Based on the blog post from Another DAM Blog:
Written and read by Henrik de Gyor
Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic, Spotify, TuneIn, and wherever you find podcasts.
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Here are the questions asked:
Transcript:
Henrik de Gyor: This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset
Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Louis King. Louis,
how are you?
Louis King: [0:09] I’m great.
Henrik: [0:10] Louis, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Louis: [0:13] I’m at Yale University. I’m the Digital Information Architect for the
Office of Digital Assets and Infrastructure. [0:21] Our focus is working on Digital
Asset Management at the enterprise level for the institution. This really means
looking across all the disciplines and the activities of the university, how digital
media is being used and how Digital Asset Management could be applied.
[0:39] What we’ve found over the years is that digital media is actually embedded
in every aspect of the institution. This involves our research endeavors in
which we have rich media artifacts coming in from the field. It involves teaching
and learning activities, and our dissemination of knowledge in publication.
[1:01] As we looked across the terrain and saw so many people using digital
media, we also found that there are a lot of silos of digital media and that we
couldn’t fluently move our content from one endeavor into the others.
[1:18] For instance, we might grab field activities some digital recordings of
indigenous languages being spoken from native speakers, and we bring them
into the research environment but we then couldn’t use them immediately in the
classroom environment either.
[1:37] As we looked at those silos, we really came to work on this idea of
being able to have data flow fluidly and in particular, digital media. Digital
Asset Management became an obvious piece of infrastructure to look at. As
we looked at infrastructure, it also became clear that it was not just a technical
solution.
[2:00] One of the things that we have to understand is a construct that we’ve
built around infrastructure and core infrastructure, which is actually it’s intersection
of a particular community of practice that contents that I think work with
policy and shared practices that are required to facilitate at work, then, finally,
the technology.
[2:25] Our work in Digital Asset Management is to work with all members of the
institution to understand where that intersection is for that type of work they’re
doing. When we looked at Digital Asset Management, we looked at people who
had a compelling need, a particular community of practice that was ready to
move into a more managed approached to their media production and dissemination
and stewardship.
[2:54] It turned out that our museums were working on similar solutions independently,
and we started there to bring people together around Digital Asset
Management. Shortly after, we also brought in the Yale University Library.
[3:12] This group of cultural heritage stewards of people who maintain a presence
of our cultural heritage for our use today in advancing our work had a
practical set of purposes that needed to be supported.
[3:28] They had identified content to work with. We were able to identify policies
and refined and shared in common practice. Then, we were able to configure a
technical solution in a Digital Asset Management environment that would meet
those needs.
[3:45] As we moved forward, we begin to look at what are other communities of
practice. We’re beginning to bring in other communities of practice. We have
the communication teams coming on board to start looking at how we advance
communications work. This is digital media production all the way through to
Web communications. Also, since we already have cultural heritage people on
board, it’s when those are valuable communications that we want to maintain
them for a long time. How do they move into the more archival and stewardship
arena of digital media?
[4:21] In the future phase, we’re looking at bringing more of the research community
and the teaching and learning community into the environment.
Henrik: [4:29] Why does the university use Digital Asset Management?
Louis: [4:31] The university is focusing on using Digital Asset Management to
meet its core mission. In the areas that I touched on, the research, teaching,
and learning, dissemination and publication. Those are core to what the institution
does. [4:46] The ability to have a mechanism that makes us more fluid. That
makes us be able to connect pieces of content together in order to enhance
discovery.
[5:01] To enhance dissemination. To enhance the learning experience becomes
fundamental to our work. We look at this technology to facilitate that.
[5:11] In addition, what we’re finding is that it’s a complex production environment
because of our many disciplines. By being able to put a shared and
common approach to media management in place, we’re actually able to develop
some basic efficiencies.
[5:28] We’re able to aggregate our storage positioning. We’re able to aggregate
our content. We’re able to do training that moves from one discipline
to the next.
[5:39] As staff moves, they bring the skills necessary to do the same kind of work
applied to a different discipline. These become fundamental to the everyday
working on the institution.
Henrik: [5:48] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and
people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Louis: [5:53] It’s a great field. It’s really exciting to work in media management.
You get to span all kinds of creative works that are going on. You bring value
to the institution or the organization that you’re working for. That’s fascinating.
[6:13] I would suggest that you not expect to live in a comfort zone, at all. These
are very complex issues for complex environments. They have complex legalities
and practice issues to them.
[6:29] They are all at the center of various types of organizational change.
Change in the way that we do things. Where there’s change, there’s a certain
amount of pain.
[6:40] We work with people whose roles are threatened and other people who
we can’t move fast enough for. There’s a bit of volatility in the field. You should
want that kind of excitement in your life.
[6:54] The bottom line on this is that it’s really an area where we’re building,
where we’re constructing and we’re discovering new ways of doing work. A lot
of that work is very compelling and has tremendous opportunities associated
with it. It’s very exciting.
