Listen to Yaochong Chen talk about Digital Asset Management
Transcript:
Henrik: This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, I’m speaking with Yaochong Chen. How are you?
Yaochong: How are you, Henrik? Nice to meet you.
Henrik: You too. How are you involved with Digital Asset Management (DAM)?
Yaochong: Well, I was just graduating from King’s College London’s Digital Asset and Media Management Program. In the past one year, I’ve learned a lot about some basic concepts and also some practices used and ideas about how to, if that colleague managed assets. I think this program really helped me to understand how important managing rich media is and also give me a lot of ideas to think critically about how to help more people to better do so.
Henrik: You started a new Digital Asset Management group. Tell us more about this.
Yaochong: Okay, well the group I’ve found that is called Digital Asset Management China Connect. I founded this group in May 2018 with two of my friends. The reason why I started this group is because I really want to bring DAM to China. Although we have a lot of Chinese students in this program, actually for them it’s very hard to find a DAM career back to China, which is because most of us [are not] really aware of what DAM is. What I’m going to do is to bring an awareness and also persuade more Chinese companies and organizations to really ponder how to organize and manage their rich media content. In the past one year, what I’ve done is get connected with a lot of DAM experts in the western world and also I’ve held some presentations and meetings with some Chinese students and also some DAM experts. What I’m going to do this year is to do some interviews with some Chinese organizations, especially rich media content intensive companies, to know their conditions about managing rich media and also to think about really implement a digital asset management system or some friends.
Yaochong: And also maybe do some interviews with some western expert to see if they have some reflections or ideas about the future of DAM’s development in China. So, next year my plan is about to launch a website is DAM China. I hope to use this website to get connected between western experts and the Chinese rich media intensive companies to let China’s companies to now the importance of DAM and at the same time to let in western experts and then maybe vendors and the people to do so to know that China really needs their help to really make their DAM condition better.
Henrik: What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Yaochong: I think in my view, I think challenges are at the same time the potential success. And if we see the whole DAM world, I think one of the challenges is to how to face change and unpredictable things because technology is really developing fast these years. On the one hand, technology will bring more challenges to DAM management because they will be more multiple types of rich media contents and there will be more content devices. But at the same time technology can really help DAM to manage content better. But if we have a closer look about DAM in China, I think the biggest challenge will be to think about how to nurture a Chinese organizations awareness about DAM.
Yaochong: And there are actually three points I really want to cover. I think they are really some reflections. The first one is about society and culture. I think in China, people with more experience get more priority, which means it’s really hard for some creative and the critical young people to raise their ideas. And I can imagine if some young people go to a company and to say like, “can we implement a DAM system? It will help a lot.” Maybe some more experienced leaders, they don’t really take [this seriously]. And the second one I really want to cover is that I know their are many like Librarian Degrees in Western world, but in China there are less, which means that they don’t really take [this seriously] about how to exactly manage their rich media and digital contents. The third one I think is about Chinese people are really concentrating a lot about developing technology like many hot treads like AI, AR, VR and blockchain things so that they don’t really have the energy at the efforts to really think about rich media content and how to manage them. So I think about this challenge, if I mean we can really think about some ways to persuade them to do so then there will be a really potential success and more footprints for them in the whole world.
Henrik: What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Yaochong: Well, I think I want to cover two points. One is the problem solving and critical attitudes. And the other is the entrepreneurial attitudes because I mean everything is developing and DAM will also to the future as well. So it’s very important to look forward and to see about the future like to really be open and see the technologies that is going to be developed in the future and to really think about how to solve the problems that are brought by all kinds of technology. I think the entrepreneurial attitude is what I really want to give to those potential DAM management people in China because I mean, we still lack the awareness of DAM at present and it is very important for us to stand up and raise the idea and get the courage to talk about this with all kinds of organizations and really bringing this idea there.
Henrik: Well, thank you so much for your insights on this.
Yaochong: Thank you. Thank you too. Nice to talk to you.
Henrik: You too. For more on this, visit anotherpodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.
Listen to Rebecca Schneider talk about Digital Asset Management and Content Management
Transcript:
Henrik: This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Rebecca Schneider. Rebecca, how are you?
