26 And then also be capture our institutional knowledge with the DAMs for Museum, it just sort of grows and grows. The lifecycle of a digital asset is essentially forever in there, because we just build on it. So if you have an old photograph of a painting, maybe you don’t use it for marketing anymore, but maybe your conservation department’s interested in what the colors looked like in a particular year. So we just sort of build our institutional knowledge in the DAMs. Use it as sort of a small a archive, we also have capital A Archives. But this is a place where you can learn about our objects. You can look at the exhibition history, how it’s been shown and exhibitions through the years, you can look at the conservation history and determine the copyright information.
Susan Wamsley 3:18 And one good example of how we’re using our DAM to capture knowledge is in our recently, almost completed project, the Panza Collection Initiative. That was a 10 year research project that was funded by the Mellon Foundation grants. And it was a look at our conceptual, minimal and post minimal artworks in the Panza collection. And this is very complex material. And it needed to be researched very carefully from lots of different sources.
Susan Wamsley 3:53 And our researchers were able to capture what they found about the objects. I’m just gonna use as an example. We have four exhibition copies of one Bruce Nauman neon work, and these kind of holdings you need to look at and determine Is there something that would be considered an original? Are there any they’re considered wrong? Are they the wrong colors or something, for example? So our researchers interviewed the artists, interviewed artists estates, looked carefully at what we have looked at other archives, pulled all this information together, and then they’re able to determine, for example, in this or that exhibition photo, which artwork is in there is this exhibition copy, that exhibition copy. So that kind of material, which is very complex and has lots of nuance is perfect, actually for the DAM because you can get a lot of description in there. You can get a lot of photographs in there, and you can really detail all of the findings. And then ultimately, this is to be sort of available for public research. So this has been a big project and one that I think has really shown what you can do with the Digital Asset Management system.
Henrik de Gyor 5:15 Susan, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Susan Wamsley 5:20 This was something that, as I thought about, I kind of thought we could answer both questions with the same answer, which would be user adoption. I feel like your biggest success as a digital asset manager is achieving a solid user adoption, because that means you’ve got a good interface, your metadata is good and you’ve have a good rapport with your colleagues and with all the people who are using this [DAM] because you’ve listened to what they need, and you’re responding to also the needs of the company. So you can set up good workflows, as well as have data integrity.
Susan Wamsley 6:02 And I thought this is also really one of the biggest challenges is you have a system that people need lots of different things from and they want different things from. And how do you set something up that can please everybody, or mostly please everybody? So I would say user adoption for both of those.
Henrik de Gyor 6:24 Susan, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Susan Wamsley 6:30 I don’t know if I have a lot of advice for people who are already professionals, because I’m sure we all have similar experiences. I think, currently, one thing that is a big topic, among my colleagues is interoperability with other systems that that’s really a key to your data integrity, and just to making your workflows easier for everybody in the institution, or in the company that you work for. And I would say, people who are coming into this, that, you know, you you find yourself doing a lot of the work on your own. There are a lot of hours to setting things up and determining a taxonomy and coming up with the keywords and all kinds of things, applying metadata. But really, when it comes down to it, while you’re also worried during all this, what you really need to be doing is interacting with your colleagues a lot and really listening to what people need, what they expect, and how your system can respond to kind of the culture that the institution or the company needs. You can reflect their acronyms. You can see how people search you can. Are they looking for something really specific? Are they looking for more browsable topics, that kind of thing, and really build something that responds to the needs of the institution.
Henrik de Gyor 7:59 Well, Thanks Susan.
Susan Wamsley 8:00 Thank you for inviting me to be on your podcast.
Listen to Denise Bastien talk about Digital Asset Management
Here are the questions answered:
How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
How does a Museum of Art and Design 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 (0:00): This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Denise Bastien.
