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Another DAM Podcast interview with Giovanni Benigni about Digital Asset Management

Interview with Giovanni Benigni about Digital Asset Management

(Duration: 10 minutes 40 seconds)

Questions asked

  1. How are you involved with Digital Asset Management (DAM)?

  2. How does the Vatican Museums’ Digital Transformation project involve Digital Asset Management?

  3. What are the biggest challenges and successes you have seen with Digital Asset Management?

  4. 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 Another DAM Podcast on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts,  RadioPublic, RSS, Spotify or TuneIn

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Alan Gottlieb about Digital Asset Management

Henrik de Gyor interviews Alan Gottlieb about Digital Asset Management

(duration 8:43)

Questions asked:

How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

How does a nonprofit environmental organization use Digital Asset Management?

What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people who aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor (00:00):

This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Alan Gottlieb. Alan, how are you?

Alan Gottlieb (00:08):

I’m doing well, Henrik. How are you?

Henrik de Gyor (00:10):

Good. Alan, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Alan Gottlieb (00:14):

So I’m the Digital Asset Manager at a national environmental nonprofit. I maintain and develop a DAM system that serves upwards of 600 users at our headquarters in New York and in Washington and at state and local offices across the country. I’m something of a one-man-band. I’m currently doing much of the ingest, description and creating rules and standards as I move ahead of with development of the system while also identifying new content providers and monitoring users on the system.

Henrik de Gyor (00:50):

Alan, how does a nonprofit environmental organization use Digital Asset Management?

Alan Gottlieb (00:55):

So, on the downstream side, our contact team includes photography from the DAM to illustrate stories in our beautiful magazine and our websites and with reports that we share with the public. We’re a nonprofit, so we also use assets for fundraising and marketing. And we use assets for communication. Communications with media organizations and on social and we also have a large outreach and education component to our organization. So educators use these assets to help create public programs. On the upstream side, our organization runs a popular nationwide wildlife photo contest for amateurs and professionals and contestants who enter photos may as part of their of their entry grant just rights to reproduce their images to further our mission. The photography from that yearly contest is at the core of the wildlife photography on our DAM. And many people use those assets and you know, our efforts. We also maintain an ever expanding collection of creative photography shot by our photo department staff and network photographers. They shoot activities and events across the country, conservation efforts, legislative initiatives and local programs or citizen science events. Also scientists may do field work and contribute photography that documents that.

Henrik de Gyor (02:33):

Alan, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

Alan Gottlieb (02:38):

So when I arrived at the organization, the DAM was about two years old and it was still in a pretty early stage of development. People who knew about it were using it. It was, you know, clearly meeting a need for high quality, interesting wildlife photography, but not everyone in the network was aware of the DAMs existance and if so, how it could work for them? Also, you know, initial metadata profile had been set up, but largely abandoned, you know, say for one important searchable field. There were really no controlled vocabularies, just backlog of assets and there was really no file naming convention either. So, since then I’ve worked to establish basic DAM design and good practices, you know, establishing workflows, creating system rules and governance structures and improving security and establishing, controlled vocabularies. You know, because there was a lack of metadata fields.

Alan Gottlieb (03:46):

A search wasn’t very flexible and people were getting, you know, I thought very incomplete search results. So as an interim solution, identify the info that we wanted to maintain and, you know, use a free text keyword fields to answer those values. And finally, now I’m in the midst of making more permanent changes by establishing metadata profile, finalizing controlled vocabularies and developing rights metadata. And you know, I think establishing this should make a lot of things easier, including, you know, ingest and just further stabilizing description. Oh. So I think managing rights on our systems is a challenge. And one I’m also tackling now, less than half of the photography on the DAM was shot by employees, is work for hire or is otherwise owned by us. The rest of the photography was a shot by some combination of contestants, freelance photographers on assignment and other employees. That is, you know, people who still own their work and also the rights that we requested from contestants change somewhat from year to year early on.