Rebecca: Good. Thanks.
Henrik: Rebecca, How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Rebecca: So I am a Content Strategist. I have a background in library studies and library science and I often am involved in digital asset management projects with my clients.
Rebecca: How do you help organizations understand their content, advocate for realistic solutions and evaluate those implemented solutions over time?
Rebecca: I work with clients to understand their current state through interviews and content audits and understanding where they are currently at. And then I work with them to define their goals for their content in relation to their business and where they want to take the content in the future. I always advocate for practical and realistic approaches to content because not every content solution is perfect. So we have to be practical in our approach to make sure that, you know, the solution is effective and mindful of cost. I try… I strive to help my clients get as much return on investment as possible. And for me, the key is to understand that content is a corporate asset and it needs to pay its way.
Henrik: What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Rebecca: A really big challenge that I see is just the sheer number of objects, you know, images, videos, etc. That are now being managed even compared to just five years ago and think about the technology that allows us to create 4K images and videos which will require a great deal of storage. There’s just so much stuff out there. So I really feel that that is a really big challenge just to manage all that information. And a success in some ways is the realization that from organizations that they need the proper tools and processes to manage their content. I think a lot of people are having a bit of a come to Jesus moment, so to speak, when it comes to their content and realizing that they have to manage it. They can’t just put it on a shared server and call it a day. It needs active management and maintenance in order for that content to be useful to the organization.
Henrik: You are going to present at the Insight Exchange Network DAM Summit in New York on January 24 and 25th of 2019. Tell us more about this.
Rebecca: So the presentation that I am giving on the 24th [of January] is focusing on tagging and empathy. So what is that about? So this actually sprung out of a comment that I made at last year’s summit [in 2018] where I said it would be nice to see more tagging, focusing on empathy to help enrich the content experience and that’s a nice thing to say, but what does that really practically mean? I mean, we use empathy to understand and relate to customers and users and to create appealing content interactions and a lot of organizations and brands are using empathy as a tool to encourage user engagement with the brand and imagery and videos. Most certainly played a significant role in that kind of messaging. Right now I’m seeing a lot of, you know, a lot of campaign-related, kind of one-off attempts to create sort of an empathetic marketing focus, but nothing that seems really long-term and for me the primary challenge remains and how do we tag all of this content that we’re dealing with and support empathetic communication across multiple channels.
Rebecca: And as I said before, it’s one thing to add content for a specific campaign. What about entire websites and apps and mailings and all the things you used to reach out to your client or customer base? So, I’m using this session as sort of a launch pad to explore how tagging based on empathy can increase the brand engagement, but also sort of the practical aspects of how we could potentially make this happen, you know, also thinking about the context of the user experience itself, you know, regional, cultural, socio-economic and how we can approach tagging in that regard practically and have it be leveraged in a manner that would really increase the interaction between the brand and the customer or the client, and I certainly don’t have all the answers for this, you know, but I think it’s really worth having the discussion and getting input from the attendees regarding the need, the practical aspects of implementation and how the success of this kind of tagging can be measured. I’m also going to be on the future digital asset management which is earlier in that day and that’s always fun because it’s always really fun to hear about what other people are thinking about where digital asset management is going and what the issues people are grappling with and how do we get there.
Henrik: What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Rebecca: One of the first things that I encountered when I became a full-on content strategist with the amount of education that I had to do with clients about what content strategy is, what digital asset management is and the approach to managing content. I think everyone should always be prepared to educate others on why this is, what they do, why this is important and how it can really help the, you know, the organization. Every new client I have, it’s always an education and you know, on both sides, you know, I’m learning about them. They’re learning about me and my company and what we can do for them. But you always have be prepared to talk to people about why it’s important, what you’re doing because digital asset management is not a well… outside the particular field, it’s not particularly well understood to a certain extent, so it’s always important to have that put on your teacher hat role and then one of the other things I would also recommend is that when you work with clients or work with people in your organization that you have to lead them on this journey, but you also have to partner with them on this journey. It’s not like you say, okay, well this is how it needs to be done. You work with people, and incorporate them along the journey as you go figure out what your content management process these are, you know, how you’re going to focus on managing assets and those sorts of things. So they’re part of the journey with you. And then my third recommendation would be to say that metrics is your friend. You must be able to measure how your content is performing, good or bad, you know, success or failure in order to help make strategic decisions regarding the direction of the content. You know, maybe having to do it successful…well, that’s great, let’s do more of this, or you may need to do some course correction. It’s super important to have those KPIs and metrics defined and baselined so you can understand how your content is performing.
