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?
You recently started a blog and podcast about Digital Asset Management. Can you 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. Today, I’m speaking with Dave Ginsberg.
Dave, how are you? Dave Ginsberg: [0:10] I’m doing well, Henrik. Thanks for having me on. Henrik: [0:12] No problem. Dave, how are you involved with Digital Asset
Management? Dave: [0:17] I work at a studio in Los Angeles, and I oversee all the technology
for our marketing group. Marketing’s interesting in that we’re almost like a mini
case study in production and post workflows. We deal with all the same issues
everyone in media does. Things like limited dry space resources, tight deadlines,
the need to be more efficient, and, most of all, the need to be more cost
effective in how we do things. [0:39] DAMs allow us to take repetitive tasks and
automate them with metadata so we can leverage the assets we create between
the different groups that we service. We can go into our DAM and find assets
we might have forgotten about or just something that we could take one asset,
another asset, and merge the two together.
[0:55] Oftentimes, we find ourselves doing slight changes rather than making
something new whenever our clients need something, and obviously that can be
very cost effective.
[1:03] Our DAM also allows our clients to service themselves directly. If they
need a file type that they didn’t originally request or they need more copies,
they lost their original copy, they can go into our system and create whatever
they need from the master mezzanine file, which is very, very high quality. They
can make anything they need from a web resource all the way out to a HD-type
quality.
[1:25] They just do it right in the system themselves, so we found just a lot of
efficiencies moving into a DAM, and we’re excited to move into the world of file based
workflows. Henrik: [1:35] You originally started a blog and a podcast about Digital Asset
Management. Can you tell us more about this? Dave: [1:40] Sure. I started a website called ElegantWorkflow.com. I started
thinking about it a couple years ago. I was researching DAM, so file-based
workflows, getting on the Internet, and looking all around. There really weren’t
a lot of sites out there at the time. I know that there’s a few more now, but still
it’s not something where you go into Google and 40 sites pop up. It still seems
to be a really new technology that people are interested in. [2:11] What I wanted
to do was create a place where I could impart what I have learned in my journey
in this arena, and I work underneath the finance and operations umbrella
where I’m working out. I see things very differently from where a programmer
or an engineer might look at how to build a system. I wanted to be able to pass
along what I had learned as well as interview some of the top industry people
out there.
The site’s really taking off, and it’s also a lot of fun to have a nice relaxing conversation
with somebody that I would normally meet on a floor at NAB
[2:36] and have two minutes or five minutes with them or be in a
meeting where they’re presenting something to me to having a relaxed chat
where we’re talking between 20 minutes and an hour.
[2:55] They can really dig into the meat and potatoes of what they want to talk
about and impart what they’ve learned in what their business or their technology’s
all about. Henrik: [3:06] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and
people aspiring to become DAM professionals? Dave: [3:12] My advice for DAM pros and people aspiring to get into this industry
is to learn as much as you can about everything. If you’re an engineer
or a programmer, learn about finance and production. If you’re a producer, try
to learn about programming and technology. [3:27] I think for everybody, we
all need to learn about library sciences, metadata, and also how users look for
information because I think that there’s a lot of great systems out there, but they
could be even better if people really took the time to figure out how does the
average user look for something? What’s the different between how an editor
would be searching for something based on his or her needs versus someone
who’s a producer, an associate producer, or a researcher?
[3:56] The more you can see things from other people’s perspective, the better
you can build the systems and most of all the better metadata structures we can
all build because it still is a relatively new technology, a relatively new arena for
everybody. There’s so much we can all learn from each other. I think the more
you can just see through another person’s eyes, the better all these systems can
be and the better we can all do our work.
