Henrik de Gyor: [0:00] This is Another DAM Podcast, about Digital Asset
Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today we’re talking about Kickstarter, launching the first Kickstarter project related to Digital Asset Management, transcribing Another DAM Podcast.
[0:14] In mid-April of 2013, I launched the first Kickstarter project related to Digital Asset Management. This was to fund the transcription of Another DAM Podcast. Over 120 episodes of this podcast have been recorded, including 80 interviews with different professionals from various organizations. The goal is to transcribe these podcast episodes from audio into searchable text.
[0:37] How do we do this? Using Kickstarter, a crowdfunding website for creative projects, individuals can back projects they believe in. In this case, the project involves transcribing audio podcasts into text. No, we’re not going to ask you to transcribe the audio for us. A transcription service will do all the transcribing of these podcasts for us, and they charge for every minute of audio. There are over 11 hours of audio to transcribe. The bulk of the funding raised through Kickstarter will pay for this transcription work. The rest of it will pay for the rewards that backers get for pledging towards this project.
[1:14] The rewards vary based on the amount of funding they pledge everything from an eBook, exclusive to Kickstarter, of all the transcriptions compiled together, which will only be available for backers of this project. At a higher level of funding, people can speak to me, as a DAM consultant, regarding Digital Asset Management related topics. At the highest level of funding, there’s a combination of either of these, including a limited-edition, printed version of Another DAM Podcast transcribed.
The funding goal for this project is $3,000. At the time of this recording, we
have 53 percent of that funding, from 35 backers, with seven days left to go.
Under the rules of Kickstarter, which is an all-or-nothing crowd funding model, if we don’t obtain that goal, none of the backers get charged anything and the project does not happen at all. The deadline for this project is May 17, 2013, at 6: 26 PM Eastern time. That is when all the funding needs to be in or the project doesn’t go forward.
[2:17] In order to track the progress of this project, either now or in the future, you can go to kickstarter.com, and in their search bar on that website, type in Another DAM Podcast and you will find what’s going on with that Kickstarter project, now through August 2013, when all the rewards are scheduled to be delivered, if this project is fully funded.
[2:44] I encourage you to take a look at the project, support it if you can, and
help spread the word throughout your network, your colleagues, and other professionals you know of who may be interested in this project.
[2:55] Why should you transcribe Another DAM Podcast from audio to searchable text? To make this resource easier to reference. Audio is inherently not easily referenced, nor indexed, nor searchable. Transcribing them would make this possible.
[3:13] People from over 64 countries listen to Another DAM Podcast to learn
more about Digital Asset Management and how DAM is used within various
organizations. Professionals working in the field of DAM listen to these podcasts and enrich their knowledge from the variety of perspectives. College students are assigned to listen to these podcasts as it relates to their coursework, in library science, information management and archival studies.
[3:39] The final transcriptions will be made available, per podcast, online, on Another DAM Podcast. If you make this project a reality, everyone will benefit from it because it will be fully searchable online.
[3:58] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, log on to AnotherDAMblog.com.
