How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
How does a health care provider use a DAM?
What is the difference between an organization that has a DAM where they sell their content versus just manage their content such as marketing material?
What advice would you like to give to DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Transcript:
Henrik de Gyor: [0:03] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset
Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with David Price. David,
how are you? David Price: [0:10] I’m very good, thank you. Henrik: [0:12] David, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management? David: [0:15] I am a applications manager at a healthcare provider. I work within
a marketing and sales group that manages a number of different Digital Asset
Management systems and workflow related project work. Henrik: [0:29] How does a healthcare provider use a DAM? David: [0:34] Well, this particular healthcare provider has a large marketing and
sales group. As with any company that has marketing and sales, we have a lot
of marketing and sales collateral. We have posters, brochures, fliers, booklets.
We have rich media. We have TV. We have radio. All of that content needs to
be managed. Henrik: [0:53] Makes sense. David, what is the difference between an organization
that has a DAM where they sell their content versus just manage their content,
so it’s just marketing material? David: [1:03] That’s a good question. One of the things that I’ve realized is that
is an important differentiator between DAM users largely because the people
that sell their content who typically are in the entertainment or media business,
TV, radio, music, etc., are much more concerned with the full work flow
process from start to finish because the DAM and the workflow management
and the product management cycle manage their end product. It’s their bread
and butter. Henrik: [1:37] Sure. David: [1:39] For that type of company, a DAM implementation is a much more
integral part of what they do if they’re a mature organization. For companies
that only use DAMs to manage marketing materials but don’t sell those materials,
it’s still important, but it’s not as important. [1:56] It’s more difficult to
directly tie it to the bottom line. It’s more difficult to measure the effectiveness
of your marketing materials because they don’t generate direct sales. They only
indirectly affect your sales. Henrik: [2:12] That makes sense. Sure, yeah. David: [2:13] That can actually be an impediment to purchasing, implementing,
and supporting DAM systems also. Each one has its pros and cons. Henrik: [2:25] Sure, I agree. One is certainly more vital than the other if you
actually want to deliver something to be seen and sold. David: [2:33] Right. Interestingly enough, one of the things that I learned
coming to shows like this and listening to all of the people that are in entertainment
and media is they develop a huge repository of older media that they
reuse and repurpose. [2:50] Often times, you watch TV. If a famous actor dies or
a movie re-released, they’ll go back and pull assets from 10, 20 years ago, repackage
them in some new format and you’ll see them again. Henrik: [3:07] Smart. David: [3:09] Our type of DAM user doesn’t do as much. Henrik: [3:12] Sure, that makes sense, but you can still reuse those marketing
materials. David: [3:14] Sure, we can, but we probably wouldn’t as much as… Henrik: [3:19] For a different campaign or… David: [3:20] Yeah, right. Henrik: [3:21] OK , fair. What advice would you like to give to DAM professionals
or people aspiring to become DAM professionals? David: [3:27] That’s a good question. I’d give aspiring DAM professionals the
advice to several things, first off, DAM is a discipline and not a tool. [3:39] Lots of
people who first get into Digital Asset Management think, “We’re going to go
out and buy this wonderful, cool new software, then life will be easy.”
[3:49] You’re chuckling because anyone who’s worked in practically any discipline
for some amount of time knows that a particular tool will do nothing if you
don’t have the business process and agreed upon structure and organizational
processes in place within the business to make it work and to utilize it to its best
advantage.
[4:13] Another statement that summarizes that is “Garbage in, garbage out,”
that’s the advice I’d give. Henrik: [4:19] Great. Well, thank you, David. David: [4:21] You’re welcome. Henrik: [4:22] For more on digital management, log onto AnotherDAMblog.com, thanks again.
How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Why does a training and development organization 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 Anthony Allen.