Alan Gottlieb (05:05):

So we have a big variety of rights situations that we’re trying to grapple with. And I’m in the midst of setting up rights metadata fields so we can maintain a self service model where users can understand that at glance, I hope, how they can use the assets at least for, you know, various editorial uses. And in the more complex uses usage situations, we’re going to have users come to us and request permission. I’m trying to get a bead on all our upstream content producers and media, you know, and that’s a challenge maybe in part because we have a kind of a nod, entirely centralized structure. Our DAM is administered in the photo department so we have that large amount of content being driven by our shooters. But we have shooters and videographers among our communications people and social media people and scientists may have content that our national local users would find useful.

Alan Gottlieb (06:09):

And identifying those people I think is also a work in progress for me. Our organization is also not entirely centralized for a historic reasons. I think I just mentioned that for example, our local chapters and there are a lot of them are each independent nonprofit organizations themselves and though the national organization support salmon, we coordinate so well. There was initially strong adoption by the people who knew about it. Making more people in these chapters aware of us in what we offer is a challenge and we’re using internal newsletters and web pages to make our presence known. And there’s been some word of mouth growth. Also. New initiatives brought us new users and, and between us, between it all, we’ve tripled the number of users or almost tripled the number of users and doubled the downloads on the system. And the time that I’ve been there.

Alan Gottlieb (07:09):

And I think a last challenge that we’re grappling with is trying to understand how people in the organization are using the system. What are they downloading? What are they doing with those files? Once downloaded, our vendor gives us a robust audit trail so we can understand a lot of what a search for viewed and downloaded and who’s doing it, but creating reports, consolidate this information to give us a broader understanding of subject use is another current initiative. Also conducting user interviews to bolster our understanding of what’s being done downstream.

Henrik de Gyor (07:51):

Alan, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people who aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Alan Gottlieb (07:57):

Well, I’d say if you’re coming out of library school, library world, working a basic cataloging internship in the library or museum, be it with digital media, but also analog media. I think that’s really very helpful. Also, if you’re on a system, understand your users. Use system statistics, interview people, do outreach. Find those people who are using your DAM, you know, and let them give you information about what’s happening.

Henrik de Gyor (08:32):

Thanks Alan. For more on this, visit anotherdampodcast.com. Do you have any comments or questions? Please feel free to email me at

Henrik de Gyor (00:00):

This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Alan Gottlieb. Alan, how are you?

Alan Gottlieb (00:08):

I’m doing well, Henrik. How are you?

Henrik de Gyor (00:10):

Good. Alan, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Alan Gottlieb (00:14):

So I’m the Digital Asset Manager at a national environmental nonprofit. I maintain and develop a DAM system that serves upwards of 600 users at our headquarters in New York and in Washington and at state and local offices across the country. I’m something of a one-man-band. I’m currently doing much of the ingest, description and creating rules and standards as I move ahead of with development of the system while also identifying new content providers and monitoring users on the system.

Henrik de Gyor (00:50):

Alan, how does a nonprofit environmental organization use Digital Asset Management?

Alan Gottlieb (00:55):

So, on the downstream side, our contact team includes photography from the DAM to illustrate stories in our beautiful magazine and our websites and with reports that we share with the public. We’re a nonprofit, so we also use assets for fundraising and marketing. And we use assets for communication. Communications with media organizations and on social and we also have a large outreach and education component to our organization. So educators use these assets to help create public programs. On the upstream side, our organization runs a popular nationwide wildlife photo contest for amateurs and professionals and contestants who enter photos may as part of their of their entry grant just rights to reproduce their images to further our mission. The photography from that yearly contest is at the core of the wildlife photography on our DAM. And many people use those assets and you know, our efforts. We also maintain an ever expanding collection of creative photography shot by our photo department staff and network photographers. They shoot activities and events across the country, conservation efforts, legislative initiatives and local programs or citizen science events. Also scientists may do field work and contribute photography that documents that.

Henrik de Gyor (02:33):

Alan, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

Alan Gottlieb (02:38):

So when I arrived at the organization, the DAM was about two years old and it was still in a pretty early stage of development. People who knew about it were using it. It was, you know, clearly meeting a need for high quality, interesting wildlife photography, but not everyone in the network was aware of the DAMs existance and if so, how it could work for them? Also, you know, initial metadata profile had been set up, but largely abandoned, you know, say for one important searchable field. There were really no controlled vocabularies, just backlog of assets and there was really no file naming convention either. So, since then I’ve worked to establish basic DAM design and good practices, you know, establishing workflows, creating system rules and governance structures and improving security and establishing, controlled vocabularies. You know, because there was a lack of metadata fields.