What are the biggest challenges and successes 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: [0:01] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I am Henrik de Gyor. Today I am speaking with Steven Miller. Steven, how are you? Steven Miller: [0:09] I am fine. Henrik: [0:10] Steven, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management? Steven: [0:13] I have worked with digital assets for cultural heritage organizations, such as libraries, museums, archives and historical societies, that type of thing. I used to work in a university library, and when I did that, I served as a metadata consultant for them. [0:28] I assisted with metadata design for digital collections, mostly digitized items such as images and text from our archival collections. I also co-chaired a metadata working group for a Wisconsin statewide cultural heritage digital asset repository. [0:45] What I do now is, I teach full-time at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, School of Information Studies. As part of that, I teach a graduate course on metadata and also an online continuing education workshop on metadata for digital collections, for people working in the field. Henrik: [0:59] You wrote a how-to manual about metadata. Tell us more about this. Steven: [1:04] I have been teaching my graduate-level metadata course for many years at the school, and I really never found an adequate textbook that really addressed the hands-on how-to-do-it aspects of designing a metadata scheme and creating metadata for digital assets or objects. [1:22] As I worked through the course, I ended up creating my own material that was more or less equivalent to my own textbook, but I had it in various Word documents, examples, illustrations and exercises. What prompted me to write the book was that I received a lot of positive feedback from working professionals in the field who took my online metadata workshop. They said how helpful it was to them in practice. [1:49] That led me to approach a publisher about actually publishing my own book. They liked my proposal and agreed that it would be a good thing. “Metadata For Digital Collections A How-To-Do-It Manual” fills a gap in addressing that hands-on how-to-do-it aspect. It includes principles and various other topics about metadata, but also that hands-on aspect. It is oriented towards cultural heritage digital assets. Henrik: [2:18] What are the biggest challenges and successes with Digital Asset Management? Steven: [2:22] I think there are a lot of challenges. The ones, of course, I am most familiar with relate to metadata and control vocabularies. I think that they are extremely critical to provide intellectual access to any organization’s digital assets. It is a challenge to design a good metadata scheme from the beginning that is going to serve their user needs for whatever organization it is. [2:44] Good metadata is essential to helping people find what they need or what they want to do their jobs and to discover resources they might not otherwise have thought about. After designing a good scheme or element set and specifications for that, the other challenge is to create good quality metadata to produce that scheme, that Digital Asset Management System. [3:07] I think it is a challenge for a lot of people who do metadata to really understand how important it is or how critical it is for findability and usability of digital assets for an organization. That is a challenge to get people to understand that. Another challenge is, I think that the design of a metadata scheme, and when I say a metadata scheme I mean the selection of the elements, the specifications. [3:33] Is an element required or optional? Various database specifications, and so forth. The design of the scheme and the design of the backend database and the front end user interface should all go hand in hand with each other. I think they are really all interdependent and the same people should be involved in doing that. [3:53] I really think it helps to develop a set of functional requirements from the beginning and have several key people in the organization involved in that. People who know what kinds of digital assets the organization has and how they need to be used. Henrik: [4:10] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals? Steven: [4:15] I think it is good to learn what you can about metadata or digital assets and digital collections, whether through books or articles and so forth. It is a very helpful thing to understand database design and data modeling, since a Digital Asset Management System is a database. [4:32] It is good to understand what metadata is. It is really just another form of data in a database, but it is about the digital assets. It describes them and provides access points for finding them. It helps people to gather various assets based on common characteristics. Metadata can also help manage and preserve digital assets over time. [4:53] I think it is really important to understand how critical control vocabularies are for giving people consistent retrieval of digital assets. I think even in creating a simple database, like Microsoft Access or even a flat spreadsheet in Excel, using sorting and filtering functions can help illustrate how the values you put into each cell are going to affect whether people can retrieve data consistently. Henrik: [5:20] Great. Thanks, Steven. Steven: [5:22] Sure. Henrik: [5:23] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, log on to AnotherDAMblog.com. Another DAM Podcast is available on iTunes and AudioBoom. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.
How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
How does a publisher of children’s magazines, stories and activity books use Digital Asset Management?
What advice would you like to share with DAM Professionals and people aspiring to become DAM Professionals?
Transcript:
Henrik de Gyor: [0:01] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset
Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with George Brown.
George, how are you? George Brown: [0:09] Great. Thanks for having me. Henrik: [0:11] No problem. George, how are you involved with Digital Asset
Management? George: [0:15] Henrik, I’m a member of our publishing technologies team with
the editorial product development group for Highlights for Children. That team
includes our premedia production, our archiving, our rights management, and
our asset management. We’re currently in the middle of two implementations at
one time. [0:36] We’re doing a new DAM, an upgrade, as well as implementing
an editorial publishing system to help track our workflow as we’re building these
magazines, books, and various other digital products. So in my normal day job,
I manage our assets services team. There’s four of us. There’s a rights management
administrator, our archivist, and a content management specialist. So our
archivist is working with the premedia team in advance of a product to set up
folder structures and file naming conventions.
