How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
How does an organization focused on gems use a DAM?
What do you do to encourage user adoption of the 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 Judy Colbert.
[0:08] Judy, how are you? Judy Colbert: [0:10] Hi. I’m fine, thanks, Henrik. Henrik: [0:12] Judy, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management? Judy: [0:15] Well, I’m administrator of GIA’s DAM system. I deal with the daily
operation for the system on the front end. The technical side is handled by our
IT department. [0:26] My team, the visual resources library, consists of two catalogers,
a digital resources specialist, a visual resources librarian and me.
[0:36] When we began our DAM project around 2002, I was co-project manager.
With the involvement of committee members from various departments, we
decided on a vendor, came up with policies and procedures in using the DAM.
We, also, developed our property models and taxonomy at that time.
[0:56] After implementation, the visual resources library took over as caretakers
of DAM. I had a smaller staff in the beginning and did much more of the importing
of assets and editing of metadata. But as my team grew, more of my time’s
spent in management. Henrik: [1:13] How is an organization focused on gems use a DAM? Judy: [1:18] One of the more important things we do at GIA is teach gemology,
and the jewelry manufacturing arts. It’s very visual and you need a lot of images
to teach students about the large variety of gemstones, how to identify them
and how to determine their quality. [1:34] The Gemological Institute of America
develops its own courses in print and, more recently, in eLearning. We have staff
and freelance photographers who produce a lot of images. They need to be
organized and made accessible, not only to our education department, but to
marketing, PR, the laboratory, and the research departments, too.
[1:57] They all use images for a variety of uses, such as for scientific journals, education
catalogs, lectures and instructional use. Henrik: [2:06] Great. What do you do to encourage user adoption of the DAM? Judy: [2:11] That’s a good question and one we continually ask ourselves how to
do. One thing we start off with is to provide training to new users. At first, because
it was a larger number, we held group training sessions. Now, we mostly
have one on one training. [2:28] It’s really important to get users to feel comfortable
in using DAM, especially if they’ve never used it before. We try to simplify
and not overwhelm them right away with all the features that are available in
DAM. We show them what they need to do to get started, and if they want to
know more or have a higher level of access, we can instruct them more then.
[2:50] Other ways we’ve tried to gain user adoption is by communicating with
our users by way of newsletters and a blog. We’ve also held special events, like
awards ceremonies, to acknowledge our power users. Photo identification socials
to identify unknown people in old photos, and open houses to give demos
and answer some questions. Henrik: [3:13] Excellent. I have a link to your blog on my blog, AnotherDAMblog.com. What is the URL to your blog? Judy: [3:21] It’s dam4gia.blogspot.com. It’s mainly, an internal blog for our own
users, but people from the outside are welcome to view it if they like. Henrik: [3:36] Excellent. There’s a lot of nice imagery on there. Judy: [3:38] Well, thank you. Henrik: [3:39] What advice would you like to give to DAM professionals and
people aspiring to become DAM professionals? Judy: [3:45] Read up, learn from other DAM professionals, and make a project
plan before you take the leap. When we started our project, there wasn’t as
much information available as there is now. Take advantage of learning from
other people’s experiences and mistakes. [3:59] Start small and build up. It can
be very overwhelming to try to do it all at once.
[4:05] Finally, be flexible and willing to adapt. Changes will happen. Henrik: [4:11] Excellent. Well, thank you, Judy. Judy: [4:12] Oh, you’re welcome. Henrik: [4:14] For more on Digital Asset Management, log onto AnotherDAMblog.com. Thanks again.
How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
How does the Air Force use Digital Asset Management?
How do you get unstructured assets under control?
How did you develop new metadata panels for use with the Adobe Creative Suite?
What advice would you like to give to DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Transcript:
Henrik de Gyor: [0:00] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset
Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Cynthia Hilsinger.
