Another DAM Podcast

Audio about Digital Asset Management

Category Archives: Publishing


by

Another DAM Podcast interview with Matt Shanley on Digital Asset Management

Matt Shanley discusses Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • Why does a museum use Digital Asset Management?
  • What were the drivers for getting a DAM?
  • What advice would you like to give to 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’m speaking with Matt Shanley. Matt,
how are you?
Matt Shanley: [0:09] Very well, and yourself?
Henrik: [0:10] Good. Matt, how are you involved with Digital Asset
Management?
Matt: [0:14] I am the Digital Asset Manager for the Photography Department of
the American Museum of Natural History. They brought me on in 2006 to develop
a photography workflow that would stand savvy. [0:30] Basically, what they
were doing at the time is just taking everything they shot, burning it to a CD or
DVD, and putting it into a binder, and keeping an Excel spreadsheet of what
CDs were where. As you might imagine, that quickly became unmanageable.
[0:44] So when they hired me in 2006, it was a priority for them to have me redesign
their workflow and then research what hardware and software we would
need to get a Digital Asset Management system that was going to be usable
and scalable to the amount of assets that we would eventually accumulate.
[1:06] We decided to go with an Apple Xserve with a 10.5 TB X RAID, and we
decided to use Extensis Portfolio as our DAM. That has a MySQL back end with
a portfolio governing the front end.
[1:25] We started cataloging from 2006 on and then I redesigned the workflow
of the photographers to use Lightroom. It was embedding copyright metadata
on import.
[1:39] We came up with a standardized file naming and folder naming protocols
that were DAM savvy. Basically just formalized the workflow, because the photographers
were pretty much just doing their own thing and there was no real
organization to it. Had to standardize what they were doing in the workflow that
they used.
[2:05] From the time it left the camera and went onto the computer, data preservation
protocols were put in place so that things would get backed up onto
the server, so that if their local hard drive ever crashed, they would at least have
unretouched backups of everything, etc., etc.
[2:23] Then, I have to, when they finish a job, they move it to an area on the
server that I know that they’re done with that job. Then I move it over into the
portfolio sys, catalog it in portfolio. That’s how we do it.
Henrik: [2:43] Why does a museum use Digital Asset Management?
Matt: [2:45] I would say that while we are a museum photography department
we are actually a division of the communications department. We do all of the
press photography, anything that goes out to the press, advertising, marketing,
all of that stuff. We document all of the educational events that happen here.
We documents all of the development events that happen here. [3:12] What
we don’t do is we don’t, for the most part, photograph the collections for the
purposes of cataloging the specimens and artifacts that we have. That’s up to
the scientific department themselves. What museums would probably use it for
would be actually like a collections resource, management. But that is not what
this department does.
Henrik: [3:35] What were the drivers for getting a DAM?
Matt: [3:39] The bottleneck that was happening where it was just taking too
long for photo requests to be fulfilled. Once we got up over a couple hundred
thousand images, that system of burning stuff to CD and DVD became unwieldy.
It was just taking too long. Anything that wasn’t done recently it would
take someone doing much research and going through DVDs and the Excel
spreadsheet. [4:13] There was no controlled vocabulary as far as search and