[1:15] Then that way the files are put into the right setup so that, when it is time
to archive them, we have them ready to go in the right condition that we need
them for archive and reuse. Our rights management administrator is tracking
all of the rights for content that we’re acquiring as well as content that we are
licensing out to various partners. Anytime we reuse content, she helps us check
those rights.
[1:43] Our content management specialist is really working within the DAM, and
right now a couple of other databases, to help our internal users here in the
editorial group as well as our business team in our Columbus, Ohio offices, and
then our various international and domestic licensing partners. Anytime there’s a
request to reuse content, it comes through our group, and our content management
specialist pulls those assets together for that request.
[2:17] Now we archive everything in a nice orderly fashion, but reuse is not
always nice and orderly. They may need a couple of pages from this book, a
couple of pages from this magazine, and maybe a few puzzles from some other
place. So our content management specialist is working with these people
within the DAM pulling those assets out and actually putting them together for
new use purposes. So he does a variety of packaging and repackaging to give
the right assets in the right format to what we call our customers, whether internal
or external.
[2:54] Now, the other part of my job right now is on the DAM implementation.
I’ve been working with our vendor to look at our assets and the metadata we
have, and figure out how we’re getting the assets ingested, and then the metadata
from another system attached to the appropriate assets. We’ve really
been fortunate with our DAM implementation in that our Director of Publishing
Technologies, who is my boss, has a wide experience in the DAM space.
[3:25] He’s done a number of DAM implementations through a few different
organizations. So he’s able to bring to our organization this deep understanding
of what it means to go through a DAM implementation starting with the requirements
gathering, then onto the vendor selection, the contract negotiation and
now, here we are in the heart of the implementation phase.
[3:52] Having Joe, who understands all of these pieces, is really helping us as an
organization hit the ground running with our DAM implementation. Henrik: [4:01] How does a publisher of children’s magazine stories and activity
books use Digital Asset Management? George: [4:07] It’s interesting. We’re a 65 year old company, and a lot of us remember
us as a magazine company. “Oh, I remember ‘Highlights’ from when I
was a kid.” We’ve always collected and looked at the importance of asset management
before they were digital assets. It used to be up in our attic, and now
we’ve sent these off to various storage places. [4:33] But we’ve always collected
our backup, our archival materials, photos, and our art. As time progresses, we
went from film to digital in the late ‘90s. We’ve expanded our business to be
more than a magazine with books, activities, partners that are doing different licensing,
and international partners. We’ve had more and more need to get back
into that archive to find our content and reuse it.
[5:05] First off, our Digital Asset Management is for accessing the archive and
gaining those assets that we need for reuse. Also, for research purposes, our
editorial group is very thoughtful about the content they make, and they’re
often looking back at what we’ve done in the past to help them think about
what they might like to make going forward. We also use our asset management
in the current production process, for storing our unpublished assets and being
able to search and find those assets quickly.
[5:45] We’ve been doing this with a FileMaker database and a lightweight DAM.
It’s kind of like you have to go to our FileMaker database to find the metadata,
the record information. Then match that up with a picture of it, from the lightweight
DAM. Our new DAM implementation, with the EnterMedia software, is
going to bring those two pieces together. So it should be one environment for
our users to be able to search and find what they’re looking for. Henrik: [6:19] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and
people aspiring to become DAM professionals? George: [6:24] It’s fascinating, Henrik. I love the DAM field. I fell into it accidentally.
People I’ve met at various trade shows seem to have come about it the
same way. I was working on a project to create a summer magazine of activities,
stories and puzzles about some fun summer activities for kids. My colleague
and I, as we were working on this, were flipping through printed back issues
of the magazine. [6:55] And started thinking about, “Isn’t there a better way to
find this stuff? Imagine if we could just do like Google and search terms related
to summer to find this content?” That was really what got me started into the
DAM space. The more I get into it the more excited I get about how DAM can
be such a central piece to the publishing process and the content creation. If we
can help our end users, who are varied.