[4:22] Most of all, I think the goal for everybody is getting home and having a
home life and not sitting in the office looking for a file for three days when you
should just be able to go into a DAM and pull it up within three seconds. Henrik: [4:35] Great advice. Make sure you get out of your specialty, and make
sure you get out of your comfort zone. Dave: [4:40] Exactly, and just really embrace technology. There’s a lot of amazing
things people are doing out there. Through websites like your website,
Elegant Workflow there are a number of these sites starting up you can really
get a feel for what everybody else is doing, and most of all I love when people
tell me about what they would have done differently. [5:01] In every interview, I
always like to ask, “If you were doing this all over again knowing what you know
now, what would you do differently?” Some of the answers you get are not even
close to what you would expect. Sometimes it’s really basic small things that
people got so excited to go build a DAM and they didn’t think about how it was
going to be used all the way to crazy metadata structures that people want to
employ that I don’t even think we have the technology yet for. Henrik: [5:28] Great points. Thanks, Dave. [5:29] 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?
How do open source Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions stack up today?
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 Joe Bachana. Joe,
how are you? Joe Bachana: [0:11] Great. Hi. Henrik: [0:12] Joe, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management? Joe: [0:16] Personally, I’ve been implementing Digital Asset Management since
about 1997. My first project with DAM was when I was working with a company
called Image, Inc. I was implementing a product called Phrasea, which was a
French-based solution. I had way back then experienced implementing products
like MediaBank. North Plains TeleScope I had implemented at a number
of locations around that time, as well. [0:42] I founded DPCI, which is a technology
company that implements content solutions. I founded that in ‘99. We’ve
been doing Digital Asset Management projects ever since with a wide variety of
Digital Asset Management products for a whole variety of use cases, as well. Henrik: [0:58] How do open source Digital Asset Management or DAM solutions
stack up today? Joe: [1:04] We have to look at them in a few different ways. The first is the
business of open source DAM. The second, you would have to look at the legal
underpinnings of those solutions. The third would be the technology. Some
people say, “Let’s take a look at the technology real quickly first,” but I think
that’s a mistake. [1:22] One of the reasons why we look at the business is that
the open source DAM projects are very different from the open source Web content management solutions out there. The CMSs such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, or Plone are principally anywhere between a very large collection of
contributors globally to those projects to maybe a little more modest contributor
base.
[1:48] Generally, it’s anywhere between a few hundred people and thousands
and thousands of people contributing to the innovations of these open source
projects, so they’ve taken firm foothold into the rubric or fabric of not only
our country but globally, the way Web content management innovations are
happening.
[2:06] In the case of Digital Asset Management, not as much. You do have solutions
that have been created out of Europe, out of the UK, and here in the
United States that there are a couple of folks that are working on it that are
friends or colleagues, or you’ll have companies that are behind the products
with their own resources. The solutions themselves haven’t necessarily taken
root as global initiatives.
[2:35] That doesn’t mean it’s not going that way. You’re starting to see more of
what happened 10 to 12 years ago in the CMS world starting to happen in the
DAM world. The reason why it’s not going to happen as rapidly is, to me, Digital
Asset Management is a little bit like the plumbing in your and my walls. It’s nice
when it’s working, but it’s not the sexiest thing in the world.
[2:57] The thing that everybody cares about is how nice does your house look.
It’s like the CMS. The CMS is the presentation of your content as well as the
ways in which you develop your content the workflows and so forth. Obviously,
no CMS is created equal. Joe: [3:13] With respect to DAM, companies principally use Digital Asset
Management systems for archive and retrieval of their assets. That’s a simplified
notion of what DAM should do. Both you and I both know there’s a
huge number of reasons people implement DAM, ranging from selling content
through storefronts to integrating DAMs with CMSs, CRMs, or ERPs
and so forth.
[3:38] In the case of media companies where they’re selling their content,
whether it’s through rich media like video or live streaming, these things obviously
are the core of their business. It’s not just about archival. It’s about real
work in progress and delivering that content across multiple channels.
[3:57] The pace of innovation in the open source world from a business standpoint
is certainly not as rapid yet. It’s not as sexy.
[4:06] There’s one project that we’re involved with for a media company. They’re
headquartered here in New York City. They had been veterans of a couple of
different proprietary platforms. They had spent millions on a couple of different
solutions. They made a determination that they were going to try an open
source implementation. They are doing a good amount of work to having us do
some cool customizations for them to add on top of the open source solution.