keywords and stuff like that. It was just a mess. It made it very, very hard to
find things. We needed a centralized storage system that was well organized.
Keywords needed to be standardized with a controlled vocabulary. Once we did
that, it turned image requests from taking days to minutes. It was a huge efficiency
boost for us.
Henrik: [4:45] I bet. Are any of these requests you get paid requests?
Matt: [4:49] Yes. Our business development department and our museum
library both deal with requests coming in mostly from education book publishers.
We do get some of what I would call commercial requests, but it’s mostly in
the educational realm. [5:04] I don’t know how much they’re actually charging for
this stuff, but we’ll get a call. “Do you have a picture of an Apatosaurus thigh or
something like that, a thigh bone?” We’ll look through the collections and see
what we have. We’ve been shooting a mix of digital and film since around 1998.
I think by 2000 or 2002 we were shooting exclusively digital. Considering that
the museum has been here since about 1875 or so, the bulk of our collections
are shot on film.
[5:44] When we went digital the museum library did not have the manpower or
the technical expertise to handle and archive our photos, which is what, back in
the film days, we did. We always turned everything over to the library and they
would put them into the photo archive. When we went digital there was nothing
they could do with the stuff and we did what everybody did, just burn everything
to CD and DVD and store it that way. It was really the only economically
feasible solution at the time.
[6:23] But, like I said, once we got up over a couple hundred thousand assets
it was not working. Sometime in 2007 this new DAM system went online. I’ve
cataloged approximately 328,000 assets. At any given moment there’s about
100,000 assets that I haven’t gotten to yet.
[6:53] That legacy system, we had all of those CDs and DVDs copied onto the
server over a period of time and tried to clean it up as much as we could with
the limited manpower that we have available to be spending time doing that.
That’s somewhere around 210,000 assets in the legacy system.
[7:17] It’s never going to get smaller. We keep everything. So, pushing a million
assets total in no time. We have to make sure that are hardware and software
stay scalable to handling those kind of numbers.
Henrik: [7:33] Wow. Great. What advice would you like to give to DAM professionals
and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Matt: [7:39] I sort of tripped and fell into it. My background is photography.
It was my photography background that got me hired into this photography
department. Photography, digitally driven photography or organization, Digital
Asset Management is a necessity just like having an IT guy to keep your computers
working is a necessity. [8:09] I would say Higher Education is definitely the
way to go. I had to learn it from scratch, kind of on the job, on the fly. There’s
definitely a market for it out there. Anybody who deals with digital content has
to keep it organized because if you can’ find it then it’s like not having it.
[8:38] I think it’s a growing field. As more digital content is created better solutions,
on a larger scale, are going to become available. I think, even if you get
an education in it now, people who work in this field are going to have to get
reeducated in it multiple times over the course of their career. I think the technology
is going to keep changing at a rate that if you want to stay competitive
you’re going to have to keep up with it.
Henrik: [9:06] Never stop learning.
Matt: [9:07] Yeah.
Henrik: [9:08] Good point. Great. Thanks, Matt.
Matt: [9:11] Thank you. I enjoyed talking to you.
Henrik: [9:14] Me too. For more on Digital Asset Management, log onto
anotherdamblog.com. Thanks again.