[7:28] They can be in the editorial group, the marketing group, our licensing
partners, or a whole variety of different customers. If we can help them find
our content, they can think of more and better ways to build products that are
meaningful to children, which helps fulfill our mission. As well as helps us continue
to grow as a media brand. Henrik: [7:55] It’s a very exciting field, indeed. Thank you so much, George. George: [7:58] Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity. Henrik: [8:02] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, log
onto AnotherDAMblog.com. Another DAM Podcast is available on Audioboom,
iTunes and the Tech Podcast Network. If you have any comments or questions,
please feel free to email me at AnotherDAMblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.
How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
In May 2012, the ISO released a new standard regarding a Digital Object Identifier system. Can you tell us more about this new standard you helped develop?
Now, DAM systems (among many other Enterprise Content Management solutions) often use various kinds of Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) or Unique Identifiers (UID). How is this standard applicable across organizations and vendors currently using DOI or UID for a variety digital media?
What advice would you like to share with DAM Professionals and people aspiring to become DAM Professionals?
Transcript:
Henrik de Gyor: [0:02] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset
Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Norman Paskin.
Norman, how are you? Norman Paskin: [0:10] I am fine. Thank you, Henrik. Thank you for the invitation. Henrik: [0:13] Norman, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management? Norman: [0:15] I guess my principal involvement is, I manage something called
the DOI system DOI is “digital object identifier” run through an organization
specifically setup to do that, the International DOI Foundation, which I was
involved in founding and I’m currently managing. [0:33] The reason for that is,
if you’re managing digital assets, the first thing you need to do is to be able to
refer to each asset unambiguously and precisely using a short string. Give it an
identifier. That’s what the system was conceived to do back in 1998. It came
out of the publishing industry, but it was deliberately developed with wide
applicability.
[0:56] If I drill down a little bit into that involvement, I think there are three sorts
of involvement I have with DAM. The first is using identifiers on digital networks,
what we call resolution. The DOI system actually uses the Handle System. That’s
Handle.net from CNRI , which is the Corporation for National Research Initiatives.
I do work with them, just to be clear, on a consultancy basis.
[1:25] The Handle System was developed by Bob Kahn, who was one of the
co-inventors of TCP/IP to be highly scalable, efficient, extensible, secure and so
forth. It’s ideal for persistent identifiers and managing unique identifiers. That’s
the first area of involvement.
[1:45] The second involvement with DAM is associating descriptions with those
identifiers. For us at management, obviously it’s not sufficient to have an identifier,
you’ve also got to say what that identifier refers to precisely and unambiguously,
particularly if someone else is going to be using it. That takes us into the
world of metadata, particularly for intellectual property assets or what people
call content.
[2:15] I’ve been involved with a number of initiatives dealing with metadata for
enabling persistence and interoperability for well over 15 years. The first was
the INDECS project, 1998. That set the scene for a number of later initiatives.
The most recent of those just starting is something called the Linked Content
Coalition, run by the European Publishers Council.
[2:44] What these all have in common is recognizing that in the digital world,
convergence means you can be dealing with many different types of things, different
content from many different communities with different sets of standards.
They may not have previously had to work with each other, but they now need a
common framework. Norman: [3:03] Also, what’s come out of that, I think, is recognizing that assets
as intellectual property are much more than digital objects. For example,
Beethoven’s “Fifth Symphony” is more than an MP3 file. It’s an underlying abstraction,
a creation with all sorts of rights that may be different from the specific
digital manifestation. People have investments in all sorts of different data
schemes, so the aim has to be to enable people to reuse what they have. That’s
part of the effort that we’ve been involved in.
[3:35] One of the things that’s come out of that is something called the
Vocabulary Mapping Framework, VMF. A fundamental basis of things like that is
a structured ontology approach, the same principle as behind the semantic web
and link data. What we’re offering with DOI is a tool to give you a set of data
which is both curated and managed to be reliable.