Cynthia, how are you? Cynthia Hilsinger: [0:10] I’m just fine, Henrik. Henrik: [0:12] Great. Cynthia, how are you involved with Digital Asset
Management? Cynthia: [0:14] I manage a series of files, images, et cetera, about a terabyte, at
Headquarters Air Force Information Media Management and Graphics. Henrik: [0:25] Great. How does the Air Force use Digital Asset Management? Cynthia: [0:28] The Air Force uses Digital Asset Management to control its
unstructured assets. These unstructured assets are kept for remanipulation and
repurposing. Information requests come in for the Air Force. We can pull that
information quickly, serve it up to our customers. [0:48] It all becomes part of
telling the Air Force story. This is what we do and having those assets handy,
findable, discoverable, ready to be pulled, served up, made into a product that
can be consumed by the customer or the public, that’s an important storytelling
point for us and our office. Henrik: [1:10] How do you get unstructured assets under control? Cynthia: [1:13] One, you have to deal with people and personalities first, content
makers. That was the most difficult item for me. Making sure people understand
that data is a corporate asset, and it has a very real value, and having
them understand that. Henrik: [1:36] How do you develop new metadata panels for use with the
Adobe Creative Suite? Cynthia: [1:42] We were given new governance that we were required to
add a VIRIN number to our Creative Suite files. We use a lot of Illustrator and
Photoshop. In the military, in the DoD in particular, we have what’s called
a VIRIN number. It’s the Visual Information Record Identification Number.
Currently, there was no way to add that VIRIN number into the metadata panel.
The practice had been to rename a file and give it this long VIRIN number. [2:15]
To give you a sample of what a VIRIN number is, think of your car VIN number,
the Vehicle Identification Number, which is a very long number. We have this
very long VIRIN number, important because each data asset, each visual information
product has its own individual VIRIN number. It’s almost like a thumbprint.
How are we going to add that without changing a lot of file names to a
hard to remember VIRIN number?
[2:47] When I was looking at the metadata panels that come incorporated with
Adobe Creative Suite, I realized that they were powered by XMP. I contacted
that company and tried to develop some way to add that information in and
change those panels around. After some time, they said, “Well, you know, it’s a
little bit difficult. We had a few requests from other people in the military wanting
the same item.” So it was a common pain point for everyone in the DoD.
[3:24] I brought it forward to Defense Media Activity, and between developers,
Pound Hill, and Adobe, and Defense Media Activity, and understand, trying to
get the government from many different arms. Defense Media Activity said,
“Well, let us massage this a bit.” And I was keeping the communication lines
open, adding some insight on how we were developing things in our name
schema, and I wanted to keep the file name the same.
[3:55] Well, everybody signed off. Adobe said, “Not a problem.” DMA said,
“We’ll host this. It can be found on a DoD website free to the government
users.” Now we can open up a metadata panel that is named for us. It’s a metadata
panel, and that allows us now to keep the file name the same and add
metadata in the appropriate places and makes a smooth transition.
[4:31] My goal was to make each file smarter. With everyone’s cooperation, it all
came together. So now we have a new metadata panel that can be inserted into
our Adobe software, and Adobe is thrilled with it. They’re out saying to their
federal customers, “Hey, look what we have. Please use that.” Federal users
they’re happy, since they don’t have to go some other place. Henrik: [4:59] What advice would you like to give to DAM professionals and
people aspiring to become data professionals? Cynthia: [5:05] I would say to begin with, when you come into any organization,
take a survey of the work processes there, and take the survey of all the data
that is in-house. Learn how your office is ingesting data, how it is being moved
throughout the office, and its work processes how it is being made, held,
and kept.
[5:29] Once you have a baseline of what is and when you know what you’re
currently doing and how to do it, getting a DAM system or building a DAM
system and having metrics is quite critically important. That takes a fair amount
of time to understand, so that’s a first critical step. After you know what your
processes are, the next item that I would say to young DAM professionals is get
a naming system.