Related Articles

Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic, Spotify, TuneIn, and wherever you find podcasts.

Need Digital Asset Management advice and assistance?

Another DAM Consultancy can help. Schedule a call today


by

Another DAM Podcast interview with Jim Sippel on Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • Why does a community church group use Digital Asset Management?
  • What advice would you like to give to 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 Jim Sippel.
Jim [0:09] how are you?
Jim Sippel: [0:10] I’m good, how are you?
Henrik: [0:12] Good. Jim, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Jim: [0:16] The way I got involved with Digital Asset Management, I currently
work at Willow Creek Community Church in the Chicago land area. We’re a very
large church, we’re one of the largest churches in the country. My role here is
managing and directing the post production and field production in video. I
don’t do the live production of video or for services, I actually am in the content
creation side. [0:44] When Digital Asset Management came to Willow Creek
about four years ago, it was through our IT department that was trying to resolve
a problem that they were having with a lot of people using, and you may
have talked about this on previous shows, having their own desktop DAMs.
Meaning that everybody was storing content that they were creating on their
own laptops, their own desktops, their own server folders.
[1:11] Our IT department realized that they were having a problem of they were
running out of space, they were having to purchase more server spaces, drives,
and maintenance and all that goes along with that cost.
[1:20] When they did their own internal audit, they realized that video was probably
the biggest culprit in absorbing all that storage and space. They approached
us, saying, “We’re going to purchase a Digital Asset Management system, and
it’s going to solve all your problems.
[1:37] Start putting everything on there and don’t put it on the network at all
because you’re killing us. Every time you transfer a video you slow down the
network, and storage, and so on and so forth.”
[1:48] We’re all like, “OK, what’s a DAM and why do we have to use this?” “Why?
Because we like this.”
[1:54] After the first year and a half of implementation, and I use that term
loosely because it was implemented, but nobody was using it. Out of frustration,
they came to me and said, “Jim, you seem to be a little more knowledgeable
than most on what Digital Asset Management is. Your department is the
one who’s using the most amount of IT services, so guess what. You’re going to
manage this and good luck with that.”
[2:24] With very little training or any kind of orientation, I wound up having to
be the guy to learn how to do Digital Asset Management. We’ve thrown this
around before. I became an accidental DAM manager because I had no previous
experience. It’s been quite a learning curve. [laughs]
[2:43] Getting involved with it is, first and foremost, I had to understand what our
business was at doing video and doing video within a church. Then, as it expanded
out I had to learn what other ministries were doing with media in general,
and how they were using it within the church.
[3:02] Just like any other business, our realization is we’re using a lot of digital
media. That all needs to get managed, especially when you’re trying to locate
things, whether it’s pictures, video images, stock images, music.
[3:20] A lot of people never, really had to think about, “How am I storing this,
and how do I find it, and how do others find it?” This is how I got involved
with it. It’s not that I was looking for it. It’s just kind of like I didn’t sit down
fast enough.
[laughter]
Henrik: [3:38] Why does a community church group use Digital Asset
Management?
Jim: [3:42] Again, just like other businesses, we have a lot of media content.
We produce hundreds of hours of video. We have hundreds, if not thousands,
of hours of live church services across over 50 ministries throughout our organization.
[4:01] Not all ministries have a live service, but they’ll request or create
content that’s either going to go into a teaching class, or they’ll use it on the
Internet or they will use it in the service itself. All of these, as with the rest of
society, we become more and more media savvy, more digital savvy. In creating
that content, it all needs to go someplace, obviously.
[4:29] When you look at the history of the church, they’ve been managing
content for thousands of years. From “Dead Sea Scrolls” to printing Bibles in
a Gutenberg press and trying to distribute that. It’s a natural phase for the
church to go from analog and physical asset management to Digital Asset
Management.
[4:53] Our asset is the message that we have in the church. That’s number one.
Then everything we create around it to support preaching that message naturally
fits. We need to store that and be smart about it and steward our resources
and our money well by being able to retrieve that information. Be able to make
it usable for other people.
[5:15] We may create a great video for a service and then one of our youth
ministries want to use it, but they don’t want to use all of it because they want
to create it for their age group. They may want to change some components
within that video like, maybe, they want to take the music out that we use and
put some better music in from their perspective. That’s an asset that needs to
go into that piece of content. Or they want to use graphics and, maybe, the
graphics for the old people church is not cool enough for their service. They can
create their own graphics and insert that into the core of that content.
[5:47] It’s, really, great to be able to have that ability to be able to go into a
centralized system, find those different assets that you can use to either make
a derivative of the original piece and make it work for your specific ministry or
business group. Then be able to take those assets that you create within your
own group and put that in a centralized location that other people can grab it