Henrik: [7:15] Thank you, Louis.
Louis: [7:16] You’re welcome. My pleasure.
Henrik: [7:17] For more on Digital Asset Management log on to
AnotherDAMblog.com. Another DAM Podcast is now available on Audioboom,
iTunes and the Tech Podcast Network. Thanks again.
Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic, Spotify, TuneIn, and wherever you find podcasts.
Need Digital Asset Management advice and assistance?
Another DAM Consultancy can help. Schedule a call today
Here are the questions asked:
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 Tom Barnouw.
Tom [0:09], how are you?
Tom Barnouw: [0:10] Good, thanks. How you doing?
Henrik: [0:11] Good. Tom, how are you involved with Digital Asset
Management?
Tom: [0:14] Well, I work for WWE, been here about six years, and I retired as a
systems engineer. I’m involved with Digital Asset Management. [0:24] We have
many live shows a year, thousands and thousands of photographs are taken
at each live event, and those assets make their way back to our company for
processing. They are used for a variety of things from websites to publications
to any type of creative services project. As these photos come in, they’re processed
by our photo department and uploaded to servers, at which time our
asset management system catalogs all those. There is metadata written to each
asset so that everything is searchable easily.
[1:03] There are many layers we have on top of our assets that can satisfy different
work flows. We’ve got certain catalogs that are web enabled. Other things
can be sent out via email, with voting and approval processes that can take
place and things. We’re web enabled data where end-users can vote and actually
have metadata written back to the assets.
[1:30] A significant process is in place for easily sharing assets around the company,
without the need to duplicate the files or copy them to other storage
medium. My involvement is in managing that workflow and trying to find efficiencies
throughout the company and ways that we can leverage the asset
management system.
Henrik: [1:51] How does your organization wrestle with DAM?
Tom: [1:54] It’s been an interesting evolution over the last six years or so.
Working with Cumulus has grown tremendously over those six years, aside from
just doing the system administration of the backend infrastructure. I think one of
the most important and impactful things that’s occurred over that time is really
studying the workflow of our users, and I would say the lifecycle management
of the data that our asset management system tracks. [2:24] We’ve evolved into
a very nice system now. We have several million assets in our system and, as an
asset ages, we need to move it, not just from the asset management side, but
from the storage side, from disk to tape, how does that process?
[2:42] The first thing we wrestled with was how do we manage the lifecycle of
this data? As an asset becomes older it’s used much, much less frequently. Do
we need to keep it on disk? If we do move it to tape, how do we easily access
that asset on tape? We struggled on solving some of those problems.
[3:01] We’ve come to a very nice place with it now where it all works very, very
nicely, including giving the end-user the ability to manage those assets, to some
degree, to a much more limited degree than I can, but still, they have access to
things, even when they’re on tape, which is nice.
[3:18] Other challenges I’d say, we continue to work with is the various workflows.
It’s one thing to have an asset management in place, cataloging assets, but
there are so many different this is going to be different in every company but,
there are so many different workflows.
[3:35] One department or one person may have very different needs for those
assets than another, understanding those various workflows, and customizing
the asset management system to blend in well with those required workflows.
In most cases, improve on those workflows. We’ve been able to leverage our
system to create significant efficiencies in workflows for different people in different
departments.
[4:04] In terms of how we wrestled with that, I think, that process hasn’t stopped,
in fact, I feel like I’m just now at the beginning. Now that we’ve got a very solid
foundation for our system in place managing lifecycle, I can turn my attention
much more to tackling various workflows and creating efficiencies within
the company.
Henrik: [4:23] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and
people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Tom: [4:28] I think it would probably have to segue way from what I just talked
about, which is there are so many different things. Obviously, each company is
going to have different needs, various storage needs, depending on how much
data you’re actually dealing with. That can significantly impact what lifecycle
management you may or may not need to have in place. [4:53] I think, again, just
what I talked about. Try to think into the future, 1, 5, 10 years from now where
do you think these assets are going to live, what access do you think people will
need to them you can start with that foundation, then, trying to understand the
various workflows that may exist within a company.
[5:16] If you can do a lot of groundwork ahead of time, before deploying something,
even if you have deployed something, start at that 30,000foot view to try
to get a good understanding from the needs of the company as a whole, and
then you can begin to zero in on different topics and processes that you can
help with.
Henrik: [5:36] Thanks, Tom.
Tom: [5:37] No problem. My pleasure.
Henrik: [5:39] For more on Digital Asset Management, log on to
AnotherDAMblog.com. Another DAM Podcast is available on Audioboom,
iTunes and the Tech Podcast Network. Thanks again.
Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic, Spotify, TuneIn, and wherever you find podcasts.
Need Digital Asset Management advice and assistance?
Another DAM Consultancy can help. Schedule a call today
Here are the questions asked:
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 Klee. Dave, how are you?
Dave Klee: [0:09] I’m doing well, Henrik. How are you?
