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Another DAM Podcast interview with Jill Hurst-Wahl on Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • You teach at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies. What is different about what you teach?
  • You have popular blog. Tell us more about this.
  • 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.
[0:07] Today we’re speaking with Jill Hurst-Wahl. Jill, how are you?
Jill Hurst-Wahl: [0:10] I’m good.
Henrik: [0:12] Jill, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Jill: [0:16] Well, I don’t actually do Digital Asset Management. But in my workshops
and in my blogging and in my teaching, I try to make people aware of
the need to think long-term. Not to just focus on the short-term health of their
digital assets, but to think about which digital assets they might want to have
access to long-term. Then how they’re going to make those things accessible in
the long-term.
Henrik: [0:52] Makes sense. You teach at Syracuse University’s School of
Information Studies. What is different about what you teach there?
Jill: [1:00] I think many of the library science programs have very similar curriculum
because of the American Library’s Association accreditation. But the
iSchools are all different, and Syracuse University has an iSchool, School for
Information Studies. We have six degree programs. [1:25] I think what makes us
a bit different is our, not only being library science, but also our classes around
information management and telecommunications and network management.
[1:38] We think more, perhaps, about the management of information, which
includes what’s going to happen to it long-term. In library science, or library and
information science, that thinking comes in the digital libraries area.
[2:08] But you would get, perhaps, similar and different thinking about the topic
from students and their information management program who are future information
managers, not necessarily working in the library archive or museum, but
working in businesses throughout the world.
Henrik: [2:27] Makes sense. You have a popular blog. Tell us more about this.
Jill: [2:32] I have a blog called “Digitization 101,” started in 2004, and started
as a way to make people aware of what I do and my thinking around digitization.
[2:48] I do consulting, helping people get their digitization programs off the
ground. Often times, just helping them with their planning process, but helping
them sometimes acquire equipment, think about actual process, implement,
find vendors, find whatever they need to get their projects up and going, their
programs up and going. Because these are not short-term events.
[3:18] The blog was started as a way of letting more people know about what
I do and what I think. Over the years, it’s become something I’m really known
for, having this blog that talks about digitization. I talk about all aspects of
digitization.
[3:38] The name “Digitization 101,” if you’re in college, a 101 class is really basic.
But the blog has gone beyond being just talking about basic digitization and
talking about the things that we’re all focused on in digitizing and making sure
that our digital assets are available long-term.
[4:04] I’ve got, I don’t remember how many blog posts. I think over 2,000
blog posts at this point. I used to blog once a day. Because I now teach full-
time, I don’t blog as frequently. But a new series that I’ve started is Way Back
Wednesdays. A way of kind of resurfacing things that are in the archives of
“Digitization 101” that are still relevant and making people aware of those older
blog posts. Trying to keep those older blog posts alive just the way we try to
keep our other digital assets alive.
Henrik: [4:48] Smart. What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals
and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Jill: [4:56] Well, I think for the people that aspiring to be DAM professionals, and
by the way, I love the acronym DAM.
Henrik: [5:04] Me too.
Jill: [laughter] [5:05] For people aspiring to be a DAM professional is to think
about how to talk about it in ways that don’t necessarily use the words Digital
Asset Management. I think that’s true about digitization, too. In our field, we
tend to rely on jargon. Words are very meaningful to us, not so meaningful to
other people. [5:38] I think, especially if you’re trying to get organizations to
understand how to keep their information alive for the long term, we need to
talk about it in ways that make sense to them. Talk about the value of their information
over the long term. Why they would want, in five, ten years, have access
to information that they’re creating today and then how they would insure that
their information or the data is available for five, 10 years.
[6:17] Using stories to get our points across, but doing it in a way that doesn’t
rely on our terminology as DAM professionals. But the terminology of our organizations,
our users, our colleagues, now whoever it is that we’re trying to persuade
that they need to do something now to insure the life of their information
in the future.
Henrik: [6:45] Well, thank you, Jill. [6:46] For more about Digital Asset
Management, log onto AnotherDAMblog.com. Thanks again.