[4:00] Just to wrap, the third way I’m involved is in social infrastructures and
governance. The DOI Foundation operates as a federation of independent
agencies. We have a governance model and a set of policies and procedures. It
works very well. We’re very pleased with progress, although sometimes it seems
like herding cats. We have agencies from a number of sectors US, Europe,
China, Japan so very different views coming forward.
[4:27] Also in the social infrastructure area, I’ve been involved in a number of
standards activities. Most recently, ISO 26324, which is an effort to take the DOI
system and put it into an ISO framework.
[4:40] Technical involvement in identifiers, metadata, and governance that’s my
involvement. Henrik: [4:46] In May, 2012, the ISO, or International Standards Organization,
released a new standard regarding a digital object identifier system. Can you
tell us more about this new standard you helped develop? Norman: [4:58] Yes. I was the convener of the working group that did that, but
the DOI system, which has now been standardized, actually preceded the ISO
working process itself. In fact, the ISO standard 26324 is codifying what already
existed. [5:16] In the early days of the DOI system, 1998, we worked with ISBN,
the International Standard Book Number people. Through them, we came to
the attention of the ISO group involved in that whole topic of bibliographic
identifiers. They invited us to consider taking the DOI system and putting it
into an ISO standard to gain the advantages of international recognition and a
degree of autonomy and independence.
[5:43] The system that’s now being standardized is, in effect, the DOI system
as it was. The DOI system really took off in 2000. ISO got involved in 2004, a
number of years later. It finally passed as a standard in 2010, quite a number
of years after that. It’s actually only been published now, in May, 2012. The
reason for that delay is purely an ISO thing. They wanted to review all of their
generic registration authority contracts. We got rather caught up in that whole
framework.
[6:18] Seven and a half years from door to door, but in effect what IS O has done
is taken the DOI system and put it into the ISO framework. There’s been a lot of
advantages to that, by the way, from our point of view. In the working group, we
had a number of suggestions for how to improve the wording, for how to consider
in particular interoperability with other standards, make sure that was fully
recognized in the wording, and avoid some initial misunderstandings, I think,
that were about. Norman: [6:47] Which was that in some way, DOI was trying to replace existing
systems. In fact, that’s far from the case. Actually, we’ve encouraged the creation
of new registries and new sorts of identifier standards. We’ve also been
involved in new IS O standards like IS TC, which is a standard for textual abstractions,
and ISNI , the international standards and name identifier.
[7:11] It’s been quite a long story, but I think our involvement with IS O has all
been good. What it means for the community is, I don’t think the ISO standardization
makes a big deal of difference to people already using DOI . By the time
the standard was published, we’d already assigned 60 million DOI s. Clearly,
people weren’t waiting for the standard to come along to use it. But that was
actually a help in the standards process, the benefit of practical experience of
implementation of what worked.
[7:41] We were able to say, when we, for example, were talking about the metadata
standard that we wanted to associate, “In our experience this is what’s
practical. This may be a better design over here, but we have to deal with reality
at the moment.” That’s been quite a helpful process.
[8:00] ISO standardization is just one of a number of events that’s taken place
with DOI since we started in 2000. We’re quite pleased that we’re still around
after all this time and we haven’t had to make any U-turns. We seem to be getting
a lot of recognition. The publication of the standards actually generated
quite a bit of interest from people who may not have been aware of it before.
For example, this interview is a sign of that. Henrik: [8:25] Digital Asset Management systems, among other enterprise content
management solutions, often use various kinds of digital object identifiers,
or DOI s, or unique identifiers, UIDs. How is this standard applicable across organizations
and vendors currently using DOI or UIDs for a variety of digital media? Norman: [8:47] It’s a good question. I think I need to tease apart a couple of
the terms there. When people talk about digital object identifiers and imagine it
all in lower case, they’re using it generically. When they talk about it with capitalized
DOI , they’re specifically referring to the DOI system, which has got its
own set of rules, policies, and principles. DOI is a trademark, simply because we
wanted to preserve the consistency of the system for that reason. [9:15] If you
want to work with others to manage or you want to pass onto other parties in a
supply chain or you want to simply make available to third parties that you may
not yet know about, you want to simply make them discoverable, then you’ve
probably got to find a way of interoperating and ensuring persistence of your
identifiers.