[4:34] The question always is…What we like to do in open source is, we like to
contribute back to the community, however small or big it is. Hence, we oftentimes
will go to that customer and say, “As a precursor to our signing on,
do you have any objections to us contributing these solutions out in an open
source way?”
[4:53] That gets to the business aspect of it. The other part of the business
aspect of it is operationalizing DAM. For companies that have had experience
with proprietary vendors, some of the vendors have 24/7 support. Some of
them, not so much.
The DAM vendors can be smaller companies in some cases, so they don’t necessarily
have the resources. When you have a president of a company answering
the phone at 11: [5:07] 00 at night to support you, that’s generally not a good
sign, although some of the presidents of these DAM companies are absolute
geniuses. It’s always a pleasure to talk to some of them. But it isn’t a scalable
model. Operationalizing maintenance and support, it’s something that some
of the proprietary vendors don’t do that well. But if you look at it in the CMS
world, when you think about the kind of services you can get out of an Acquia
and Drupal, which is commercial support.
[5:44] There are other alternatives on that side, as well. Those types of things
aren’t necessarily fully hammered out yet in the open source world. Because
businesses behind the open source DAM projects are sometimes not matured
yet. They may be smaller groups. So that’s going to change over time. The
second point was this notion of the legalistic implications of open source. Not all
open source is created equal or licensed equally.
[6:11] You’ve got different licensing schemes out there. A very common one is
the GNU GPL. You hear about that one a lot in the web CMS world. In DAM,
quite a number of them take advantage of the lesser GPL, LGPL, which has
some limitations. These things people have to really reflect on, when they’re getting involved.
Do they want to do an open source implementation where there may be some restrictions.
Joe: [6:37] I also look at these products… Does the company who is creating
it, are they paying lip service to open source? But then you start to think, “Do
they have all their documentation out there online? Can you readily download
and install that product?” If you’re really open source, you’ve got to behave like
open source, which to me means freely downloadable and installing, and freely
available documentation.
[7:01] Then it’s your prerogative to decide whether you want to purchase services
from a company or whichever individual. The legalistic application of it
is quite important when people are reflecting on open source. Now we get to
the technical. This is the one everybody really concentrates on first. People ask
me, “Don’t even look at the products if you can’t first look and see what the
business and the legal implications are of the solution you’re about to go forward
with.”
[7:29] The open source DAMs are approaching, in general, the work group functionalities
of products out there, in the marketplace. If you look at solutions like
Resource Space or Enter Media, Rezuna as well. There are a couple more, I’m
not trying to plug these products, simply giving it as examples that these solutions
are starting to meet the needs of work group, Digital Asset Management,
which would be considered, for me, the ability to import, either individually or
batch, a whole variety of digital asset types.
[8:08] And on ingestion, to be able to automate the creation of thumbnails and
previews and even evoke certain recipes for conversion of the assets. If you,
upload a PSD or any PS file, then you can set up recipes for conversion to JPEG s
at certain widths and depths. The ability to also capture metadata information.
Things aren’t all created equally, but the ability to capture XMP metadata, for
example, is something that is available in several of these products.
[8:38] In one case, we actually did some customizations where we have some
preprocessing of assets within Adobe Bridge for a customer. Then the assets
are going into their open source DAM. It’s a phenomenal thing, because they’re batch modifying with some extended XMP metadata, with their own panel within their Adobe Creative Suite products. And then that information is getting
ingested into those open source DAMs.
[9:06] These kinds of basic functionalities are available. It’s really exciting, because
they’re there. We’ve actually implemented quite a number of these kinds
of projects. They’re working. For a year or two years, they’re in business, in
use. The other thing that I find really exciting is that the whole promise of open source, to me, is you don’t have to say, “Mother, may I?” The whole idea of innovate and ingenuity in software, the open source software world is the ability to just step up and say, “I want to create something of value that’s available or
that I need for the context I need it.” Joe: [9:45] Without saying, “Hey, may I please do that?” And then somebody saying, “Yeah sure. But pay $20,000 for an SDK and sign this agreement that you won’t do this or that.” With open source, you can do it. A couple of the
open source products have robust web services and published APIs that, essentially,
allow you to do anything you want, ranging from connecting the DAM
to a produce like Drupal or WordPress, or connecting it to your CRM, if that’s
what you needed, and so on. That, to me, is the most exciting aspect. In one
case, we did a project down in Atlanta for a company where they had this huge
infrastructure. They needed to just automate the production of real estate guide books. Joe: [10:31] So we have this integration of, in that case it was a product called EnterMedia, with believe it or not, a whole Microsoft infrastructure. Integrated
with Adobe Live Cycle, integrated with Data Plan Journal Designer. And integrated,
I’ll add, with the InDesign server. So the whole infrastructure is automating
the pagination of these real estate books, straight from sales folks just
entering the data on the individual homes that are going to be offered.