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Julie Maher on Digital Asset Management

Julie Maher discusses Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • Why does a jewelry company use 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’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Julie Maher. Julie,
how are you?
Julie Maher: [0:09] Doing great, how are you doing?
Henrik: [0:13] Good. Julie, how are you involved with Digital Asset
Management?
Julie: [0:15] I’ve been involved with Digital Asset Management for over 10 years.
I first started at Ralph Lauren. A little bit of background, I’ve always been very
interested in photography and the preservation of those types of assets. Digital
Asset Management happened to be something that I naturally fell into. It was
the natural next step for me. [0:39] At Ralph Lauren, they have an extremely
extensive collection of photographic assets, video assets and they were at the
point where everyone in the art department was keeping the same types of
images on different servers. It was really clogging up their space. It got to a
point where we really just needed to clean everything out and put it into one
system that the entire company could access.
Henrik: [1:10] Makes sense.
Julie: [1:14] Yeah, we started building this DAM system. It was highly customizable.
A company like Ralph Lauren is not going to have anything straightforward.
They’re very lifestyle driven, so you can’t just search for photographs by a
photographer. It has to be by thoroughbred, Nantucket, things like that as well
as searching as by location, photographer, model, season, year, that type of
thing. [1:42] It was extra special, because that’s really their whole thing. And also,
at Ralph Lauren, as in fashion in general, is very cyclical. A collection from the
80s will return and be very popular, and you need to pull those assets again as
inspiration for a new collection.
[2:00] It’s a huge, huge database. They had about 750,000 assets when I left in
2006. They were adding approximately 60,000 assets a year. It’s massive. I was
in the corporate archives department. My boss and I, Pat Christman, who had
been with the company since the very beginning, she was more like the company
historian, we worked with this team for this.
[2:30] We had a very rigorous schedule. We’d meet weekly. We really built up a
beautiful, beautiful system. I love it. To this day people always comment about
it. Anybody who has interacted with that system knows that it’s very fine tuned
and it works really well.
[2:49] Yeah, that was my entre into the Digital Asset Management world. From
there, I’ve worked with the NFL. I worked with them last year for their youth division.
They needed to organize their assets. It seems to be a problem in these
art departments where people download these high res assets and keep them
on their individual servers or desktops. It starts clogging up the system again.
[3:23] Companies are starting to realize that they need one place for these
assets to stay so they’re easily accessible but, again, not everywhere all over the
company. You know things start to happen. Was this the final approved one? Is
it cropped correctly? You don’t have that information in a simple file sitting on
your desktop. Do you know what I mean? It hasn’t gone through all the stages
of approval.
Henrik: [3:48] So, there’s centralization basically?
Julie: [3:51] Yeah, definitely. I basically work with luxury brands. My other job
that I do is I produce fashion videos. Now I’m starting to work with those clients
who have all these video assets and photographic assets, and they have no idea
what to do with them. [4:11] It just amazes me, maybe because I’ve been doing
this for 10 years it’s not shocking, but it just really surprises me that people don’t
have things more in order. They’re starting to catch on and realize that this is a
very vital part of their business, which is good. This area with the fashion sector,
luxury brands, it’s really totally booming right now.
Henrik: [4:42] Julie, why would a jewelry company, for example, use a DAM?
Julie: [4:47] Currently I am consulting at the second largest jewelry company
in the country, not the world actually. A jewelry company is like any other company
that has assets. In this particular case there is a jewelry designer for this
company that is pushing this project. [5:12] She herself realizes how valuable it
is to have her assets organized and located in one place. They’re preserved.
They’re getting digitized at very high resolution. They’re going to be preserved.
Everything is going to go to cold storage. Her actual physical assets are going
to be protected.
[5:32] I really saw the jewelry company as any company like a Ralph Lauren or
a NFL. It’s not even about the industry. It’s about preserving your assets and
making sure everything is taken care of. I could do this in any industry.
[5:50] I tell people all the time, “Yes, I work in a luxury brand sector, but I could
be doing this for anyone who has that need.” It’s a major, major need. This is
a great project that I’m working on now, because the company is 100 percent
behind it.
[6:09] We have a very nice budget, which you also often don’t get with these
projects because it’s so new on the scene, it seems. Again, as with Ralph Lauren,
the team I’m managing, we have a very rigorous schedule.
[6:29] We meet every Wednesday, and on Thursdays we action everything that
we talked about on Wednesday so it gives the team that is actually building out
the system five days to get it going. It’s a very, very strict schedule. Everybody is
totally committed to it.
[6:46] I think that’s what makes it work and makes a DAM system really effective,
if you’ve got a team that’s just as passionate as you are, knows the end goal,
knows what it’s going to look like and can see what it’s going to look like.
[7:00] Again, it’s highly customizable. We can just bring this right into the PR
department and use it for exactly what we need. What’s very exciting about this
project is that there are other modules that have already been developed within
the company, but they did it backwards.
[7:19] They uploaded photos first, and then they attached some data and everything
else. We’re doing it like the old school way. We are building it up nice and
slowly, very clean. Then we’re going to add assets. This is now going to serve as
the model for the rest of the company going forward.
[7:35] They have a very, very nice, clean system. It’s going to work perfectly. It’s
going to totally be across the company. It’s going to be one large system with
all these different modules, and it’s very, very nice.
Henrik: [7:52] Julie, what advice would you like to give to DAM professionals or
people aspiring to become a DAM professional?
Julie: [8:00] I thought about this a little bit. I said I worked in fashion for a long
time, luxury brands. I feel that the DAM community is very inviting. I don’t feel
like it’s a very competitive group. People are always sharing ideas and going to
each other. [8:18] I think that’s really key in this industry, not to be afraid to contact
your colleagues and talk about things. Chances are they’ve already been
through it, and they can give you some pointers. I go to these Meetups, and I
meet these fantastic people.
[8:36] You keep in touch, and you come across some situation, like I met someone
last week and I’m going to contact them about these video assets I’m working
on for this current collection. I just think you should be really open and not
be very competitive about that type of thing.
[8:53] I know a lot of industries are competitive, but I feel like this is a knowledge
sharing group, and it’s just natural to want to talk about, discuss, and
share information. Do you know what I mean? It’s one of those industries that
work that way.
[9:06] For the aspiring professional, I just feel like you should go to these meetups.
Go to these networking events. I hear so many people say they don’t want
to go. They’re shy or whatever. But it’s like this is one group of people who are
so passionate about what they do that somebody is going to talk to you.
[9:30] That fear of social anxiety that people experience when going to these
events, people shouldn’t even worry about that. I find that younger people I run
into don’t want to do these things. I’m like, “It’s the best thing going. Are you
kidding me? I meet people every time I go. I meet wonderful people.” You just
expand your network.
Henrik: [9:51] Thanks, Julie.
Julie: [9:53] You’re welcome. It’s a pleasure.
Henrik: [9:54] For more on Digital Asset Management, log onto
AnotherDAMblog.com. Thanks again.