Henrik: Great. Thanks, Rebecca
Rebecca: Thank you
Henrik: For more on this, go to anotherdampodcast.com for over 200 interviews like this. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.
The DAM Summit was created for Digital Asset Management professionals on topics requested by DAM professionals and created by the Insight Exchange Network. #IENDAM
Listen to Alex Hauschild talk about Digital Asset Management
Transcript:
Henrik: This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Alex Hauschild. Alex, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Alex: I started out at UCSB Davidson Library working for Salvador Güereña. And he brought me on to do brochures and graphic arts and stuff for him and we hit it off up pretty good and during that time found out that a lot of my imaging experience from previous was what’s going to help him develop what was called a digital library at the time. And we did a couple of pilot projects and went from there and he encouraged me to get the… he tricked me into getting a library and information sciences degree and went from there. I ended up with the UCSB Art Museum doing architecture and design collections.
Worked with California digital library, developing some of their policy and content governance for the California Digital Library and Califas, which is basically a large multicultural archive online. And went from there. Around 2008, ended up going to…moved to Los Angeles, did a little trying to start my own publishing business for a while. They ended up with Motor Trend hot rod trying to save their archive and that was an amazing experience. And from there, just kept going through the entertainment industry, went to Dreamworks and from there Google.
Henrik: Alex, how does a multinational technology company use Digital Asset Management?
Alex: Well, that’s a crazy question. Basically, they use it in multiple different facets. There’s production pipelines. Might have heard the term creative value chains or creative value pipelines and these are basically the production from concept to final assets. And final assets actually can mean several different things. So they’re using Digital Asset Management all the way along the way and sometimes multiple case in multiple ways. They use it in project management and then they use it for distribution. I mean, the short answer is distribution in all cases. That’s what Digital Asset Management is all about. But depending on your user base, it depends on what that distribution is.
Henrik: Alex, What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Alex: That is a question that has two different parts. What are the challenges and successes for me and what are the challenges and successes in the field. For the field, I think what we’re seeing is more of a transition or more of a user-friendly attitude towards content management basically blends brand awareness and brand control with Digital Asset Management. We kind of transitioned into that from content management systems and just being…. seeing the potential for being able to distribute out to multiple users and multiple ways. Especially with… for the web or specifically for the web. For myself, it’s been a long road, so I’ve gone from creating digital library… Digital Asset Management systems before we had a term for them. I used to think of them as digital libraries and then kind of evolving with the industry as it transitioned into, I think basically going into distribution and then getting mixed with legal and I think maybe the challenges and obstacles we faced are now that we’re able to provide organized sets of assets on a massive scale, how can we protect the legal at that point and what kind of interaction with legal and licensing do we want to take? Or we the gatekeepers, are we the organizers? That’s really the fundamentals of the industry right now I think is can we transition as librarians, gatekeepers into a communicative role where we basically are helping users determine whether or not just where something is, but whether or not they can use it, so user control is a big deal now.
Henrik: Alex, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Alex: I mean, depending on which aspect of the industry they want to go in, there’s a big difference between academic and tech…technology fields where I’m at. I would get to know the marketing production, the process of it from content creation, which is at the producer level, at the project manager level and get to know how that works and how those assets are transferred from concept to creatives to postproduction. There’s so many tie-ins from asset producers who are creating images and handing them off multiple ways. Those handoffs become the critical mass for any assets, like who’s getting it, when they’re getting it and those are the timelines that you were working with. I think that those are really the things I would pay attention to if I was starting out. Now it’s can I get more involved in marketing and can I understand the marketing world because they’re the ones really creating these asset banks, really just get to know marketing agencies and how agencies work. It really becomes more of a people process when you understand why and when things are being made.