[11:02] This content is being used to create both the web listings, as well as the
print catalog books or guide books that are being done in multiple states. It’s saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in their production processes. The DAM is an underlying technology within the architecture. It works flawlessly and it’s
open source. They save themselves… If you think about the amount of money
they spent on the other infrastructure. [laughs]
[11:28] They spent a fraction of their budget on the actual DAM implementation.
There’s a lot you can do with open source DAM solutions as underlying architectural
decisions for larger projects. And for very modest use cases around
archival and retrieval of assets you absolutely can use those types of solutions in
your business. Henrik: [11:54] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and
people aspiring to become DAM professionals? Joe: [11:59] That’s a great question and I appreciate it, Henrik. A lot of folks
come into this industry… I should add, I’ve been doing this type of thing for
26 years now. I’m not going to count my tech jobs while I was in college,
which principally were around content technologies. But 26 years ago, content
technologies were a whole different animal. To me, there’s a lot of folks that
enter the market and they want to be DAM professionals and they want to get
jobs doing this. [12:28] My concern has been folks coming out there and never
having laid their hands on a single product, without having done a single implementation.
There’s a lot of information that goes on and a lot of folks that are…
There’s no certification for becoming a DAM professional or a DAM analyst or
consultant. Yet people go out there and help folks with RPs and so forth, and
they’ve never done a DAM project.
[12:54] To me, if you’re right out of college, first of all, there’s some colleges which actually have some programs, like RIT, the print management school.
They have a course in Digital Asset Management. It is modest. But they give
people a chance to understand how to configure. What are the important use
cases trying to be solved in DAM? Getting hands-on experience with DAM is
really important. Even if you never will touch the technology in your career and
you want to be a pundit or someone who’s just a thought leader, you’ve got to
be able to touch them and understand what these types of products, this class
of products, do.
[13:33] What problems do they solve? That’s just me. Other people would probably
emphatically disagree. But I don’t think, going back to the plumber motif
that I said earlier or concept, you can speak with authority about plumbing
if you’ve never laid in the pipes an understand what the heck goes on there.
I certainly don’t understand what’s happening behind the walls. That’s one
thing. The second is, the best, to me, really exciting folks out there are the folks
who’ve gone to library science school.
[14:05] They really fundamentally understand what information science or information
architecture is. How do you define a taxonomy? What is an ontology?
How do you create controlled vocabularies? What’s that process? Sometimes
folks that were in data modeling are very good at that, as well. They’re very
thoughtful. A lot of times we go in as professionals and over engineer the
model, the information architecture of a platform.
[14:35] That becomes onerous for the folks who are trying to capture that metadata
and track it. There has to be a reasonableness that goes on, which again,
goes back to point number one. Which is, try to become a practitioner. But,
understanding that these are human systems, that’s the third thing. Again, we
talk about first laying your hands on these types of things, second is understand
how taxonomy is laid out. If you have money to go to library science school or, if
not, pick up some books on it.
[15:04] There’s some great resources out there for that. The third thing is understanding the use cases or the workflows. Because the DAM systems don’t necessary do workflow really well. But every single person or any company that’s
creating, managing, enriching and delivering assets has implicit workflows.
Some that are simple. Some that are very complex. Until you really understand
what those are, you’re going to be hampered. Joe: [15:34] I’m talking about not just people starting out in their career, but folks
that are 10, 15, 20 years in, that are delivering Digital Asset Management implementations.
