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Another DAM Podcast interview with Laura Patterson about Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

How does a leading health solutions company 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 Laura Patterson.

Laura, how are you?

Laura Patterson 0:08

I’m doing great. Thanks. How are you?

Henrik de Gyor 0:10

Great. Laura, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Laura Patterson 0:14

I have a lot of different roles in asset management for my organization. I am part strategist, part project manager, developer, coder, I do a whole gamut of different things within the DAM world. And it’s been about 10 years of me being in this field. And within the organization I’m in now, I have actually built three different DAMs, and each one has been progressively more complex than the next. And we’ve done so because of obviously, the technology changing in the world and the changing business needs of our organization. So we’re just finishing up building our third DAM for the company.

Henrik de Gyor 0:59

Laura, how does a leading health solutions company use Digital Asset Management?

Laura Patterson 1:05

We use it in a very wide variety of ways. We are all encompassing our entire enterprise is utilizing this DAM to search and download assets. And this is across many different business areas. We have our retail marketing and creative teams, obviously, they’re one of our primary users. But we also have folks in corporate communications and HR, learning and development, our prescription benefits management groups. So we have a very broad audience. But we also service a number of external partners, including design agencies, photographers, and illustrators, some of whom might be coming to the DAM to consume our assets, utilize them in partnership work that we’re doing with them, or they might be contributing assets to us, such as photo shoots or video shoots, etc. And our other primary external users are our product vendors, they are actually our heaviest uploaders of the system. We have a partnership with these product vendors, where we advertise their products, and they help us with our marketing campaigns. So they will provide us with their imagery that then gets stored in the DAM, access by marketing and creative and subsequently used in our marketing materials. We are expanding very quickly, we are getting more and more people that are involved in participating in the DAM. And I think with the technology and digital transformation, we’re really bringing a lot of consistency to our technology stack across the organization.

Henrik de Gyor 2:47

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

Laura Patterson 2:52

I’ll start with one of my biggest challenges that I’ve experienced, and then how it became successful. So one of the biggest challenges that we have had is user adoption and change management. That can be a really big deal for folks that have never used an asset management platform before and trying to understand why we need it, why we have to participate in it, what benefits does it bring. So, you know, definitely with different types of business areas that can be far more challenging to convince than others. And I would say that the success of dealing with that challenge is as you’re building out your DAM, whether it’s from the very getgo, starting your strategy, metadata development, the actual platform development, any business areas that are going to be touching this platform at any level, you should engage with them right at the start of the project and get their input and their feedback, understand their problems and their needs, and work with them to come up with solutions. I found that it’s more successful when you involve all of these different groups that you want to adopt the DAM, and how let them have their say, and how it gets applied to their world and give them those sorts of real life experiences and how it will directly relate to them. And you will find that the adoption and the change management becomes much smoother when you have that communication and that open door for them to give them what they need.

Henrik de Gyor 4:27

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

Laura Patterson 4:34

I would say my advice is and this would go for both new and existing again, really thinking through your strategy really working with the different business areas. Not thinking about DAM in a vacuum of how you as the asset manager is going to work with the assets, work with the application, but to think broader in terms of how it’s going to to impact your direct users, both incoming and outgoing, and if you really put your focus on the users, you’re going to have a much better DAM solution, a better experience for your users. And you’re really going to get people engaged and wanting to participate. I found that has been probably the biggest success for me in my career in really getting the asset management out into the organization and really making it successful and worthwhile for all of our users.

Henrik de Gyor 5:35

Well, thanks, Laura.

Laura Patterson 5:36

Thank you very much.

Henrik de Gyor 5:37

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.


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Another DAM Podcast interview with Jennifer Anna on Digital Asset Management

Listen to Jennifer Anna speak about Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

How does an independent conservation 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 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 Jennifer Anna. Jennifer, how are you?

Jennifer Anna 0:08
I’m great. Thank you for having me.

Henrik de Gyor 0:11
Jennifer, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Jennifer Anna 0:14
Right now, I’m serving as the Digital Asset Manager for World Wildlife Fund. And my responsibilities actually encompass several different roles ranging from, say, contract manager, librarian, photo editor to product owner, so kind of a jack of all trades, if you will. And throughout my, I guess, 10 plus year career, I would say that the majority of my roles have been as product owner in some capacity.

Henrik de Gyor 0:52
Jennifer, how does an independent conservation organization use Digital Asset Management?