and use it for theirs.
[6:15] It also helps through all continuity throughout the different medias, too. If
we’re using something live in the service and then we decide we want to put it
up on the Internet or we want to use it in other distributions through publishing
or whatever, it’s like everybody can go to that one place and grab that specific
asset that’s important to that brand or whatever they’re trying to do. And be
able to incorporate that into the piece so that there’s continuity throughout the
different media that it may be in.
Henrik: [6:43] Jim, what advice would you like to give to DAM professionals and
people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Jim: [6:47] Well, for those that are in the predicament that I was in where it’s
you’re chosen to be the DAM manager, I think one of the things that the learning
that I’ve come away with is understanding it forces you to sit down and think
about what do you do just within your own group. What do you do? Why are
you doing it and what are you trying to do with it? [7:09] For me, it was a very
interesting exercise to go through to think about this is where we start, this is
where we end and here’s everything that’s involved in that process. Now, some
organizations are, probably, more thoughtful than we’ve been, but it really
helped identify a lot of things in terms of what happens to our videos. What are
all the elements that are going into that video? Then, what happens to the video
afterwards, and who needs it? What do they want to do with it?
[7:38] Going through that alone, really, helps to identify, I think, what you need in
a Digital Asset Management system. What are the different components do you
need? Do you need it to do a lot of different transcoding within itself or do you
have to buy an add-on or a bolt-on? Do you need a document management to
go along with that and how does it tie back to your specific digital assets?
[8:08] All these things I never thought about when I was creating video. We
would think about what’s our script, how are we shooting it and it goes into the
tape library until somebody asks for a copy. That’s how I’ve thought about it
most of the time. And obviously, did it succeed in the message?
[8:25] The next thing I learned through all this, is I had to build…Well it was twofold.
I had to be a salesman through this whole thing to get people to buy into
why would they want to take their work and put it into this centralized storage
system or repository? Instead of keeping it on their desktop where they can go
into their my docs and pull it up, or they can go into their thumb drives or external
hard drives and pull up that content or asset, immediately, and be able
to use it.
[8:55] Trying to cast that vision for…Well, you could add more value. The whole
point of an asset is to add value to it. The more you make it accessible to others
for use, the more value it creates. It’s like what Kevin Kelly talked about in one
of his books from “Wired” where the fax machine by itself has no value, but the
more fax machines there are in the world the more value there is. Obviously,
that dates us [laughs] because people, probably, don’t use fax. The same with
an asset if you think about that.
[9:30] With the sales, there also has to be trust. Again, if they’re able to look at a
tape on their shelf or look at a hard drive on their shelf, there’s the feeling like,
“OK . I have control over this and I know where it is.”
[9:43] Where it goes into a central repository it’s like you don’t see it. If people
are going to put it in there, they want to be able to get it back out like they do
with their desktop DAM. Because they can’t see that asset and they’re putting it
in that repository, they got to have that trust that they can find it quickly.
[10:00] Most people will browse. They want to click through however your repository
interface is set up, whether it’s a folder collection or it’s little widgets. But
they can get to it quickly just browsing.
[10:12] Or if you have the metadata, which is like learning about, what is metadata?
What is taxonomy? How do I? But if it’s offered search purposes that they
can put in keywords and be able to find again what they’re looking for quickly,
and have confidence that it’s there. Or they have confidence that whatever their
search, whatever search they create, it’s going to return to them quality assets.
[10:36] Because, again, you can use really broad strokes on metadata and you
can return 100 assets on a search that, really, are not relevant to what you’re
looking for. Or you can design metadata that, or descriptions of that asset, in
a way that’s going to return 10 to 20 high quality assets where it’s right there
on the first page. You don’t have to go through 20 pages to find what you’re
looking for.
[11:00] Just learning how to do that. What’s metadata? What makes quality
metadata? What’s taxonomy? How am I structuring all of this stuff? This is all
stuff I wish I would have known when this was put on me. Fortunately, through
this community and yourself, a lot of people out there that were blazing a trail
before me are very helpful in learning that structure.
[11:23] I think, the third component is learning, networking with others. You
realize, hey, I’m not the only one [laughs] that’s tried to figure this out. There’s
others, and just learning from each other. That’s been a huge help to me is like
being a part of various digital asset conferences, whether it’s LinkedIn groups,
or Another DAM Podcast or Another DAM Blog and other resources that are
out there.
[11:48] It’s great to be able to know you can go to…You meet people, and you
learn where this all is and you don’t have to build this all by yourself. Yeah,
networking is the third and, really, important component, too. There’s a whole
bunch of other things, but those are probably my top three.
[12:05] As far as aspiring, don’t know if I have too much advice [laughs] for aspiring
other than the same thing.
Henrik: [12:10] Great. Well, thanks, Jim.
Jim: [12:12] You’re welcome.
Henrik: [12:14] For more on Digital Asset Management, log onto
AnotherDAMblog.com. Thanks again.