Anthony, how are you? Anthony Allen: [0:10] I’m doing great. Thank you very much for
having me today. Henrik: [0:13] Not a problem. Anthony, how are you involved with Digital Asset
Management? Anthony: [0:18] I’m the Director of Digital Media for The American Society for
Training and Development. It always helps to explain a company or an audience
before diving into the finer points of Digital Asset Management. ASTD is an
association for trainers. We train trainers. [0:43] We’ve been in business for about
60 years. We have about 45,000 members. We are a nonprofit, a mission driven
publisher, but still very much care about the bottom line. We consider ourselves
a small publisher. We publish books, magazines, pamphlets, smaller 28 or 30
page books.
[1:11] We also have a very heavy practice for video. The video and media production
is specifically geared to our conferences. We have a small 1500 person
conference in January and a large 8000 person conference in June.
[1:30] We record most of the material there, so we produce hundreds and hundreds
of hours of conference content every year as well, so there are thousands
of assets in our digital library for PowerPoints sent to audio and live, full frame
video production for the conferences.
[1:55] I was brought on to ASTD, that’s how I refer to the company, about three
years ago to basically take care of the content management, Digital Asset
Management, tagging, XML. I’ve delved full force into that realm.
[2:15] When I came to ASTD there was really quite a shock. I had come from
the video world, and I was a producer at Discovery Channel. Video, they were
making TV basically the same way for decades. The taxonomy and the metadata
based publishing search within libraries for video assets are actually quite
mature. Lucky me.
[2:46] I had actually then moved on to ASTD, and I came to a publishing house
in an industry that had no taxonomy. The content is also highly contextual,
meaning that search is very, very difficult with training content. The reason is
because it’s the exact opposite of medical content. If you search for basal cell
carcinoma in a medical directory, you’re going to get information about basal
cell carcinoma.
[3:17] Training content, on the other hand, is very contextual, and trainers
argue about the definitions. I was at a shock, at a loss for where to start, when
I started my job as a content manager. With ASTD over the past three years,
what we’ve done is we’ve developed a taxonomy for the training industry that
I’m now going out into other content production houses for training content and
trying to get them to adopt the training taxonomy.
[3:53] It’s a very, very large initiative for us. I’ve also made some large technology
purchases for the content management benefit of all of the content production
departments within ASTD. We have an XML based content management
system, an XML based metadata workflow publishing engine. We also have a
part of ASTD that goes and takes our content, which is at the very, very end of
the print cycle, PDFs, and then converts that content into XML.
[4:36] Then it is tagged according to our taxonomy. It is tagged according to the
DITA XML standard, and then it is put into a repository. Afterwards, we have,
basically, what I call a workflow expansion framework that allows us to build new
workflows to get new formats out into the publishing world, make money with
ePub, make money with other formats as well.
[5:07] That gives us a scope of how I’m involved with Digital Asset Management.
It really was from zero to now I would say that we have a lot of our internal production
workflow practices matured. Now we’re squarely looking at the future
as far as getting this content out and creating new and exciting applications that
leverage the metadata. The word of the day and the phrase for the future is
really metadata based publishing for ASTD. Henrik: [5:43] Why does a training and development organization use a DAM
specifically? What is the end goal? Anthony: [5:50] There are two things here, there’s ASTD, the small publisher,
but then there’s also ASTD, the representative and quasi governing body for
training and development organizations, of which our members are trainers
within organizations. They are independent consultants who are brought in to
large companies like IBM, to give sexual harassment training, leadership training,
and so on. [6:23] We also represent the vendors in this space. Those vendors
can include other small publishers of training content. It can include technology
companies that produce learning management systems, and it can also
be other companies that create training content. A hot topic right now is education
modules, education component, so smaller building blocks of content.
[6:50] I’ll tackle the first part first, ASTD as the publisher of content. We don’t
really do anything different than any other small publishing house does. Tongue
in cheek I say, “We look at what the big boys are doing and we try to mimic it.”