Listen to Anne Graham discusses Digital Asset Management
Transcript:
Henrik: This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Anne Graham. Anne, how are you?
Anne: Great, how are you?
Henrik: Great. Anne, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Anne: So I actually work for Turner Sports. I came from an archival background. I worked for a public university in Georgia and I was a digital archivist there for eight years before moving to Turner Sports. So I’ve worked in academic institutions and I’ve also worked in corporate archives before. So here at Turner, I am managing digital assets, specifically our media assets, so this would be audio and video recording of sporting events.
Anne: So I manage the media in two different ways. I manage the digital media feeds that come in remotely from the trucks. At remote sport events, we actually have trucks and they bring in the actual video recordings that are going on and those get sent to our site from the remote site. And I also manage a physical tape assets which are kind of legacy assets that we have on site and kind of what that entails is I develop and enforce retention periods. I create and maintain data models and metadata schemes with our stakeholders and users. I develop a controlled vocabulary and a document the relationships between those terms with a variety of stakeholders and partners. So basically, we’re working on creating an ontology as well as just control vocabulary. And we do a lot of reaching out to stakeholders just to survey content to make sure that it’s being managed properly. So it might not be something that’s coming into our MAM or our media asset management system. It might be something that’s being managed in C2. So C2 just means that people are managing their media in place. So it would be the actual content creators are managing it in their area instead of moving it to our centralized MAM system. But I just want to make sure that we provide recommendations for them as to how to preserve it and how to organize and describe it.
Anne: And then, I also control the movement of content between users and partners. So we get a lot of content from our media partners like NBA, PGA, NCAA, MLB. So we’re basically transferring that content into and out of our MAM system. And then on top of all of that, we take care of reference requests for our users.
Henrik: Anne, how does a sports broadcaster use Digital Asset Management?
Anne: Something that’s a little bit different about the sports library at Turner is that we started out as a tape library and we have moved obviously to managing digital media so there’s still some remnants of our old workflows that were in the process of updating, but basically feeds come in from satellite or fiber from the sports venues and those are fed through the trucks which we discussed. And sometimes those also have digital or social media content and engineers in the trucks as well.
Anne: So sports broadcasting, we manage access to the content that follows the contractual obligations with content owners, both long-term and short-term access and preservation to those. Meaning that each of these properties are major properties are actually partnerships. We have partnerships with NBA, MLB, PGA, and NCAA. That content doesn’t belong to us, it belongs to them. We fulfill the contractual obligations with those partners concerning access and preservation. We also manage access to content produced by Turner that can be current production or legacy. For instance, the current productions we’re doing or Eleague, which is our eSports property, but we also have legacy media, like Goodwill Games that went on from 1986 to 2002. Then we also transport media to and from remote sites, so that would be the media that’s coming from the trucks, but we also send media out to the trucks to be used on site.
Anne: We add metadata and aid search and retrieval and we document the provenance and we are trying to automate our workflows as much as possible. We match game logs, so games are actually logged when they’re going on for actions and players. We’ve matched us with the content. Our content, basically are airchecks, melts, and clips. So an air check would be an off-air broadcast. It’s what you would actually see on television if you were watching a game. Melts are highlight reels basically, so you would see the most important actions from a game, but you’d see them from multiple angles and we call that clean footage because it doesn’t have any bugs in it, any graphics. Bugs are what the network identification is on the actual feed. And then clips. So we preserve and provide access to those [clips]. We also manage our content standards with partners so we actually have content standards that we follow and we need to make sure that content we receive from partners follows the standards. And then we collect media and distributed to users so that can be inside our MAM for users inside and external users, especially we get requests from talent who want copies of their appearances. So that’s basically it.
Henrik: Anne, what are the biggest challenges and successes with Digital Asset Management?
Anne: So what I like to talk about our challenges and opportunities instead of successes because I kind of see opportunities as potential successes and I think it gives you a little bit more of a win for it. So I think some of the biggest challenges with Digital Asset Management right now, and I think this is universal, is funding. We’re always looking for funding for positions, for digitizing legacy media and just for Dev[elopment] work for new systems that you’re bringing online. I’d also say a problem that we have here is just overcoming silos to find stakeholders and allies who might be across properties and also identifying content, I would say across the silos. We have staffing limitations, there’s a lot of complexity since we have rights managed by so many different contracts.