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Theresa Regli on Digital Asset Management

Theresa Regli discusses Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • Do you believe the field of Digital Asset Management will continue to grow? Why or why not?
  • What advice would you like to share with DAM Professionals or people aspiring to be DAM Professionals?

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor: [0:01] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset
Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, we’re speaking with Theresa Regli.
[0:08] Theresa, how are you?
Theresa Regli: [0:09] I’m great. How are you?
Henrik: [0:10] Good. Thanks.
Theresa: [0:12] Good.
Henrik: [0:12] Theresa, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Theresa: [0:17] I’m involved in a couple of different ways. My principal involvement,
really, is as an analyst. I work for an analyst and research firm that’s called
The Real Story Group. [0:30] And we publish, basically, product and vendor
evaluation reports and essentially evaluate different technologies on the market.
It’s kind of like a “Consumer Reports” sort of thing. I am the Digital Asset
Management lead analyst for the company.
[0:48] I also do some consulting, and I help people learn about Digital Asset
Management and pick Digital Asset Management products based on what’s
most appropriate for them.
[1:00] That’s my main two-pronged association with the DAM world.
Henrik: [1:06] Excellent. Do you believe that the field of Digital Asset
Management will continue to grow? Why or why not?
Theresa: [1:13] That’s an interesting question. I think the field of Digital Asset
Management and the discipline of Digital Asset Management is something that
is growing and will continue to grow, because the number of assets we have
is really continuing to grow, the number of images, video, audio, etc. All those
things are constantly getting bigger and bigger, and there’s more and more
of them, and we need people and technology to manage them. So I definitely
think that is going to increase and the people involved will continue to increase.
[1:46] Interestingly, the technology, or the vendors that are selling the technology,
aren’t really growing, I think, at the same pace as the number of assets and
the amount of work that needs to get done. I think there’s sort of a gap that
is existing between the number of things to be managed and the speed with
which vendors are able to address it. I think that’s a little bit slower than the
actual field is growing.
[2:15] Yes, I think it’s going to continue to grow. I just think there’s different parts
of it that are growing at different paces, really.
Henrik: [2:20] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals or
people aspiring to be a DAM professional?
Theresa: [2:27] Well, I think, of course, the number one thing that I would share,
just because it’s my particular bailiwick and it’s my particular area of expertise, is
just to make an effort to understand Digital Asset Management technology and
how it really works. [2:45] It’s not that that’s the panacea to all the problems to,
or all the challenges that are involved with, solving Digital Asset Management.
But I think there’s a lot of very general approaches to Digital Asset Management
that don’t consider the technology enough, and the details of the technology,
and how that could potentially change things or make them more efficient. Also,
how they, in some cases, might make things more difficult, and require different
sorts of human tasks that are different from the ones they have now.
[3:23] I just think in general, just learning about the technology, how it really
works, what the different components are, how it’s successful in certain organizations
and maybe why it fails in other organizations, I think, is really important
for DAM professionals, whether you’re already one or whether you’re aspiring
to be one.
[3:41] Also, just to make sure that you’re out there and you’re also meeting and
talking with other people who work in the industry. I think that’s important,
regardless of what industry that you’re in, but in particular, with Digital Asset
Management, we have various events, and there’s lots of places online where
we can learn about it, too.
[3:57] Those are really my two main pieces of advice.
Henrik: [4:01] Excellent. Well, thank you, Theresa.
Theresa: [4:03] Yeah.
Henrik: [4:03] For more on this, log onto anotherdamblog.com. Thanks again.