Related Articles

Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic, Spotify, TuneIn, and wherever you find podcasts.

Need Digital Asset Management advice and assistance?

Another DAM Consultancy can help. Schedule a call today


by

Another DAM Podcast interview with Tony Gill on Digital Asset Management

Tony Gill discusses Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • What challenges do you face using Digital Asset Management within a marketing organization?
  • What advice would you like to give to 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 Tony Gill. Tony,
how are you?
Tony Gill: [0:10] I’m good. Thanks Henrik. How are you?
Henrik: [0:12] Good. How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Tony: [0:15] My job title is Global Director of Library Science and Information
Management. I work for an advertising agency that is part of one of the large
global advertising conglomerates. [0:28] We have a single client which is a very
large technology company. My role is theoretic quite general.
[0:35] In practice, I spend the vast bulk of my time running a large multi server
Digital Asset Management System that’s shared between us, our client, and
about a dozen of our sibling agencies within the same conglomerate, all working
on the same account.
[0:53] After defining the initial information architecture for the system such as the
metadata schemer and the control vocabularies, the folder hierarchy that we use
for storing the assets, asset ingest and work flow procedures.
[1:10] I now manage a team, a small team of Digital Asset Librarians who perform
the day-to-day act of managing the flow of assets throughout the system and
throughout their life cycle.
Henrik: [1:20] Great. Tony, what challenges do you face using Digital Asset
Management with a marketing organization?
Tony: [1:26] The challenges are many and varied. One of the biggest challenges
we face is just the sheer volume of assets coming into the system all the time
from a wide variety of different sources both from within our agency groups and
also from the client and from beyond. [1:43] We do have fairly well established
asset ingest procedures that require metadata to be provided with the assets.
But because there are always new users and new communities wanting to
upload assets to the system, it means there’s a constant need to keep training
people and keep bringing them up to speed on the ingest procedures. That’s
fairly challenging.
[2:05] Another factor of my job is that we have a very demanding client and
often times they will make requests to have assets organized for their particular
needs.
[2:18] Often, it’s down to me to say politely but firmly that we can’t do that because
the system has to meet the needs of a very, very broad user community.
We have something like 3,500 users on the system globally, at the moment.
[2:31] We can’t just reorganize areas of it for one group, or one individual’s requirements.
Sometimes I have to be able to politely and tactfully say, “No,” and
explain why we can’t change the structure of the system for individual user’s
needs because of the whole broad range of different user needs.
[2:55] Obviously, rights management is a perennial problem in this field. We have
to make sure we have detailed usage right information for anything where the
usage rights are not just straight forward global unlimited usage rights.
[3:13] Communicating that to people that are uploading assets is also sometimes
challenging because sometimes they haven’t even considered the usage rights.
[3:23] You have to end up doing a little mini tutorial about copyright and usage
rights and explaining why, as the publisher effectively of these assets, if we
publish them and we don’t have the correct usage rights, then we’re effectively
liable for copyright infringement even though we may have had no part in acquiring
these assets in the first place. Of course, that’s also a challenge.
[3:47] Then, the general symptom of working in the advertising industry is that
deadlines are always very short and often missed. People tend to wait until the
last minute and tend to get very anxious when we say that things are published
in a timely fashion.
[4:08] They often leave things to the last thing on a Friday night before they
upload them. We often find ourselves scrambling at the last minute to get the
stuff posted that’s urgently needed by teams all around the world right at the
last minute.
Henrik: [4:21] Sounds like a bunch of challenges there.
Tony: [4:23] Yeah.
Henrik: [4:27] What advice would you like to give DAM professionals or people
aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Tony: [4:33] From my part, if you want to come work on my team, you will need
a Library Science degree. That’s a graduate degree in Library and Information
Science. That’s a really good grounding in the kind of disciplines that are very
good in the Digital Assets Management field. [4:51] It teaches you the importance
of information architecture and information management. It teaches you
to be rigorous and to follow standards. It also teaches you an observance for
finickiness and attention to detail.
[5:05] In the job description that I wrote recently for the Digital Asset Librarians, I
said, “An almost obsessive attention to detail would be a useful attribute in any
of the successful candidates.”
[5:20] I tend to find that there are certain people that are drawn to the librarianship
role, and they also make very good digital managers. Those are the main
things that I can think of just off the top of my head.
Henrik: [5:31] Great. Thank you, Tony.
Tony: [5:33] You’re very welcome, Henrik. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.
Henrik: [5:36] Any time. For more on Digital Asset Management, log on to
anotherdamblog.com. Thanks again.