Anne: So trying to simplify that is always a challenge. And I’d say, again, this is probably something that everyone deals with is just the scale of content. We keep getting more and more content. It’s a higher and higher quality and I think everyone needs to understand that you can’t keep everything so you have to keep the stuff that’s really important where you can’t find it. And I would say another challenge we have is just getting everyone else to kind of see the big picture for content management that it’s actually, it’s an overarching picture and it needs to be administered in a standard consistent and predictable way. It shouldn’t be ad hoc decisions that people are making. And so for opportunities, I would say what we’re doing now is trying to accurately model our data so it describes it the way that our users actually search for it and use it themselves.
Anne: And we want to extend that model. We’ve started with our highlights production and we want to extend it to other users like creative services. They actually look for different things. So their data model is slightly different. Whereas a highlights looks for the actual actions are players during a game. What a creative services is looking for is actually a fan reactions, colors, believe it or not, emotion. So just trying to get a handle on how they actually use that same data. And we wanted to extend our models to include that manage vocabulary thesaurus, and eventually in the ontologies so that we can really start to identify the relationships between those different terms. What we aspire to, I think is to have our users not only discover the content that they knew they wanted, but to find the stuff that they didn’t know they wanted. That’s my goal.
Anne: So we have a metadata schema and our model. We also want to have that accepted across sports properties. I’d like to have kind of one standard that we all use. And basically the biggest thing is documenting our policies and procedures. That’s a huge hurdle, but it makes things so much easier for administration.
Henrik: Anne, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Anne: So I’ve heard lots of your guests recommending networking and I think that’s hugely important, but my advice is going to be to study across disciplines because if you’re managing content, you’re basically the advocate for that content. And in order to do that well, you need to be able to translate your needs between multiple areas. You need to be able to translate business needs to your IT support and you need to be able to to promote production needs to business and technology.
Anne: Everybody needs to understand what is best for the content and how to get there. So the areas that I would suggest studying would be archival science because that’s my background and it really helps you in terms of just thinking about collections instead of individual items about original order. So how things were organically created, the provenance, where things came from, and how to really describe things in terms of how your users look for things. And the most important skill I think you get from that is appraisal, which is deciding what you keep and what you don’t keep. I’d also suggest studying digital preservation. I think everyone should be familiar with the OAIS model and they should know the trustworthy repository audit and certification, which is now ISO standard 16363, the trusted digital repository checklist. It helps you to ensure that your users have confidence that the content is what you say it is, and I would also suggest doing some reading and records management.
Anne: It’s related to archival science, but it’s really about how to organize and manage your records as you’re creating them. So it will help you with lifecycle management. It’ll help you with creating retention periods and it really helps you to gather customer requirements by interviewing and observation and just doing research. I would also suggest studying technology so IT or I studied information systems [IS]. It’s been tremendously helpful in just understanding the lifecycle management not only of your assets, but if your systems. You’re never going to put one system in place and it’s going to be there forever. Those things change over probably a five to seven year development cycle, so as soon as you get your new system in place, you’re already looking for the next one. And studying IS really helped me with understanding software development cycle, how to actually write project requirements, basic project management and really thinking about getting your content out of the system from the very beginning of the project. It shouldn’t be something that you think about later. You need to think about that immediately and the last thing that I would suggest is studying business because my IS program was actually within the college of business and it was just invaluable for teaching me how to put together a funding proposal, how to make a business case for something, how to do presentations, which sounds very basic, but we think we’ve all seen some truly terrible presentations and if you can get your point across in a very efficient manner, people really appreciate it and it also really helps with just how to negotiate, so whether it’s negotiating with your users or your tech support professionals or even vendors. I think that’s just a hugely important skill.
Henrik: Great. Well, thanks Anne.
Anne: Thank you.
Henrik: For more on this, visit anotherdampodcast.com for over 200 episodes including transcripts. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.
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