A lot of times they don’t pay attention to the ways people interact
with assets through the life cycle. Different asset or content types have different workflows.
The way you’re creating an interactive object is going to be different
from some sort of an image file or video file and so forth.
[16:02] Those have different ways of being manipulated through a whole class of
employee types or user types. So understanding those is really important. Once
you get those you’re going to be more sensitive to the way people work. The
fourth thing is, understand how to listen and understand how people currently
work, meeting them halfway. Just coming in and implementing a DAM and
saying, “This is the way it works,” isn’t good enough.
[16:32] To be able to understand how an organization needs to work is important.
To hopefully deliver a DAM solution that supports that work and bolsters
and improves it, as opposed to makes people change the way they work, which
invariably, as you and I both know, doesn’t work. People rebel. You get into all
kinds of change management issues where folks just fight the DAM implementation.
I want to just end on this note, that a good way to inform your career
in DAM is that everybody high fives themselves when the DAM installation is
completed.
[17:09] But the way you test the success of a DAM solution is two to three years
out. How many people are using it? How many assets are there? Is it supporting
the business? Has duplication of assets been minimized or eliminated? Are there
issues with finding assets that were thrown in two years before, that are important?
That’s the way you test. You always have to think forward in this business.
Think about the results you’re going to be creating, two to three years in. Henrik: [17:38] Thanks, Joe. Joe: [17:40] Cool. Henrik: [17:41] 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.
Suzanne Smagala discusses Digital Asset Management
Here are the questions asked:
How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Why does an organization focused on entertainment 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 Suzanne Smagala.
Suzanne, how are you? Suzanne Smagala: [0:11] I’m great, Henrik. How are you? Henrik: [0:12] Good. Suzanne, how are you involved with Digital Asset
Management? Suzanne: [0:16] Well, basically I’m responsible for ingesting and processing
all the company digital assets. We use the Digital Asset Management system
MediaBin. I do a lot with asset retrieval and file delivery. I help write standards
and workflows for preservation and best practices. I also do a lot of work with
digital rights management. Henrik: [0:33] Why does an organization focused on entertainment use Digital
Asset Management? Suzanne: [0:39] I think the better question would be why wouldn’t we? So much
of our product is digital. We have a really huge web presence, with our Ripley’s.
com website. We do a lot with social media, with Facebook and Twitter. We
post videos on Vimeo. We also have a lot of videos that play right in our museums,
in our locations. We have a weekly podcast, a syndicated cartoon. We’re
developing a mobile app, set to launch this summer. We have a huge publishing
arm where we publish, on average, about five books a year. And not just in
print, but also a lot in eBook format. [1:09] We just have to think about all the
digital files that are associated with those endeavors. If you just take the eBook,
for example, we have design files of the page layouts, the graphic and image
files. We’re doing embedded video files for interactive features that correspond
to our apps. License rights to associate all the images that we have. All those
files need to be managed. We just saw a real need that a simple file server
couldn’t satisfy. Henrik: [1:32] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and
people aspiring to become DAM professionals? Suzanne: [1:37] I can probably speak more to the people that are aspiring,
because I myself am fairly new in the field. I’m about a year or two in. I think
number one, education is key. It’s really the starting point. I got my degree, my
Master’s in Library and Information Sciences. I was fortunate enough to land a
great graduate assistantship, working for a special library for the Florida State
University School of Theater. [1:57] I spent a lot of my time cataloging special
collections. While I was cataloging using an integrated library system, I was
really able to easily translate those skills into the Digital Asset Management
world. It’s all about taking what you’ve done and being able to use it for something
different. I would say, seek out internships, network. LinkedIn is a great
tool. Join groups and other professional organizations.
[2:17] Stay on top of what’s going on in the field. Get to conferences if you can.
This is really a great time to be getting into this field. It’s just starting to emerge.
The demand is really high for qualified professionals, but opportunities aren’t
going to fall into your lap, so you need to be the one to make it happen. Henrik: [2:31] Thanks, Suzanne. Suzanne: [2:32] Thank you. Henrik: [2:34] For more on Digital Asset Management, 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.
Another DAM Podcast 