[6:02] Make sure that you have a schema for how things are organized. Get a
naming system, making sure that there are no blank spaces, no unusual characters
except hyphen and underscore. That way files become platform agnostic.
We use Macs in our office, but many people have PCs. That way they can be
sent across the Internet without adding extra characters.
[6:28] That would be step two. Naming conventions and getting an understanding
of what things are called, and making sure all files fit that naming convention
and that organizational schema. Step one, know your processes. Step two,
naming conventions and schema development. Henrik: [6:50] Excellent. Thank you so much, Cynthia. Cynthia: [6:52] Thank you very much for having me on your blogcast. Henrik: [6:56] For more on Digital Asset Management, log onto AnotherDAMblog.com. Thanks again.
What advice would you like to give 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 Magan Arthur.
Magan, how are you? Magan Arthur: [0:11] I’m doing very well. Thank you. Henrik: [0:13] Magan, how are you involved in Digital Asset Management? Magan: [0:16] I’ve been involved for a very, very long time going back now over
10 years to one of the startup companies in California. We were at the front lines
when Digital Asset Management was an acronym that was created. [0:34] The
claim to fame there was they produced the first really Web based Digital Asset
Management tool. It was around 2000 when client server and VOI P was the big
change over. Henrik: [0:51] Magan, you wrote an article entitled, “Just What is DAM?” Is this
definition static or changing, and why? Magan: [1:00] Yeah, I think that it’s still quite relevant. I do notice that [laughs]
on Wikipedia that article is still referenced. I believe that we still see confusion
out there between what is traditional content management and the CMS software
world. [1:25] Often Digital Asset Management is used in such a broad way
that it encompasses everything, including even the document management
systems, nowadays rarely referenced.
[1:38] By the time that I wrote the article, document management was still also
a big piece of the content management pie. I believe that the article still holds
value and that it really differentiates DAM from all these other tools, focusing
on management media rich libraries versus templates for publication versus
documents.
[2:06] I think there’s still a value in defining DAM in comparison to those
other tools. Henrik: [2:12] What advice would you like to give DAM professionals and
people aspiring to become DAM professionals? Magan: [2:19] I’ve been thinking about that ever since you sent me those questions
up front. I would say, for DAM professionals, I have the similar advice I
would give to most of the clients that I speak to when we speak about DAM.
[2:39] DAM means so much to so many people. To be an expert in all of them is
probably impossible.
[2:48] If you look at Digital Asset Management as this core capability of managing
in which media in libraries is mostly geared for reuse of content much more
so than for direct publishing and consumption by end users, that again would
differentiate here the CMS versus a DAM.
[3:11] Even in that moment, we have now the wide spread acceptance of Digital
Asset Management technologies in broadcast and in parts of Hollywood in
movie production. I would say that we see very specific requirements and needs
around just that specific area.
[3:32] The news organization would have very different needs and uses for DAM
than the newspaper photo archive.
[3:41] I would say that one advice I could give to DAM professionals is be sure
what your specialty should be, because setting up these very different systems
for different user types and different asset types really bears specific requirement
and requires knowledge that not everybody has readily at hand.
[4:05] The other aspect, one of the questions that I mostly ponder with many of
my larger clients, is the overall Digital Asset Management and reuse strategy.
Looking at large marketing organizations that often touch all kinds of assets, be
it video, be it banner ads, and content that is more geared towards that use or
be it still print.
[4:36] Photo libraries always come into play. I think that one really has to be clear
about what type of skills and services one wants to provide. Is it the very specific
implementation and skills around a very specific content type?
[4:53] Is it more the strategic aspect of looking at a larger ecosystem of many
different content types that come together? Here I would say the complexity of
consolidating taxonomies enterprises and so on, come into play.
[5:11] I’m not sure if I’m clear or not in my answer but I think the long and short
of it is, be clear what it is that you want to offer, and where you want to specialize.
Are you a strategist? Or are you an expert in a specific arena?