[7:10] There are a couple of things that are going on here. Companies like
O’Reilly, very hot in the digital publishing space, are setting the expectation of
digital formats. When you buy an EPUB or an eBook from O’Reilly you actually
get .apk, .mobi, EPUB, and now even DAISY , which is… Henrik: [7:36] You get multiple formats. You get multiple formats, right? You get
to choose or all of the above? Anthony: [7:42] Yes, it allows you to really feel confident that you are going to
be able to use this on your devices, which is, on the TV side, TV anywhere was
something that kind of happened a while ago. Then the digital rights locker,
which NeuStar is trying to get off the ground, is another one of those, “Let’s get
to the promise land of, “I buy this movie, I buy this TV show, and I get to view it
on all my devices.” It’s, again, metadata based, digital sites management. [8:17]
But ASTD isn’t doing anything different than other small publishers in saying,
“We need to look at what the big boys are doing and mimic it.” There are definitely
business reasons for doing that.
[8:30] As far as the O’Reilly example goes, we need to meet the expectations of
our customers. Those expectations are not being set by us, they’re being set by
other companies like O’Reilly. They’re doing a really good job of making those
expectations harder and harder to attain.
[8:47] We have to keep up with each new search experience, with the great
search experience that somebody has at Google, with each great business
model that the newspapers make up. Smaller people, smaller publishers like
ASTD have got to keep up with that or we look further and further behind.
[9:06] Now, the other part of the piece is stuff like Amazon. This, again, speaks to
the first part of ASTD as a small publisher. Amazon is great because, as ASTD is
a commercial publisher we have lots of our stuff up on Amazon, but the taxonomy
that governs Amazon is completely meaningless for trainers.
[9:29] One of our big, hit books is called, “Telling Ain’t Training.” One of the four
ways it’s listed metadata-wise is under psychology and counseling. Now, no
trainer is going to go to psychology and counseling to find training content.
[9:47] Amazon is great in that it sends way more traffic to our book than we ever
could, but from a business perspective they take a huge cut. The training taxonomy
metadata based publishing and better categories on our stores that are
more meaningful for our audience, is going to allow us to sell more on our own
website, which is where we keep most of the profits.
[10:16] Building my P and L for my boss and saying, “Hey, we need to invest
$255,075,000 in this new technology,” part of that P and L, that business justification
is driving traffic back to our site where we don’t have to depend on other
sites like Amazon, where they take a huge cut of the book. Henrik: [10:37] Just to clarify, P and L, you mean profit and loss? Anthony: [10:40] Yeah, exactly. As a business owner, I have to go to my boss,
beg for money and he says, “Anthony, why?” Henrik: [10:48] Prove your cause. Anthony: [10:49] Exactly. The other part of your question was “Why does a
training and development organization use the DAM?” [10:57] The big part of
training and technology, where those two things meet are in what I call actually,
what everybody calls Learning Management Systems.
[11:10] Learning Management Systems are things, like Blackboard is a big LMS.
[11:17] Those systems are where a student can start a class and the learning
management systems take the student through the class and mark off with
metadata what has been completed, what the scores are.
[11:31] It takes all of that data and sends it to the teacher for verification, it marks
off what classes they’ve taken.
[11:39] The other thing that it does is it can match learning objectives and content
to industry metadata standards like SCORM, one of them for the education
industry.
[11:52] That kind of flow of data and process, the whole eLearning industry
would not have been born had it not been for Digital Asset Management.
[12:09] All of the video clips that people play as part of their class, moving things
around from this folder to that other folder, being able to create new classes
and training sessions, new educational sessions that are built off of learning
blocks from other training classes, being able to customize courses, none of that
stuff would happen without a Digital Asset Management.
[12:35] If you look at the rise of Blackboard, Blackboard is now an incredibly profitable
company. They did their IPO. I look at Rosetta Stone and they’re used to a
Digital Asset Management.
[12:47] I look at Audible.com, it was there with their audio versions of books.
These are all companies that have found incredible amounts of success by leveraging
Digital Asset Management and selling better to their customers, meeting
their customer’s expectations.
[13:05] Quicker time to market, better product, it’s all through the leveraging of
technology. Henrik: [13:12] Anthony, what advice would you like to give to DAM professionals
or people aspiring to become DAM professionals? Anthony: [13:20] There’s a place in the US called, Silicon Valley and there happens
to be thousands of web startups there. [13:28] A lot of web startups start
with a problem statement. What problem are you trying to fix and how does
your web startup fix that problem?