Henrik de Gyor (0:07): Denise, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Denise Bastien (0:11): Thank you, Henrik for having me speak with you today and I’m excited about our podcast. Let me tell you a little bit about my background. I am the registrar for collection information at the RISD Museum also known as the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design. And in that capacity, I administer the museum’s collection information and oversee the Digital Asset Management in the integration of assets and information into our museum operations. And in this capacity, I ensure that digital documentation on the collection meets appropriate collection management, legal, security, cataloguing, publication and preservation standards and requirements. And I’m just going to give you a little brief intro to the RISD Museum in case our listeners aren’t familiar. We were established in 1877 as part of a vibrant community of stewards represented in art from diverse cultures from ancient time to the present. Because of our deep connection to the Rhode Island School of Design, one of the most highly regarded schools of Art and Design in the country, we offer a unique approach to experiencing art, whether it be through our gallery interpretations, our talks, our hands on activities, our workshops, the RISD museum visitor not only observes the significant objects of Art and Design, but they learn about the process and techniques of making art from the hand and the mind of the artist. So our philosophy is a driving force is that our approach to our partnership, our programmings in exhibitions, we also aspire to create an accessible and inclusive environment that fosters meaningful relationships across all of our communities. And the RISD Museum is committed to deliberately, consistently and compassionately confronting racism and injustice in any form. We are a midsize Museum, we employ about 100 staff members along with numerous docents, freelance artist educators, and we serve approximately 125,000 visitors a year. And we roughly hold about 100,000 objects in this comprehensive collection of Art and Design. We also provide free access to our digital images of public domain works in the collection for any purpose. We want our collection, obviously, and our scholarship and interpretive content to be accessed and distributed and reused by everyone.
Denise Bastien (2:39): So where am I on this journey? I began my DAMS journey at the Museum about 18 years ago, when we made the transition from shooting film, to direct digital capture. And at that time, it was the first time when the semi-professional cameras were digital capture cameras were in the marketplace. And but it was also at a time when there was no Digital Asset Management systems really in the marketplace. So at that time, and still today, the museum photographers fall under my management. And we also at that time, had a collection system that was capable of associating JPEGs of our objects, our exhibitions, our conservation publication, and event records in the system. So we quietly built a critical mass of high resolution professionally shot digital images, looking at emerging standards that were coming out of the National Institute for Standards (NIST) and some of best practices that were coming out of these really early initiatives at creating and digitizing from a direct digital capture. So as we began to introduce these digital files into our collection system, we are also able to bring in the work of our registrar’s, our three curators, our conservation and our art handlers, all being now able to use our images of our collection and their daily work, as well as being able to distribute them for print publication primarily. And that’s how we quickly expanded our user base into the educators, our marketing staff and our graphic designers. So now we’re like 15 years later. We’ve also gone through two previous migrations of our collection information system. We’ve designed and relaunched our webs platform three times. And once again, we’re taking on another migration, funded largely in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, is a federal program which offers grants to museums to build capacity, increased public service, and public access.
Henrik de Gyor (4:51): Denise, how does a Museum of Art and Design use Digital Asset Management?
Denise Bastien (4:56): So this is in this iteration, we’re tackling our biggest and most ambitious technology project today, we will be incorporating select information from each of these three systems, our collection information system, the Digital Asset Management system, and our web platform. And we’re going to use these, what we’re really envision is creating a almost like a triad or a triangle, that each system will be using be used for what it does best. And that we will be pushing and pulling data between each system that’s common and needed in each system. For example, all of our we are having to done that we had to create an integration concept. So all of our collection centric information is administered and stored, entered, shared through that collection information system. All the digital assets will be administered, entered, stored and shared through the Digital Asset Management system. So what happens is, it’s not just you go to one system for your digital asset, you go to the other system for your information about the object, or on the object. In this case, we’re engineering with our vendors, through our API’s, because all of these three systems will be web platforms, we are using API to be able to take the content about and of the object that would be sent to the digital asset itself that represents as a surrogate of that object, and would embed all of the identification information that’s needed there. And then some select technical information, and rights information will come back to the record in the collection information system. And then the data for that object, let’s say it either is going to go to our website directly, or it’s going to a path. We’re going to have a path coming from the Digital Asset Management system and a path coming from the collection information system.
Denise Bastien (7:06): So that’s where we are. And then once we committed to this concept, we identified, as I said, all these fields, and by and push and pull between systems, with the ultimate goal of making sure that we are we have the most accurate information, and we are reducing redundant work. And it allows people to work in the systems that they primarily work in.
Denise Bastien (7:31): So our first goal, in that in this new iteration, was to begin the process of transferring and migrating our older SQL based database, that is a collection information system, we had to select a Digital Asset Management system. And in that selection process, we had to have make sure that we could do this concept that we want it.