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Another DAM Podcast interview with David Lipsey on Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • You are the Conference Chair to Henry Stewart DAM Conferences. How have you seen Digital Asset Management change in the past several years?
  • 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 David Lipsey. David, how are you?

David Lipsey: [0:11] Good, Henrik. Thanks for asking and thanks for the opportunity to join you.

Henrik: [0:14] David, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

David: [0:19] I had the chance to be involved in Digital Asset Management
before the phrase even existed. I was able to become a part of one of the foundational software companies, Artesia Technologies, which grew out of work that I was doing with many other people at its precursor company at Thomson, the publisher. [0:47] We were looking at what now seems like the quaint and carriage trade idea of repurposing editorial assets to go from textbooks or the technical reference materials from Thomson into CDs which could be distributed largely for reference publishing.
Of course, out of this…Let’s call it something…Out of this spaghetti grew the
DNA of the concept of create once and use many. We weren’t able to grab the words “content management.” They had become used for web-facing applications. But we did come up with, in some sort of aggregation and a bit asystematic [1:33] with the phrase “Digital Asset Management.”
[1:37] The first companies I had the chance to with, Henrik, that were involved with this were a company that’s local to you and I, “The Washington Post,” as well as General Motors, one of the largest corporations in the world that
has an extraordinary archive of images and thousands of hours of video that they were looking to put to better work for GM and reduce the cost of finding that material.
[2:01] I’ve continued through my career, back from this early wandering into what was then an uncharted map of, “Let’s become Digital Asset Management,” through several years with Artesia, which was acquisitioned by OpenText. In subsequent roles as an industry principle for media and entertainment for SAP, then with FTI Consulting, also in the media and entertainment practice.
[2:31] My concerns go across the entire spectrum of the content industries,
whether it’s for text or image, for audio, for video, or for other kinds of files
where, again, creating once and using again can bring value to organizations, to companies, to universities, museums, etc.

Henrik: [2:54] You’re the conference chair of Henry Stewart DAM conferences, how have you seen Digital Asset Management change in the past several years?

David: [3:03] It would be interesting to plot this and do word maps or kind of idea clusters. They are fun to reflect on. I think as you and I have talked about, and as you’ve been good about presenting it at Henry Stewart, there are now actually job descriptions about, jobs which are entitled Digital Asset Manager.
[3:29] I think that, in and of itself, indicates how DAM is becoming much more of an enterprise application. I believe there’s a large transition that we’re seeing occurring right now, where we have… There’s some kind of almost sweet irony in that this application, which collapses silos between content types, a PowerPoint, a Word document, an image, a video, an audio file, has been siloed itself into many departmental applications in the businesses or organizations where DAM had been deployed.
[4:09] I think, Henrik, that we’re seeing a recognition that DAM is an enterprise resource application, much the way that payroll is. Payroll could vary if there are exempt or nonexempt employees. Payroll could certainly vary if they’re union or non-union employees, with the complexities of the workflows of that very specialized compensation methodologies that have to be deployed.
[4:36] DAM itself, I think, is moving from something that happened in various departments, which had the original budgets for this, to an enterprise application.
To tie this to your question, I think we’re seeing that in the caliber of Digital
Asset Management installations that many companies are kind enough to share at the Henry Stewart Conferences.
[5:03] For example, we now will have, this year, the third or fourth maturing presentation of the application that goes across Warner Brothers and its allied organizations at Turner and CNN, which supports not only across business lines, across asset types. But now, I don’t know how many millions of assets are managed
in that application. That’s a statement we just simply could not have made
earlier on in several years of Henry Stewart Conferences.
[5:36] I think the fact that there are emerging models for what disposition means and HR policies for hiring. There is a recognition that DAM needs to be a centralized application and that we now see, across lines of business, repositories that number in the millions of assets and are just a part of everyday life indicates some of the maturing of this field.