[5:25] There’s so much work out there that any expert in any one arena will probably
have plenty of work. Specifically, if they do a good job. I believe that you
can only do a good job, if you start specializing. Henrik: [5:38] Excellent. Thank you very much. Magan: [5:38] My pleasure. Henrik: [5:39] For more on Digital Asset Management, log onto anotherdamblog.com. Thanks again.
How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Are there any grants available for Digital Asset Management?
What advice would you like to give to DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM Professionals?
Transcript:
Henrik de Gyor: [0:01] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset
Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Linda Tadic. Linda,
how are you? Linda Tadic: [0:09] I’m doing great, Henrik. How are you doing? Henrik: [0:11] Good. Linda, how are you involved with Digital Asset
Management? Linda: [0:15] ; Well, it’s funny, how I’ve come to this might be a little untypical
from how others have. My background is really as a film, video, television, and
audio archivist starting back in the mid ‘80’s when everything was analogue. As
we all know everything has now shifted from analogue to digital. [0:31] I would
say basically all the positions and work I have been doing since 2000 have been
digital related. All of those jobs, once you have digital files, you have to deal
with managing those files from before creation to archiving.
[0:45] Basically I’ve been involved with Digital Asset Management from manager
of the Digital Asset Management system, implementing systems, using archival
preservation workflows through the Digital Asset Management system. So
pretty much mainly for more hands-on implementation, I’ve been involved with
Digital Asset Management. Henrik: [1:08] Great. Linda, are there any grants available for Digital Asset
Management? Linda: [1:14] Well, grants are a little bit tough. Just by the nature of using the
word ‘grants,’ usually that means that the applicant organization must be a nonprofit,
an organization, or an educational, or a cultural heritage institution, because
funders give grants again to nonprofit organizations. [1:31] So thinking in
terms from the educational institution world, those types of organizations don’t
really consider Digital Asset Management at all. When I look at Digital Asset
Management or think about that term, I’m thinking about you’re actually using
a system for the whole life cycle of that digital asset, from creation again all the
way through archiving, and there could be some workflow into creating that
digital asset.
[2:00] What these educational institutes are thinking about though are more like
digital repositories or content management systems. So the grants that they
are receiving and applying for are more to receive grants for digital repositories.
The difference there is whether the repository is accepting digital assets
that have reached the end of their creation period. They are already completed.
They’re done. There is metadata, and those are just uploaded into the
repository. Henrik: [2:25] I see. Linda: [2:26] So then what the organizations are also doing, because this is the
funding world has been very interested in developing further is working with
open source tools. For example, some of the open source digital repository applications
that you might hear out there like Fedora, D Space. Those are two of
the major open source repositories. [2:48] Those are also very complex to implement.
Essentially what’s happening is these nonprofit educational institutions,
they must become software developers themselves. Henrik: [2:59] When you mentioned that they have to become the developers
themselves, is it because a lack of support for those in comparison to other vendors
that may give that type of support? Linda: [3:11] Well, it’s because they have to become software developer
whether they hire staff to work on it or they already have internal talent that can
work with the programming that’s involved. [3:23] What is happening because
once you go open source, you then you’re basically building this tool yourself or
you’re hiring someone to build it for you, then you own the code.
[3:33] In contrast to going out and finding a vendor and provide what you need
and then perhaps doing some customization to suit your purposes.
[3:41] What people are finding though, is ironically, here they’re thinking open
source would be less expensive than going through a vendor but they’re finding
it’s pretty much it’s either more expensive to do it open source because then
you must have the staff in order to keep it going and developing it further. Henrik: [3:55] Sure, and supporting it, I guess. Linda: [3:59] Yeah, so it’s either the same cost or it could be even more expensive
to go the open source route. However, what is appealing to these organizations
and institutions is that they’re then not dependent on a vendor who then
might go out of business. They have this digital management system or a digital
repositories which they have no further support. Henrik: [4:18] What advice would you like to give to DAM professionals and
people aspiring to be DAM professionals? Linda: [4:22] Well, there are two areas that are so key for whether somebody
is already working in the field or somebody who wants to become a DAM professional.