Denise Bastien (7:59): So right now we’ve managed for years, for almost 18 years, we’ve managed the assets using strict control over metadata. We keep it in a foldering system on a network shared drive. And so you can imagine now that we’re into, you know, 18 to 19 terabytes worth of assets, we can no longer do it in this sort of manual method. So that’s where the Digital Asset Management System came in.
Denise Bastien (8:30): Plus, we were also being hindered by the fact that we didn’t have an API platform for our collection management system. So that’s what put us here today.
Denise Bastien (8:42): So that’s how we’re going to use it. It’s going to be considered like part of the ecosystem of our work. As many of your listeners may know, museum work largely is collaborative. People often think of the front of the house, the curator who’s acquiring objects, or the educator who’s running a program or teaching a class. But there is this whole orchestra of players in the background. And the idea here is to make sure that our Digital Asset Management requirements fit into the way people need to use their work. So largely, what the Digital Asset Management system will do for us, is give an extension to the information that we already have in the collection information system. However, there’s features and functions that the Digital Asset Management system can do that our content management system can do, such as gathering assets, collecting them being able to output them in different other kinds of software.
Denise Bastien (9:47): Searching is different people are going to be searching for what it depicts more than what it is of and so there’s many different reasons why our staff, many different staff members will use the Digital Asset Management system. We also manage all of our event program and marketing tools, and soon to be wrangling in even our graphic design files into the Digital Asset Management system. And and consequently, we’ll have also have a record in our back end, overall information central system. So that’s where we are on our journey today. And it’s very exciting.
Henrik de Gyor (10:29): Denise, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Denise Bastien (10:34): One of the largest challenges that we’ve had to face was change management. Obviously, you know, one of the things that we’re going to be asking a very high functioning staff to adapt a different workflow. While we’re doing that, we’re also trying to minimize the amount of change that will be required of them. So that’s one of the largest challenges.
Denise Bastien (11:03): And that directs us a lot in the way in which our workflow will be and is being developed and designed. Many decision makers in our institution, and like many others, typically do not use these systems. And because of that, there’s always a risk that the cost to build or implement, can overshadow the value of bringing these workflows into alignment. So that’s one thing we’re also very, has to be very present thing for us. And then beyond building, that initial integration is absorbing the increases to our operating costs for licensing and storage, once the systems are built. And then recognizing really, that these platforms will continue to change. And we must be able to meet these changing dynamics as they arise. So also keeping abreast with whatever new innovations are coming that would really enhance our work.
Denise Bastien (12:03): We also are finding one of the challenges that’s both successful is building relationships with the vendors, who can help you identify your technology solutions. Whenever you find a gap, and help you best deliver that function and capability.
Denise Bastien (12:21): One thing that we had to do, because we don’t have technologists here directly in the museum staff is bringing in outside expertise to help us and especially and for us in the Digital Asset Management system. That was the one area that no one really had any expertise to that particular software.
Denise Bastien (12:43): So we had were very strong on collection information, software knowledge, we’re very strong on web information knowledge, but we had never seen a Digital Asset Management system. So you know, we kind of went through the typical way in which a lot of institutions and agencies approach this.
Denise Bastien (13:02): They start, usually they’ll find like, a checklist of criteria, and they’ll go through and go through this really granular list of everything that they need, and check it off. And so then when you connect with a potential vendor, you’re oftentimes almost always working with a sales staff at that particular vendor. And yes, a lot of times you can see, can it do x? Can it do y? Yep, it can do e x, can it do y? But can it do it in the way that we really need it? The way we work with it every single day? And, and is it really what we expected when we first thought of it?
Denise Bastien (13:45): So again, the biggest challenge, and success is being to be very clear and articulate exactly what we envisioned the systems, the systems to do, and then getting a detailed use case or a scenario what we called it and had each vendor present it and demonstrate that. From that scenario and demonstration, we went to what we call a proof of concept stage, where we then invited the two or three top contenders to actually build a small implementation of this to show us that the system could indeed deliver all the six or seven key work tasks that we needed it to do. That was an incredibly worthwhile opportunity for us. We also had a selection team representing a survey of all of our stakeholders within the institution, and so everyone could see exactly where their work would fit in by these demonstrations. And we had two weeks, and we was called a proof of concept. Basically, it was a sandbox, we had two weeks to go in as and, you know, each user would try to do the type of task that they could do. Now regard, we all understood that there were limitations because this was just a shell that was built. But it was clear from that process where our final vendor merged from. So it was a challenge to put it together, but it was really successful, and bringing us with the confidence to know that we are getting a system that can indeed do everything that we need it to do. So that was that’s really been some of our most challenging but most rewarding work to date.