Alan Gottlieb (03:46):

A search wasn’t very flexible and people were getting, you know, I thought very incomplete search results. So as an interim solution, identify the info that we wanted to maintain and, you know, use a free text keyword fields to answer those values. And finally, now I’m in the midst of making more permanent changes by establishing metadata profile, finalizing controlled vocabularies and developing rights metadata. And you know, I think establishing this should make a lot of things easier, including, you know, ingest and just further stabilizing description. Oh. So I think managing rights on our systems is a challenge. And one I’m also tackling now, less than half of the photography on the DAM was shot by employees, is work for hire or is otherwise owned by us. The rest of the photography was a shot by some combination of contestants, freelance photographers on assignment and other employees. That is, you know, people who still own their work and also the rights that we requested from contestants change somewhat from year to year early on.

Alan Gottlieb (05:05):

So we have a big variety of rights situations that we’re trying to grapple with. And I’m in the midst of setting up rights metadata fields so we can maintain a self service model where users can understand that at glance, I hope, how they can use the assets at least for, you know, various editorial uses. And in the more complex uses usage situations, we’re going to have users come to us and request permission. I’m trying to get a bead on all our upstream content producers and media, you know, and that’s a challenge maybe in part because we have a kind of a nod, entirely centralized structure. Our DAM is administered in the photo department so we have that large amount of content being driven by our shooters. But we have shooters and videographers among our communications people and social media people and scientists may have content that our national local users would find useful.

Alan Gottlieb (06:09):

And identifying those people I think is also a work in progress for me. Our organization is also not entirely centralized for historic reasons. I think I just mentioned that for example, our local chapters and there are a lot of them are each independent nonprofit organizations themselves and though the national organization support salmon, we coordinate so well. There was initially strong adoption by the people who knew about it. Making more people in these chapters aware of us in what we offer is a challenge and we’re using internal newsletters and web pages to make our presence known. And there’s been some word of mouth growth. Also. New initiatives brought us new users and, and between us, between it all, we’ve tripled the number of users or almost tripled the number of users and doubled the downloads on the system. And the time that I’ve been there.

Alan Gottlieb (07:09):

And I think a last challenge that we’re grappling with is trying to understand how people in the organization are using the system. What are they downloading? What are they doing with those files? Once downloaded, our vendor gives us a robust audit trail so we can understand a lot of what a search for viewed and downloaded and who’s doing it, but creating reports, consolidate this information to give us a broader understanding of subject use is another current initiative. Also conducting user interviews to bolster our understanding of what’s being done downstream.

Henrik de Gyor (07:51):

Alan, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people who aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Alan Gottlieb (07:57):

Well, I’d say if you’re coming out of library school, library world, working a basic cataloging internship in the library or museum, be it with digital media, but also analog media. I think that’s really very helpful. Also, if you’re on a system, understand your users. Use system statistics, interview people, do outreach. Find those people who are using your DAM, you know, and let them give you information about what’s happening.

Henrik de Gyor (08:32):

Thanks Alan. For more on this, visit anotherdampodcast.com. Do you have any comments or questions? Please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.

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

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Leah Carlson on Digital Asset Management

Leah Carlson discusses Digital Asset Management

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor:   This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Leah Carlson. Leah, how are you?

Leah Carlson:   I’m great. How are you?

Henrik de Gyor:   Great. Leah, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Leah Carlson:   I’ve been working with DAM for over six years. My first role in the field was with National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. I was responsible for application support and the IT department and I had the opportunity to roll out and manage DAM for the organization. And then two years ago, I took the role of Global Digital Content Manager at McCormick and here I get the opportunity to develop global content strategy, which means frameworks and best practices to promote synergy and consistency between our regional creative operations. And with that, I’m also responsible for our enterprise DAM and global content management strategy for our 30 plus consumer brands and our industrial flavor solutions organization. I am responsible for overseeing governance and roadmap for our assets and embedding that content management best practice into our region.