Related Articles

Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic, Spotify, TuneIn, and wherever you find podcasts.

Need Digital Asset Management advice and assistance?

Another DAM Consultancy can help. Schedule a call today


by

Another DAM Podcast interview with David Austerberry on Digital Asset Management

David Austerberry discusses Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • You wrote a definitive book called Digital Asset Management in 2006. Do you see DAM changing or evolving?
  • What advice would you like to give to DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM Professionals?

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor: This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset
Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with David Austerberry.
David, how are you?
David Austerberry: I ’m fine, thank you.
Henrik: [0:11] David, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
David: [0:13] Well, I guess it started about the turn of the century. At that time,
I was working in the video area. I got involved with a group of people who are
actually setting up a Digital Asset Management system. I got involved with it
very much hands on. [0:29] Back then, Digital Asset Management was fairly new
in the video field. There was a lot of it around photography for image libraries,
but nothing specifically for video.
[0:45] Now, the project we were working on was a service that would encode
and host people’s video and we’d be able to serve it over the Internet. I guess
today that would be called a cloud.
[0:59] I think we got into it far too early, though, because back then, everybody
was using dial-up modems. Although broadband was around, it was hardly
ubiquitous. The idea of delivering video over the Internet, although you could
do it, the reality was that very few people had broadband connections, so they
weren’t really able to use it. I guess we were too early.
[1:30] Out of that project, I learned a lot about Digital Asset Management.
Henrik: [1:33] David, you wrote a definitive book called “Digital Asset
Management” in 2006. Do you see DAM changing or evolving?
David: [1:41] Well, I actually wrote it, originally, in 2004, because it’s had 2 editions.
The first edition was 2004. I guess I did the research in 2003. I think it has
changed a lot over the years. [2:01] The initial products that I looked at when we
were setting up a Digital Asset Management system, on the whole, were not
really products. Let me qualify that a bit.
[2:12] They were projects that one particular customer had, had a requirement
for Digital Asset Management system and a software company had written
a custom system for them. Very few of the products had sold to more than a
handful of customers. They were not really salable products, more a custom
project. Along with that went a very large price tag.
[2:43] I think that was the big barrier to the sale of Digital Asset Management to
a lot of potential customers. The early systems ran on things like Sun hardware
platforms, they used historical enterprise databases, and the entry-level was
somewhere in the region of $1 million for a system. And you probably would
need to spend about $5 million to get a fully working system. And that was
completely out of the reach of most of the customers. Even the large broadcasters
balked at those sort of sums of money.
[3:24] What’s happened since then? Well, some of those companies have gone
out of business. I seem to remember one of the early ones was the Informix
Media 360, which probably pioneered a lot of the ideas around Digital Asset
Management. And that Informix has disappeared now. I think it’s been subsumed
into IBM. Some of the systems were just too complex. And at the end of
the day, they’ve got to sit on everybody’s desktop, be easy to use, and a lot of
those early systems just weren’t.
[4:00] So I think what’s happened since 2004, when the first edition came out, is
that people had got real about what customers really want from a Digital Asset
Management, and what they’re prepared to pay for it. On the point of what
they’re prepared to pay for it, it was always a problem proving an ROI for the
big systems.
[4:24] I think a lot of the customers looked at it from the point of view of this perceived
cost, that they know what it costs to put Microsoft Office on a desktop,
that sort of thing. They know what it costs to put video editing software. And
the early DAM systems cost about $1,000 a seed, and I don’t think most of the
customers felt that was value. Because to a lot of people it was just a fancy version
of a file search, and, well, from Google, you know, you get that for nothing.
[4:56] So until the seed cost came down to something more realistic, it was
very difficult to prove a return on investment for a DAM system. Google represents
just the search side, and there’s obviously more to DAM. There’s all
the indexing and the management of hierarchical storage systems. I think that