Henrik de Gyor (15:35): Denise, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Denise Bastien (15:41): if I had any advice to share with DAMS professionals, one of the big things, I think, is again, we don’t have an overall digital manager for all these different systems. But what we’ve done is built a team between these three systems, kind of like, we can assign, like a department chair, if you will. So you know, you have the collection management administrator, you’ve got the DAM administrator, and you’ve got the webmaster. And together, we have to keep this concept together, we have to keep informed what each system needs to do and when it needs to change so that we can maintain all of these relationships, these technical relationships, and also concept in intellectual relationships. So just, you know, kind of let down the silo, you bring down the silo you get at the table, because each one of these persons are the ones that actually know what the work that they do.
Denise Bastien (16:46): So bringing it down to like the practitioner level, that people will actually do the work and need to do the work. Having them involved in the process is critical. So I would say that’s one thing.
Denise Bastien (16:59): And I would also not be shied off to change systems. So if you’ve got a system that’s not working, or it’s only working to a particular… only does one thing well, but doesn’t do the other eight things you need very well. You know, it’s work, but it’s not insurmountable work, to change a platform or to change from one system to another. Like I said, we’ve done it numerous times. And then the key to making that successful and not harrowing, is that just having good, consistent metadata, and training your users on metadata, and both the ones that put it in, we separate the ones who put it in from the ones who use it. So you know that the people that are entering, or building records, [they] can learn the real nuances of the system, that a casual user doesn’t always bring. However, the casual user, that we’re always being driven by what they search for, how they want to ask for things, is this the proper information. So you know, the other thing that that does is assure by building to tech, this sort of different user bases is that we can have a balance between what our users need, and then you know, the rigor of keeping your metadata as tight as you can make it.
Denise Bastien (18:24): So if I were going to start in the this business again, now, I’m going to date myself because I started way back when it was only film. And, you know, it exploded when we were able to create digital information that was easily shared, and especially of our artwork, I mean, it’s tremendous for those working in the front end working with the public or public facing audiences. But it’s also a critical collection management tool for our everyday art handlers, conservators, registrar, our staff, our security staff, everyone has some function and some interface with the systems.
Denise Bastien (19:07): And so you know, you can investigate different programs. There are different professional programs emerging now at the higher Ed level. There’s a lot of professional organizations that have Digital Asset Management professionals. There’s a you know, it just is like, Henrik, you’re providing today. There’s different learning tools, webinars, and there’s all kinds of literature articles about becoming a digital asset manager. And the thing I really find exciting about it, it’s the probably one of the largest growth areas in anyone who’s interested in working with any kind of media asset. So you can do it in the commercial world. You can do it in nonprofit world. You know, you can kind of you can do it in the technical area where you can learn to build and, you know, actually use it from computing side. And some of the most exciting things that we’re seeing, and innovations that we’re seeing all surround this idea of the user experience. And largely that’s being thought of and developed as an image based or an imagery based experience. So you know, the work is going to continue to keep growing. And it’s very exciting.
Denise Bastien (20:28): If I were going to go back into museum work again, from the beginning, I would not change a thing. I would stay right in this path of information collection information, and its imagery, and all the imagery that sits aside of it. One not over the other, they really work mesh together, because you can’t have an image or a video with no information, other than, you know, just its essence. Or you can’t have a record that has no metadata. And if it has information about an object, you have nothing you don’t know who made it, you don’t know where it’s from, you don’t know what it’s made of. You don’t know where you got it. It kind of renders that object less useful than those that really have this marriage of image and information. So that’s where we are.
Henrik de Gyor (21:27): For more on this, visit anotherdampodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.
Interview with Giovanni Benigni about Digital Asset Management
(Duration: 10 minutes 40 seconds)
Questions asked
How are you involved with Digital Asset Management (DAM)?
How does the Vatican Museums’ Digital Transformation project involve Digital Asset Management?
What are the biggest challenges and successes you have seen with Digital Asset Management?
What advice would like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM
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 Giovanni Benigni.