Henrik de Gyor:   Leah, how does a global leader in flavor use Digital Asset Management?

Leah Carlson:   McCormick uses the DAM as a global platform for all of the organization’s digital content, so photography, videos, brand guidelines, social content. It’s also our historical asset repository. We support the majority of all of our internal teams as well as our partners and agencies, including joint ventures and distributors. And, one of the cool ways that we use it is to better get our users to the latest content and information. We develop curated landing pages within the tool. In addition, we use our DAM to benchmark and measure digital performance by analyzing KPIs to drive efficiency and effectiveness within our content operations. So for example, this might look like optimizing our operations by shooting a video for one brand and then swapping products stills in simple elements to create content that work for the entire family of brands.

Henrik de Gyor:   Leah, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

Leah Carlson:   One of the challenges that I’ve had for myself is that there’s no really one blueprint for marketing technology metadata since it’s such a new field. I find myself always trying to seek out the best practices and evolve our internal metadata to support the search and keep robust and rich information on the content for us to better connect with other tools and workflows within the organization. In addition, some of our various stakeholders obviously use a variety of tools to support their needs. And as you know at many others there’s always constant changes and the technology world. On the other hand, success is really seeing those downstream benefits to our pragmatic approach to solving these challenges. So for example here, one of the things that is so encouraging as when we receive great feedback that we have helped enable sales and marketing by serving up the right content and information at the right time and that has made their job easier and more efficient. And then

Henrik de Gyor:   Leah, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Leah Carlson:   For those considering the field, it’s really a collaborative and fun community. People help each other out and they share their information. So when you get into the field, you can learn from building these relationships and really taking those applied learnings and applying them into your own organization. The other thing that’s great about the DAM field is you get to wear many hats, so all in one day you may be a librarian, you might be designing user interfaces and you might be training and collaborating with different users and stakeholders. Also for other professionals in the field, one thing that I recently did was I took a formal change management training and those methodologies have been really an effective tool for me and assessing my stakeholder engagement, my project management, and my change management, which has enabled me to be more successful in the way that I roll out the various projects.

Henrik de Gyor:   Great. Well thanks, Leah.

Leah Carlson:   Thank you.

Henrik de Gyor:   If you enjoy this and want to hear more about the Insight Exchange Network DAM Practitioners Summit happening in January 2020 in New York City along with a discount code, links to register and more details, visit the show notes at anotherdampodcast.com

If you are interested in attending the Insight Exchange Network’s DAM Practitioners Summit on January 30-31, 2020 in New York City, you can find more details here. Use the discount code M131ADC for a 15% discount on registration (applicable to the early bird pricing rates too).

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

Need a Digital Asset Management Consultant?

Another DAM Consultancy can help. Contact us today.


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Another DAM Podcast interview with Paul Garrison on Digital Asset Management

Listen to Paul Garrison talk about Digital Asset Management

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor:   This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Paul Garrison. Paul, how are you?

Paul Garrison:   I’m good, thank you. How are you?

Henrik de Gyor:   Good. Paul, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Paul Garrison:   I’m currently a Digital Asset Management Supervisor for McCann World Group here in Detroit. Previously, I worked as an Account Manager for the Getty Images DAM product called Media Manager and I had several accounts throughout the Midwest. And then on a personal note, I’m also working towards my Master’s in Information and Library Science at Wayne State here in Detroit with an emphasis on digital content management. So my involvement goes a little bit deeper than my 9 to 5 job.

Henrik de Gyor:   Paul, how does a marketing and advertising company use Digital Asset Management?

Paul Garrison:   Well, we’re an agency and obviously in advertising, an agency creates campaigns and those campaigns create assets. We have an internal DAM system here for our in-process creative assets and this DAM holds our photoshoots and purchased stock images, things like that for our creative department to access and use.