That’s metadata and preservation. [4:34] Metadata, we here so much
about already. I think that as preservation becomes key within Digital Asset
Management systems, which I think is really in the near future, this is going to be
a crucial area of growth in the field.
[4:49] You have to have far more discrete metadata in order to track these digital
preservations actions, which must be done for your digital assets to survive in
the coming years.
[5:01] Metadata, I think that the training in metadata has to go beyond just
saying, “OK , we want to have these fields.” You can’t just use basic keywords
searching any longer, especially when you have thousands of items
and you have perhaps, different working states of files and different preservations
actions.
[5:18] I think that people should start studying metadata, more not just knowing
what the standards are what is the type of metadata that really you should
be tracking.
[5:25] The descript of the technical preservation metadata but importantly along
with that is why does that have to be captured. Just throwing around the terms
of the words, but understanding the concepts behind it. Henrik: [5:37] Makes a lot of sense. Linda: [5:38] Yeah, and the preservation part of it also, as I mentioned that with digital assets you have to keep preserving them. Preservation doesn’t mean
keep backing them and putting them on LTO tape on servers but you have to
keep checking those files and make sure there isn’t any bit lost.
[5:53] As they are moved from one media to another and also there could be perhaps file
formats that are becoming obsolete. We’re all used to video tape becoming
obsolete. Every format can become obsolete.
[6:05] Now it’s digital files that are becoming obsolete. You have to track all of
this information in your digital management system so that you can migrate
even that file format forward. Not just the media that file is sitting on.
[6:17] The only way you do that is to actually have that data in your DAM so you
can just manage all of those preservations actions. Henrik: [6:25] Would you recommend a specific time frame to do that checking
on a regular basis? Let’s say you’ve archived a whole bunch of files with XL
formats, how often would someone check their file formats to make sure they’re
still current and usable? Linda: [6:39] The way and how they can check their file formats to see if they’re,
they would have to look at digital file format registries and really research those
because if in your database in your DAM you can easily search for how many
assets do we have that are in format X because now you’re learning that oops,
format X is no longer going to, it’s a proprietary format. [7:03] It is no longer
being supported. Perhaps we better check all those files and then consider
should we migrate them forward so we can use them in the future.
[7:12] That is just something that is constant. You just, as a Digital Asset
Manager, you have to be aware of what file formats are becoming obsolete in
your database will help you do that and manage those files.
[7:24] As far as moving them to new media then whether it’s LTO tape or even
checking them sitting on servers is the, pretty much what archivists are considering
is every three to five years, you have to check those files and make sure
they are still valid and to checksums are still valid.
[7:41] That there’s no bit loss especially with larger files, if you’re working with
moving image files with large video files you’re absolutely, it is essential to check
those files. Because the larger the file is, the more bits that can be lost. If you
have some bits that are corrupted then that can perhaps corrupt your entire file. Henrik: [8:00] It makes a lot of sense. Check your check sums whatever check
sum you happen to be using like MD5, or whatever and then also making
sure that before you sense that or get rid of a piece of software across your
organization that can read file format X, make sure that you have something else
that can read it or transfer it into another file format. Is that far to say? Linda: [8:22] Right, yes and what many archivist need to do especially if they’re
working with proprietary file formats, is that they are saving the environment in
which those files can be read or rendered. [8:35] That means saving all of the operating
systems that that file can be rendered in. It’s not only saving the assets,
but again, saving the environment in which that asset can be read. Henrik: [8:46] It makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you so much, Linda. Linda: [8:48] You’re very welcome and thank you. Henrik: [8:50] For more on Digital Asset Management, log on to AnotherDAMblog.com. Thanks again.
Another DAM Podcast 