Henrik de Gyor (0:08): Giovanni, How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Giovanni Benigni (0:12): Well, before starting, I have just to say that I’m speaking on my own, of my personal experience in the Vatican. All the opinions expressed not necessarily reflect ones of the institution.
Giovanni Benigni (0:32): That said, I started working for the Vatican Museums at the end of last century. And in the early 2000s, I directed for the Governorate of Vatican City State several software development projects related to image storage and retrieval systems. But such projects, unfortunately, at the time had no fortune for several reasons that would be too long to say here, and went into oblivion. Moreover, since coming to Museums, I dealt with several software systems used to catalog and store images, without any direct connection to our CMS. Also, since the advent of digital high-resolution imagery had just been conserved on file shares, without any way to retrieve it, other than using [file] path and file names. So since then, my obsession has been to put all the information we had in a single system to get to a single access point directory of everything. This is shortly how I started my involvement with DAM in the Vatican.
Henrik de Gyor (1:50): Giovanni, how does the Vatican Museums’ digital transformation project involve Digital Asset Management?
Giovanni Benigni (1:57): The digital transformation project of Vatican Museums started some years ago with a larger, seemingly never-ending, technical renewal project involving all our seven kilometers [~4.35 miles] of galleries and working spaces, and all the systems from communication to remote surveillance, access control, networking, and so on. In this framework, we started several projects as, for example, the 3D scanning project of all said spaces, that is now completed, and a long-awaited scanning project of our historical pictures on glass plates strongly wanted by our new director, Dr. Barbara Jatta. It appeared immediately that for the pictures we needed both a new cataloging system and long-term storage to accommodate forever their digital copies.
Giovanni Benigni (2:15): And fortunately, I had a good experience with what we shouldn’t do. We looked for solutions offered by big tech, but it seemed not likely to be valid ones, because although they were flexible, and metadata rich, generally stored the images on database blobs. And I had a good experience with blobs and I knew that were not good for large files that we needed to store. That’s why we started to search for a solution that wouldn’t store large files on a blob, but just on disk on shares, on other support, but directly, physically on disks. And we identified among a large number two possible products, [a] commercial one and an open-source project.
Giovanni Benigni (3:47): The first appeared to be more aimed at companies that had to manage images for commercial purposes, while the open-source seemed built for research institution libraries, and for sure, museums, because, also, it was validated by the Musées de France. It gave us a good perspective to be able to use it satisfactorily, and, most important, being an open-source platform, it was inexpensive, which is a word always loved by management.
Giovanni Benigni (4:18): So we started a test and we had a nice surprise. It appeared every day more and more suitable to contain every information we already had. And a new possibility arose. Finally, get to a unique access point for every artwork-related information in our possession. It was my dream coming true. So, in brief, we started migration. First moving existing CMS data to the new catalog, followed by images and all the other conservation and historical data we had. Today, we are still ingesting images, the last 100,000, more or less, audio files, conservation and analysis reports, and we are planning to ingest also videos starting from the most recent digital, going back to older on tapes. Here we could open another chapter, talking about formats no more easily readable, like Betacam.
Henrik de Gyor (5:20): Giovanni, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Giovanni Benigni (5:26): We have a very ancient museum. Our history starts a few centuries ago, more or less. You can well imagine how much information we have accumulated in such a long time. One of the biggest challenges is being able to digitize the answer pictures and documents in our possession. Their quantity exceeds any idea you may have, for sure. And this reverses in time necessary to do the scanning because the items must be handled with extreme care, must be cleaned, and so on. Moreover, you know, it was 1997, and I had just joined the Museums, when I first heard about a project for scanning our ancient photos on glass plates. Well, we definitely have been able to start such a project only in 2017. Twenty years later. And although the scanning job is being practically completed today, the curator still has to check all the archival information related to them and this takes a lot of time. We are going a bit slow in this moment. Really for we have moved objects, entities, and all the assets into a unique system, where everything is directly related to inventory items with meaningful relationships, now searches are simpler and more efficient, although people have had to get used to a new way to enquire. The new CMS uses Lucene syntax, and there’s a faceting capability, so people today, unlike before, when they had to ask our inventory to make searches, now they are able to make top-down searches and, listen, they are able to find for themselves what they are looking for. And this is a really big step forward, together with the capability to see in a glance the documents, pictures, analysis, and so on in a single application. Finally, I can say that the new catalog has made possible a true collaboration between departments that today they can easily share information of every kind about inventory objects without printing paper or sending emails, but directly inside the catalog using the sharing capabilities of the system.