Jennifer Anna 0:57
So our Digital Asset Management platform is accessible by our entire network. We are a network of approximately 100 offices spanning from Columbia to Myanmar to US to UK. And at this point in time, our library is of photography and video that tells the story of the work that WWF or World Wildlife Fund does. So the way that we work, the DAM team are very small, but I’ll say DAM team works might be a little bit different than how maybe other DAM teams work, in that, we tend to be kind of involved with the full pre-production to kind of post-production processes as well as like the DAM processes of ingestion, cataloging, and distribution.

Jennifer Anna 2:08
What our library contains is the commissions, the trips that we send photographers, or filmmakers out into the field, again, to sort of tell the story of World Wildlife Fund’s work. So we actually have commissioned shoots in the library. We also have staff photography, because a lot of our colleagues are working in program science. And so they’re actually out in the field. And part of their research work is to actually document it. So we also have staff photography, in the system as well. Another thing that we have, to a lesser extent, are what we called camera traps. And this is the way that our science folk capture the actions of animals to sort of understand better how we can help conserve their landscapes, and also kind of like, yeah, conserve their landscapes conserve wildlife. So those are sort of and then we also, of course, have licensed images from stock agencies like nature picture library, we used to license from National Geographic or National Geographic Creative, even though they’re I think they’re no longer licensing. So it’s kind of those like, I think four or five buckets of imagery that we’re kind of pulling in from a global network.

Jennifer Anna 3:39
There’s different sort of like talents and expertise across the network, the DAM team, and also certain production teams across the network, kind of assist with different processes. And that can be helping with the contract process to make sure that we’re getting the right deliverables from our photographers and filmmakers to kind of helping with the editing process when those assets have been delivered, creating B roll packages, and then of course, and then the processes of actually getting them into the hive or which we call our DAM the hive and getting them distributed. So again, it’s a little bit different in that our DAM work actually extends sort of beyond the management of the DAM into said, like contract processes working with photographers and filmmakers, doing edits, and again, like getting them to the system and then getting them distributed. And the way that our DAM is actually used, for the most part, our DAM is accessible by again, our entire network. If you have a WWF employee, you have access to our DAM so we have approximately 4000 users And so, again, our DAM may be a bit different in that it’s not just utilized by marketing and communications teams across a network. Program staff use it. Science staff use it. Our accounting teams probably use it for if they’re working on something. So it’s very far reaching like our DAM definitely serves our users sort of beyond the marketing and tech teams at WWF.

Henrik de Gyor 5:34
Jennifer, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

Jennifer Anna 5:39
So let’s start with successes. I think what I’ve seen in my time in DAM is that we’ve been rethinking DAM as part of a larger marketing technology ecosystem, which I think that’s been a very positive step for the industry. I think we are thinking about DAM more holistically. And understanding they are programs requiring long term management versus standalone platforms or products, which was more the philosophy when I got started, as I said over 10 years ago, I think we understand more now. I think the industry understands more now that it’s a kind of a people first, technology second initiative, and that it can take a village to make these Digital Asset Management platforms run. And I think that’s all very positive.

Jennifer Anna 6:45
That said, DAM program still continue to be undervalued and misunderstood by companies, and therefore, I think they’re still being under resourced. I see large companies, fully resourcing their CMS, their CRM, their social media departments, and other marketing comms tech platforms with teams and budgets. But then they only employ one person to manage all the aspects of the DAM platform. And just to reiterate, these DAM programs take a village to succeed. So I would really like to see the industry help companies set these programs, and the people required to manage them up to succeed.

Henrik de Gyor 7:36
Jennifer, what advice we’d like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Jennifer Anna 7:42
I would say a few things, I would say learn about the larger marketing communications technology ecosystem, and approach DAM holistically as part of a larger system of processes and people. I would also say you need to be prepared to speak to different stakeholders in their own language about DAM. Change management is a big part of making a DAM program succeed.

Jennifer Anna 8:20
That said, I would also say it’s important to set boundaries and expectations. Many DAM jobs, depending on what they are, are actually several jobs in one and you will need to be able to educate your stakeholders about what is possible. Many times when you are coming into a new workplace, you will be the expert. No one else in the organization or company will understand DAM the way that you do. And then I would say the final thing is with that said, know that you don’t need to know everything. Technology changes so fast that we are just really running along with it.

Henrik de Gyor 9:08
Well, thanks, Jennifer.

Jennifer Anna 9:09
Thank you so much. This is really a pleasure.

Henrik de Gyor 9:12
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.


Questions?

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

Need Digital Asset Management advice and assistance?

Another DAM Consultancy can help. Schedule a call today


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Another DAM Podcast interview with Susan Wamsley on Digital Asset Management

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.

Henrik de Gyor 8:02
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.


Questions?

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

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Another DAM Consultancy can help. Schedule a call today


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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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