Henrik: [6:01] That’s true. What advice would you like to give to DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

David: [6:07] I think attending the conferences that are available is a great idea. I think the chance to understand that we’re only still, in so many ways, at the beginning of this field. Yes, the more mature vendors have been around for a dozen years or so, from the late ‘90s to here we are in late 2010. That the demands on the content and the fundability of content are something that we’re still seeing very early on. [6:43] I was in a meeting last week where I heard one of the large repurposers of content in the sports industry talk about that they currently service 106 separate digital handheld devices. This is October of 2010 when there’s only the iPad and only a nominal amount of Android smartphones.
[7:08] Just imagine, Henrik, a year from now the demand on content. And not only from industries where publishing is both a noun and a verb our friends in the book business or the movie business or TV and magazine publishing. But imagine a year from now that the demand on content from CPG [Consumer Package Goods] companies and from other manufacturers that have marketing initiatives will have exquisite tablet devices that their content can be used on.
[7:39] I’m saying this as a note to encourage them to become involved in the Digital Asset Management space and understanding that it’s a very wide-open field for someone who wants to become a DAM professional.
[7:57] I also think that someone wanting to get involved in digital liquidity within the company that they’re applying for may encounter some resistance in more entrenched departmental behaviors or operations. Nothing unusual. It’s just that the VPs or department managers may have been working with certain workflows for a long time and someone coming into the field, especially someone who is…
[8:31] There’s Schwinn Bicycle involved in iPhone and digital wheels, if you will, is going to be, maybe, much more comfortable than the people that are working for in terms of content sharing, content liquidity, and content repurposing.
[8:50] I guess that would be something that probably both of us would give as a word of caution to someone entering the field, that someone’s comfort with living in the connected world may be encountering a department that’s not as digitally integrated and not as connected within its own organization. Some education, some patience, and some very private eye-rolling may be a good approach to encountering that.
[9:20] Does that make sense?


Henrik: [9:21] Yes, and there’s likely many of those.

David: [9:23] Yeah, I think so. I think it’s one of the things that it’s both exciting.
It can also be very frustrating for…I don’t want to say a generation before.
Newer employees who are used to just lightning-fast content sharing and have not encountered the fact that it took, what was it, 20 years to clear the DVD of the first season of “Saturday Night Live” because of the complexities of the rights situation. [9:57] I think that another one of the challenges is that it makes, with the technology that provides for rapid worldwide ease of access to assets, that the distance rights systems and governance systems have not nearly kept pace with this.
[10:15] Rights clearance and rights permissioning, and, in addition, the pricing models are far from mature about this. We’re sitting here in this conversation on the cusp of “The New York Times” having an interesting transition coming up with paywall with metered access to free content. Magazines, finding a new wealth of opportunity on subscription-based and display advertising-based revenue from tablets that didn’t exist a year ago.

Henrik: [10:51] Like “Wired”…

David: [10:54] Absolutely. We’re only seeing a handful of tablet-based magazines to talk about. It could be easy to come into a job and just assume everything’s been figured out about the economics of digital content and the rights that are “the crazy aunt in the basement,” [laughs] use that phrase or “the crazy uncle in the basement.” [11:22] We have a long ways to go on the econometrics of digital contentment and on the ease with which rights are, at this point, permitted because much more maturity is occurring in the negotiation stage than previously.

Henrik: [11:39] Thank you, David.

David: [11:40] Henrik, it’s always a delight to spend time with you and appreciate your contributions to maturing the field. Look forward to talking to you again.

Henrik: [11:49] For more on Digital Asset Management, log on to
anotherdamblog.com. Thanks again.

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