Henrik de Gyor (7:59): Giovanni, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Giovanni Benigni (8:05): Well, I think that if you want to get out alive from a DAM project, you must build your project on a strong metadata base. So take your time to think and rethink and rethink it as many times as you need to be strongly convinced it will work. Really, this is not as hard as it seems, because the hard work to reduce data to a common structure will be limited to no more than 15 metadata [fields], but you must take it into consideration very seriously.
Giovanni Benigni (8:44): Second, you must define DAM and long-term preservation policies. When I say DAM policy, I say policy about ingestion, about acquisition, about tagging, about descriptions, and so on, also about vocabulary. This is crucial, to pass onto people the concept that they must follow the rules. Otherwise, you will have a fantastic system filled with objects without any capability to find what you’re looking for.
Giovanni Benigni (9:23): Third, drop an eye to interoperability, because for sure you will need it internally to develop products based on your assets. For example, our system has a built-in IIIF server, which makes it possible to superimpose more than one image and then, for example, we have visible light, infrared, X-ray images, and we can superimpose and look to particulars by switching immediately from one layer to another, and this is very useful. Very useful for curators, for restorators, and also for the public. So, interoperability, I think should be a must. And that’s all.
Giovanni Benigni (10:20): Indeed, if you are crossing over troubled water, feel free to contact me. Thank you.
Henrik de Gyor (10:26): Thank you, Giovanni. For more on this, visit anotherdampodcast.com.
If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.
Listen to Meredith Reese talk about Digital Asset Management
Transcript:
Henrik: This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, I am speaking with Meredith Reese.
Meredith, how are you?
Meredith: I’m good, thanks for having me.
Henrik: Meredith, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Meredith: I’m the Digital Asset Manager for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association. I’ve been here for now just about a year. We implemented a brand new DAM right when I started and it’s been fantastic so far.
Henrik: Meredith, how does one of the world’s top orchestras use Digital Asset Management?
Meredith: They use it for just about everything you can think of. I personally sit in the archives department where I’m responsible for preserving all LA Phil historical records and serving requests both internally within the association and for outside users. But we also maintain a complete audio and video archive for our orchestra members to review. So we’re currently using our Digital Asset Management system, not just for historical purposes and research of all types of assets, but also for the orchestra themselves, which makes us pretty unique as far as orchestras go. And then we also support all of the affiliate groups that help out the orchestra. And we’re a nonprofit organization, I should mention. So we have a lot of volunteers, but we do have a full-time staff within the association that is responsible for all the administration of the LA Phil, planning the season, executing the season. So we have a full-time production staff who works directly with the orchestra and our music directors.
Meredith: We have a full artistic planning staff who actually programs the seasons and we have a marketing team within who does both digital and physical marketing. And really all of those groups are constantly creating assets all the time. And they’ve seen all their assets grow just within the last five years. And also as part of the archives, we manage a museum. We managed the Hollywood Bowl Museum at the Hollywood Bowl. The LA Phil has two homes. We have the iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown LA, designed by Frank Gehry. And then we have the Hollywood Bowl. There is a lot of history to that performance as well. That’s not just, you know, classical music, but, all the pop programming that we do throughout the year. So we’re responsible for exhibiting in that space. At the Hollywood Bowl Museum and then we have a couple of spaces in the Walt Disney concert hall as well. So all of the assets that are being created by the organization are being used and shared and reused on a regular basis. It’s actually surprising that they didn’t have the Digital Asset Management system until now.
Henrik: Meredith, What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Meredith: In general or here at the Phil[harmonic]?
Henrik: Either. Or both.
Meredith: Either? I would say here at the Phil, it’s been, We’re a small nonprofit on team, but we’re still people who work within those silos. That’s actually been quite surprising to me that there’s not more interaction or collaboration the teams, but that’s starting to change the culture. Starting to be more open, more transparent its definitely, our programming is a lot more dynamic. It’s not just your traditional classical shows anymore. There’s constant overlap. When our music director, Gustavo Dudamel performed elsewhere, also conducts other orchestras, but as well as his collaborations that he does here at the Walt Disney concert hall or at the [Hollywood] Bowl. And so it’s really gotten, people into more of the spirit of collaboration, but they still have a hard grasp on their assets. You know, who owns what, who can see what, who can share. And as they start to get more use of digital asset management system and we’re used to being able to search those assets, they realize first of all that metadata is really important.