[13:38] I would recommend to anybody that wants to become a DAM professional
to figure out what problems there are and then create a solution
that’s DAM specific. Start with a problem statement you can start at your
own company.
[13:55] No matter what the company, what the entity, there’s probably a process
that’s at risk for falling apart because of ill management. There’s probably a process
that could use a dose of technology.
[14:12] These kinds of problems that can be fixed with a proper process is ripe
for a Digital Asset Management system.
[14:22] There’s so much sense of media even non-media companies because
of the rise of media and consumable media on the web, consider themselves,
“Part-time media companies.”
[14:37] Digital Asset Management then comes into play for seemingly unrelated
industries and companies. For anybody aspiring to get into the DAM, Digital
Asset Management field, start with a problem.
[14:52] Look at your company and say, “Wow, this really is a problem.” Then,
think, “How can this problem be fixed with Digital Asset Management?”
[15:03] I encourage people to go out and meet other people in the Digital Asset
Management field, go up to them. Find them on LinkedIn and go up to them at
a meetup.
[15:15] Pose your problem to them and say, “My company has this issue, how
would you fix it?” You never know what that Digital Asset Management professor
may give to you.
[15:30] If you go to your boss with that, that boss will see you as “This person is
trying to fix problems, trying to help, trying to leverage technology.” You make
far about a whole new job description for yourself in the process.
[15:41] That’s where I would start, with a problem statement. Henrik: [15:45] Thank you, Anthony. For more on Digital Asset Management,
log onto anotherdamblog.com, thanks again.
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.
How do you deal the challenges of cultural heritage and DAM?
What advice would you have for DAM professionals or people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Transcript:
Henrik de Gyor: [0:02] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset
Management. My name is Henrik de Gyor. Today I am speaking with Jake
Nadal. Jake, how are you? Jacob Nadal: [0:11] Real well, Henrik. Thank you. Henrik: [0:12] Jake, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management? Jacob: [0:16] I am the Preservation Officer for the UCLA Library. I’ve been involved
with the whole digital library effort in some way or another for about a
decade now. Preservation officer, I might explain to you something about it as
two parts, in terms of Digital Asset Management. One of those is kind of trying
to get assets that are worth managing in the first place, and the other is making
sure that all those assets will maintain value. [0:45] They’ll still be usable from
one asset management system to another, that as we sometimes have a planning
horizon that stretches into decades and longer, until we expect that at a
certain point those assets will move from system to system.
[0:59] Both of them are sort of shepherding roles for our digital assets, our
digital material. And I think the thing that unites those is that we look to have
certain technical criteria, certain specifications and standards that we produce
content to. Of course, I work with a great team all across the UCLA library and
the UCLA system. We’re really a set of people with very specific technical competencies
for each step of the chain. Henrik: [1:26] Excellent. How do you deal with the challenges of cultural heritage
and DAM? Jacob: [1:33] There again, I think there are two parts here. One, and probably
the most interesting to our audience here, is the actual internal workflow. The
other part is really about what cultural heritage assets are and the particular mission
obligation that comes with that. [1:50] In our workflow, we’ve been talking a
lot about having a three part strategy. It might be better to say a three part test
for preservation activities at UCLA library. One is that we always try to have a
method for doing analysis or doing some information gathering about whatever
our problem is. That leads to a proposed treatment or a course of action. We try
not to act until we have some evidence.
[2:17] And all of that we try to have happen in house and have that be the bulk
of the work, just as a matter of good management. We want to, when we’ve
done out part, have it be more or less ready to go.
[2:30] And then, knowing that we will be either incomplete…We may have subject
expertise that we lack, which is usually the case. If we’re dealing with, say,
an old Armenian scroll and we’re creating a digital version of that, we may need
to talk to language and subject experts to figure out how that will be most
useful to its users.
[2:52] Sometimes that’s an area of technical concern. Very often, as we’re dealing
with, right now, a big topic for us is research data. Our scientists especially
produce enormous research data sets, and in the arts and humanities, it’s very
common now to use multiple sources of data, so there may be news video
feeds, there may be GIS information, and those may come together in a research
project.