[9:37] That’s where we come in. We offer a framework which is effectively out of
the box. It’s a shared infrastructure, both technical and social, with the benefits
of economy of scale. You can keep your own identifier system and your own
metadata, but put it into that framework. You can keep your own autonomy of
the community that you’re looking after, but take advantage of a system that’s
becoming increasingly widely known, standardized with standard tools.
[10:09] A couple of good examples. One of the earliest implementations of
DOI was something called CrossRef it’s all one word, CrossRef.org which uses
DOIs to link scholarly publishing articles. That’s a community of now, I think,
approaching 4,000 different publishers, but they have their own rules. The DOI
system, as they use it, is the same as anyone else would use the DOI system,
just the common rules of the road. Norman: [10:35] Another example is the Entertainment Identifier Registry, EIDR.org. They’re using DOI s in the movie assets, commercial television broadcasting area. Again, they’re using the same system technically, same social infrastructure,
but they also lay on top of that their own social infrastructure for their own
community and their own rules about what they cover.
[11:00] What the DOI system offers, I think, is an ability to not throw away what
you’ve already been using, but to make it more usable with other systems and
to make it persistent. Of course, in detail, we offer some common tools free of
charge, licensed to the Handle System for resolution, tools of the Vocabulary
Mapping Framework, some common technical infrastructure and so forth.
[11:23] But that’s not the most important thing. Anyone can build their own
infrastructure if they want to. I think what we offer really is a community, a very
large community of interest, greater together than people would be working on
their own. Henrik: [11:37] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and
people aspiring to become DAM professionals? Norman: [11:41] I’ve thought about this. I think a number of points, really.
Almost at the top of the list, I would say don’t reinvent the wheel. I don’t just
mean use DOI s. A lot of useful work has already been done. [11:51] When we
designed the DOI system, again, we didn’t reinvent the wheel. We used existing
components. I think what a lot of technical people don’t necessarily realize is
that things like ontologies and classification work in the ‘60s things like library
cataloguing tools, which people may consider to be rather old fashioned actually
solve an awful lot of problems about organization, information, and contextual
ontologies. Things like FRBR, which the libraries came up with some time
ago. That’s one point. Don’t reinvent the wheel.
[12:21] I would say also look beyond your immediate community. Digital convergence
means you can’t afford to think only about your immediate problems if
you’re going to have something that lasts and is extensible. I do realize there
is a tension there, of course. If you’re looking for cost justification, there is a
tendency to look first of all to your own community and secondly to be relatively
short term.
[12:44] A related point is, think for the long term. You’ve got to use a technology,
but don’t forget the possibilities for migration to other technologies. Don’t
forget things like thinking at the right level of abstraction, extensibility, and
scalability.
[12:58] A further point is, we often talk about persistence identifiers as being
around for a while and we often talk about interoperability. I think they’re two
sides of the same coin. Persistence is simply interoperability with the future. Norman: [13:12] I would say also something that I found running the social organizations
that I’ve been involved in for 15 years. It’s very easy to get involved
in arguments about definitions. That’s pointless. Don’t argue about definitions.
It’s futile.
[13:25] What you do need to do is try to be explicit. Clarify what you mean, and
understand what someone else means. They may have a legitimate reason for
thinking differently than you. Common terms, I think, like identifier, like stakeholders,
like community. When people use them, they often have a vested interest
or a shading towards their particular understanding of what that term means.
Try to understand where they’re coming from.
[13:55] The final thing, which is not my motto but was attributed to Einstein.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. Don’t assume
that the obvious solution is always the right one. Henrik: [14:07] Great points. Well, thanks, Norman. Norman: [14:09] Pleasure. Henrik: [14:11] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, log
on to AnotherDAMblog.com. Another DAM Podcast is available on Audioboom,
iTunes and the Tech Podcast Network. If you have any comments or questions,
please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.
Another DAM Podcast 