what has evolved is that a lot of the customers, what they’re really wanting is
management of the entire workflow, from ingest of a digital asset right through
to its publishing.
[5:35] Although the early Digital Asset Management systems handled the management
of that asset, there’s a lot more to dealing with assets beyond Digital
Asset Management. I think that some of the newest systems now include a lot
more workflow management, and they can also handle external media, like
video tapes, for example.
[5:59] You have a crossover between managing media assets, which, to me,
a physical assets, like a video tape, and digital assets. The thing which really
makes it much easier to prove in ROI for a vendor is to introduce management
of workflow processes, as well. Digital Asset Management has become a component
within the management of the entire workflow.
Henrik: [6:29] David, what advice would you like to give to DAM professionals
and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
David: [6:34] First of all, DAM is a rather vague term, and it means different
things to different people. To a photo library, it’s dealing with IPTC metadata,
and it’s managing maybe a website to sell the digital assets. To somebody, say,
in the broadcast or the media and entertainment space, it’s a lot more complex,
in that they may be wanting to handle the many thousands, or even millions,
of digital assets that go into creating something like a movie. [7:14] There’s that
front end side. Once the salable asset that the movie, the television program, or
the TV commercial is finished, there’s the managing of that finished asset and its
distribution.
[7:29] There’s very many facets to Digital Asset Management. For the DAM professional,
first of all, they’ve got to decide, do they want to be involved in the
entire business, or do they want to focus on particular area, like video production,
movie production, or image library management?
[7:54] I think somebody coming to it afresh will see that there’s a very large
number of different standards bodies involved, and they’re all vying for users
to adopt their tagging systems, their standards. There’s the IPTC, which I mentioned,
which is very strong in the newspaper industry, and has come to be
found to be very useful across the entire photographic profession.
[8:30] But the IPTC is focused, at the moment, on still images. I know they’re
looking at extending it to other areas. But if you look at audiovisual assets, there
are a number of organizations looking at Digital Asset Management and metadata
schemas for audiovisual systems. That can be rather confusing for somebody
coming into it from afresh, because there’s just so many standards.
[9:07] The SMPT is very strong in this area, but then there’s other things, like
MPEG 7. There’s 10 to 20 international standards group that are developing standards
that can be used within Digital Asset Management. This clouds the whole
issue, and removes some of the potential clarity within the area.
Henrik: [9:30] True. They’re adopting what’s needed of all those standards,
rather than necessarily, would you say, instead of reinventing the wheel, pick
what best fits the need of the organization that they are working with? Is that
what you’re saying?
David: [9:47] Yeah, very much so. I think one needs to have a pragmatic approach
towards choosing how you run a Digital Asset Management system. You
could overtag your content, and there is quite a cost involved in tagging content.
You have to balance that against the business need, the business value.
Henrik: [10:17] That’s true.
David: [10:19] I think that one of the areas that’s very important to focus on is
how one gathers metadata when one’s ingesting digital assets. In principle, that
should be done as automatically as possible. [10:35] Now, that is getting a lot
easier with, for example, video and still cameras can have GPS systems built in,
so that you immediately get assets tagged with the geographical location.
Henrik: [10:52] Yeah, it’s true. Geotagging as a they call it.
David: [10:57] Yeah. Things are getting easier and easier. But one of the big
problems with Digital Asset Management is that an asset will pass through
several organizations during its lifetime. The organizations downstream are the
ones who benefit from Digital Asset Management, if it’s well tagged. Because
they can then find things and makes it easier to monetize it. [11:26] The person
upstream who is actually adding all the metadata doesn’t see the value from it.
That’s always been a bit of an enigma with Digital Asset Management. Those
who do the work don’t necessarily benefit.
Henrik: [11:42] Yeah, I see what you mean. Thanks, David.
David: [11:45] Right, you’re welcome.
Henrik: [11:46] For more on Digital Asset Management, log onto
anotherdamblog.com. Thanks again.

Related Articles

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

Need Digital Asset Management advice and assistance?

Another DAM Consultancy can help. Schedule a call today