[3:22] Very often, within the library itself, we have to manage that asset, or a
group of assets, but we need to look outside to a particular technical expert to
help guide us on the best way to do that. That second stage is sort of outside
review and approval, and then we always try to have a hedge, some strategy
in case things go wrong. Sometimes that’s as simple as just retaining a previous
version.
[3:49] Sometimes that’s retaining an alternate format, so video is an area right
now where we know what formats are good for use right now, but we’re very
much uncertain about what formats will be good for use and repurposing even
five years from now, and sometimes an alternate format is simply the authentic
artifact. We may scan a photo, and we may do a lot of work with that scanned
digital version, but, of course, we’re going to keep the original photo.
[4:20] Sometimes that’s identifying a third party provider that we can fall back
on. Especially as we work with publishers, we’re often licensing content to make
available to our users, so we do certain things to care for that content, but then
we will also arrange with that publisher and a third party.
[4:36] A group like Portico is an example, and the LOCKSS Project, or the
CLOCKSS Project. That stands for “Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe.” That’s a
group that operates out of Stanford. They both work with libraries and publishers
to be a third party archiving service, so there’s always a third group that can
provide access.
[4:55] We always try to have some sort of hedge, knowing that we’re kind of
planning for the future, and, of course, that planning for the future part is, in
some ways, the thing we do least, day to day.
[5:08] We have a job just like everybody else, but it’s part of what makes the job
so fantastic, that we’re building this collection, or record, or last resort, and, of
course, the materials we get to work with are incredible artifacts, this wonderful
digital versions of them, and now, increasingly, the born digital research projects
of some of the best and brightest.
[5:29] UCLA, of course, has got a got a pretty interesting community of people
creating digital assets here. Henrik: [5:35] Excellent. What advice would you have to give to DAM professionals
or people aspiring to become a DAM professional? Jacob: [5:41] I don’t know if you’re familiar with Tom Peterson, sort of a management
guru management consultant. He has this great catch phrase “Out read
the other guy.” [laughter] Jacob: [5:54] I find myself saying that a lot lately. My own engagement with the
DAM community comes from recognizing that the conversations I was having
with digital library folks and with preservation colleagues were very similar to
conversations I was encountering in this other community, this Digital Asset
Management community. [6:17] That’s a two way street. I would encourage
anyone in DAM, and especially people who have an interest in the cultural heritage
side of it, to look at your related professions. Look at both the customers
you serve as well as people who maybe share some of the same technical base
and technical infrastructure.
[6:38] Your photographers, your records managers. We’re all trying to do some
of the same things whether we call it library science, inventory management,
manufacturing. The people I find who are at the head of the game and are the
most interesting to work with are the people who can see what can be interpreted
or adapted to fit their means.
[7:03] In cultural heritage specifically there’s some more practical things, or more
immediate things. A number of Library Information Science programs now and
offering specializations in digital libraries and digital information.
[7:18] My alma mater, Indiana University, does a lot of work in this area. There’s a
program called DIGIN, DIGIN, at Arizona. I know Chapel Hill and Michigan more
and more. Of course, they’re all just trying to keep up with UCLA.
[laughter] Jacob: [7:36] All those programs are worth comparing and considering. Very
specifically in cultural heritage, it’s worth knowing that there’s a bias towards
open and or free software solutions. Henrik: [7:47] Makes sense. Jacob: [7:48] If you know that LAMP stack, LINUX, Apache, MySQL, PHP you’re
in really good shape in terms of tech skills. Of course, none of us are out from
under the shadow of Adobe. [8:01] Certainly in my sector a lot of the tools we
use day-to-day look a lot like the tools that are in use elsewhere. Henrik: [8:10] Of course. Jacob: [8:12] Or in XML. Henrik: [8:15] Yes, always important. Jacob: [8:16] If you’ve got XML, the rest comes pretty easily. Henrik: [8:19] True. Thanks Jake. Jacob: [8:21] My pleasure. I’m glad I could do this. Henrik: [8:23] For more on Digital Asset Management, log on to AnotherDAMblog.com. Thanks again.
Another DAM Podcast 