Henrik de Gyor:   Paul, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

Paul Garrison:   Yeah, there are several challenges I’d like to talk about. The biggest of which that I’ve seen is migrating an existing system to a new platform. I’ve been involved in this a few times and the big underlying question is who is making the choice of which system to purchase and how are they deciding that. There are so many systems available now and how do you discover which is best for your installation? That’s frustrating to go down this path and then later discover that the specific features you highlighted or needed in your RFP are weak or not offered at all. So do you backtrack at that point or are you financially committed and have to go with what you have?

Paul Garrison:   Another challenge is having serious competent people working on the system. Quality metadata is so mandatory and the saying ‘garbage in, garbage out’ is so true in DAM. Metadata differentiates the assets. So if you just tag 100 assets with all the same information, how can you find the one asset that you need? So often just the minimum information is provided and this does a disservice to users of the community. Another challenge is system adoption by end-users. Often, development is focused on what the developers can do or think is best and this does not always coordinate with what the end-user community understands or can navigate. It really benefits the whole system to engage the end-user before or during development to make sure that what you are building is compatible to their thinking. And so surveys, interviews, and focus groups will to better understand the user’s mindset and to build towards that as much as possible. The user also has to understand that the DAM is not Google. So there is training that is necessary to properly and successfully use the system without frustration.

Paul Garrison:   And the last challenge that I’d like to mention is governance. There needs to be someone monitoring this site, especially an enterprise site to make sure that the information is clean in quality. Someone to uphold best practices and train when necessary to make sure the sites succeeds. That person must have the backing of a corporate champion as governance flows from the top down and without backing it is very difficult to enforce the necessary rules for the site.

Paul Garrison:   Successes… I would like to say that I’m very interested in reporting and analysis and we monitor our KPIs to see if any trends are happening month to month on the site, either good or bad and we’ve noticed a surge in certain product images and since then we’ve gone farther to increase their availability, especially in domestic and global dealer markets to maximize their usage. That particular classification of images now our second most popular on a site that has over a half a million downloads a year, so paying attention to what works or doesn’t has been very helpful and for those looking to develop a DAM, involve with an professional from the start. This is not work for an administrative assistant to do in their free time. Someone knowledgeable about library science, assets and taxonomy who can work with the departments of the organization to understand their pain points and gather their feedback to build into the system. You need someone to spearhead the project and work with IT to make sure all the technological aspects are covered. Picking a system is difficult and working your way through all the RFPs, demos and sales pitches. It takes understanding and knowledge. You have to do your homework to begin on having successful footing.

Henrik de Gyor:   Paul, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Paul Garrison:   Sure. As a wrapped up in the daily work as we all get, it’s always key to consider the end-user of the system. Is Your taxonomy consistent with their jargon? Can they find the great assets that you just uploaded for their sales push? Do they understand the layout of the interface and how to use the facets to search and filter? Talk to them when you can and listen to their comments, successes and failures. I like to make job aids [brief task-specific PDFs] for issues that come to my attention. If one person is having difficulty, I’m sure there are many other silent ones who are as well. I tried to distribute them [PDF job aids] when possible or at least have them easily available to send out with an email. This gives the issue a visual and walks the user through it step by step for potential DAM professionals.

Paul Garrison:   I personally have a lot of patience. Patience for users who contact me and for the system that typically will hiccup just when you don’t want it to. I have attention to detail, obsessively so, and that makes me want to do it right the first time and not to cut corners. I’ve learned a lot going back to library school, even with 15 years of DAM experience, many existing resources have been brought to my attention. Things like the Library of Congress subject lists, the MARC standards and these resources that standardize values across many mediums. If you plan to eventually work and integrate with other systems, these resources are important to know and to utilize. And lastly, I know myself and what makes me tick and I enjoy this work. It will bore some people and drive other people crazy, but I enjoy this work and seeing the results by analyzing reports from the system and I track it year over year for performance.

Henrik de Gyor:   Great. Well, thanks, Paul.

Paul Garrison:   Yeah, you’re welcome.

Henrik de Gyor:   For more on this visit anotherdampodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.

If you are interested in attending the Insight Exchange Network’s DAM Practitioners Summit on January 30-31, 2020 in New York City, you can find more details here. Use the discount code M131ADC for a 15% discount on registration (applicable to the early bird pricing rates too).

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