Meredith: Making their stuff searchable and, especially information around rights, how they can use these assets, how they can reuse these assets. They’re starting to get more comfortable with that process and the silos are starting to break down little by little. We haven’t definitely a new collaborative spirit around here, but it’s just starting. I think we’re just barely scratching the surface and our DAM tool really does sit as the tool to help that along. So my challenge is really change management challenges, making sure that people are comfortable with the system that’s working for them as well as, how we can innovate later on. That’s I mean innovation is a huge challenge with DAM in general, but it’s something that I believe strongly in, you know, that we have to keep, you know, making this tool better and better and meet the needs, not just why we got the tool in the first place, which was really just to solve the influx of digital assets that are here, the association, but really think about, you know, what are we going to be dealing with in the future?
Meredith: What type of assets are we going to be seeing from both a technological standpoint and being able to describe them with good metadata and being able just to share them with the best way to share our information. We’re going to be seeing a lot more audio and video content is my guess and we’re going to be seeing a lot more data around that content. That’s going to be really important and we’re also going to have to open our doors to the general public. We’ve got a lot of demand to make audio recordings available to researchers and just music enthusiasts. So we’ll see if we can meet that demand too. That’s on the horizon. Launching a DAM system that the musicians could access as a pretty big success that just happen. So having a team of orchestra, you know, full-time world-class musicians that rarely really interact with the administrative folks and now they’re working in one system is pretty amazing. That definitely has broken down the two biggest silos here in the association and that took a lot of planning just to roll that out, to configure it correctly. I mean, streaming audio from a DAM system. Our DAM is off the shelf. You know we have a software as a service model. So technologically it wasn’t that challenging, but getting people comfortable, training them, making sure that it would meet the needs and that it was compliant with our union contracts and how we treat the musicians. How musicians treat restoration was really, really important. And we’ve got more on the horizon. Another big plan that we’re rolling out is a project management tool to sit within our DAM that will help the marketing group, basically, bring assets in and organize them and share them in a more streamlined way. And it’s also gonna help with scheduling our entire orchestra season.
Meredith: I come from the entertainment industry and so I’m used to TV seasons and film schedules and tentpole projects. And so working with an orchestra, it’s really all about the concert season for that year. And LA Phil is demanding, we have two seasons, we have the winter season and the summer season at the Bowl. And so being able to schedule that and make sure everybody’s slotted in the right space is a day to day. yeah, it’s just taxing on so many people. So we’re trying to move those processes internally and really associate them to all of the content that people are making along with the performances. Our whole taxonomy, if I can dive into the metadata kind of Geeky side of what I do is based off of performances. We have a hierarchy that’s based on the season. And then the locations that are venues and then the performance dates and then all of the works associated to that date.
Meredith: And we work directly with our music librarians who actually prepare the music for every single performance that the orchestra does. And then we have guest artists come in and that has its own challenges too. Yeah, it’s all built on the back of how the season is scheduled. So we really needed a system that would address that. And so we’re calling it project management, but really it’s project management and plus scheduling plus asset wrangling plus work in progress collaboration all under one system. It’s going to give our users that one stop shopping experience that I think most people are looking for
Henrik: Meredith, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Meredith: I would say just get as much experience as you possibly can and don’t be afraid to take risks and don’t be afraid to try new things and all of your failures are going to be just as valuable learning opportunities as your successes. My past experience definitely taught me that. And so I entered in the LA Phil. I was, you know, just about prepared for anything. And so it’s been nice that I haven’t, you know, had to have as many struggles in previous places and the adoption process has been really, really smooth so far, but I would definitely inspire people to keep at it and be persistent and try new things and dive into your metadata and your data models and really understand them. I think the biggest skills I’m seeing for DAM professionals, you know, are really those that match a data scientist, you know, the analyzing and the ability to, you really get down to good, you know, data model building and good taxonomy structures and, you know, really rich metadata and how that’s mapped, how that all fits together. But then being able to, you know, explain that to all your general users. And I think that’s the biggest skill someone can bring to DAM today.
Another DAM Podcast 