Henrik: [0:10] Good. Dave, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Dave: [0:14] Well, I actually read one of your earlier blog postings about making your elevator pitch, so I’ll give you mine so far. I’m a systems engineer, working in media asset management at NBC, so most of what I do focuses around organizing video files for NBC News. [0:30] Whenever you see old footage that shows of up of, maybe, a politician saying something contradictory, or some major event that’s happened in the past, I work on the systems that help people within the company find that stuff and put it into stories that they’re working on for the news. [0:45] As you can imagine, those systems are pretty big and complicated, so they need a lot of attention, and I work on a team that helps support them and figure out how to make them work better.
Henrik: [0:53] How does a broadcasting organization use Digital Asset Management?
Dave: [0:56] Well, there are a lot of uses within NBC, and I’ll only speak to the ones I know about. There are some things on the distribution side, obviously, that I don’t work with very much. People when we’re done making a TV show or a program, we’ll ship it off to someone else, and usually in many different formats, and a variety of different ways, so we have systems to facilitate that. [1:17] Also, when making TV programming, we’re working a lot with collateral material or things that would support that programming, so you might have graphic design for a website, or DVD material, or a billboard, or an advertisement. We have systems that help facilitate that, that I don’t work with very much. [1:33] What I do is really work with NBC News, and when I say, “News,” I mean “Nightly News,” anything that happens on MSNBC, the cable channel, the “Today Show,” and then some of our longer shows, the news magazines like “Dateline” and “Rock Center with Brian Williams.” [1:49] In these systems, there are really two major things we’re looking to accomplish with Digital Asset Management. First and foremost, it’s to enable daily editorial workflow, to let people get through the day, and also to build a longterm catalog and archive. I can briefly talk about what those mean, and I think it’s very interesting, because there are some tensions between those. [2:11] First of all, for a daily editorial workflow, it’s a big place, so there are a lot of people working on a lot of different things, as you can imagine, and we need systems that can tie people together, to allow them to collaborate, and share information, and share core footage, underlying what they’re working on. [2:30] A lot of times, things will end up being used across our different platforms. We might have a story that’s developing throughout the day on the cable channel that will incorporate a small piece with the nightly news, or we might have a small piece on the nightly news that ends up becoming a larger piece on one of the news magazine shows like Rock Center. [2:49] We need systems that help people work together, share footage, and we have producers working with editors. Sometimes, we have multiple video editors working on the same project. We just need systems that really facilitate that workflow and get people working together. [3:05] On the other side of things, we’re working on a long-term catalog and archive. Like, I’d imagine many broadcast organizations, we started with a lot of footage on film. Over time, this footage on film got migrated to videotape. Over time, the old videotapes got migrated to new videotapes. Now, we’re taking these videotapes and starting to put them into a centralized system, a centralized repository so that people can find them in the future. [3:36] As we’re doing that, we’re working on cleaning up the metadata because over time, metadata entry was done by many different people and manipulated in many different ways when things moved from one system to the other as you can imagine. There’s a lot of metadata cleanup that’s done during this process. [3:54] Then, there’s new footage, too, that’s constantly coming in. A lot of the new stuff that comes into the building comes in on satellite feeds from all over the world, and so we need some people who are sitting there adding metadata and cataloging things that are coming in in real time. [4:08] This footage is used both in future programming and sometimes, it’s sold to other people because one of the things we can do is license this footage. We need to keep track of rights and what we own and what we’re able sell to other people so when people are making other documentaries or TV shows or films, they may come to us looking for footage. [4:31] I think these two different things, the long-term cataloging and the short-term workflow, are really interesting because they have such different needs. I think there are really a few key conflicts or tensions that we have to think about and work on when we’re trying to support these systems and when we’re trying to fix them and build new ones. [4:54] One of the main ones is accessibility versus security. For daily workflow, we really want assets to be as accessible as possible. We want people to be able to get whatever they might need to get their job done, but in the long-term, you generally want to carefully want to manage your permission structure and make sure that people only get access to the stuff that they should have access to and prevent people from doing things that might be bad like accidentally deleting assets or changing metadata when they shouldn’t. [5:25] If you think about it in terms of a physical place, a building with doors, for the daily workflow, you might really want everyone to have the doors open and people just get wherever they need to go. But, for this long-term archive, you want carefully give out keys and carefully control which keys open which doors, so people only get access to the stuff that is appropriate. [5:47] That’s a real tension. Another big one is speed versus safety. For the daily workflow, you want people to get access to things as quickly as possible, and you want that to be a seamless process. We need systems that are fast enough to be able to grab something while it’s recording, put it into a project, and then ship it off to be played back on the news. [6:09] But that process flies in the face of building systems that are extra safe, because the safer systems aren’t necessarily the fastest systems. When you have a long-term archive, if you really want it to be safe, you want to put things on the safest media you can, but often the safest media is the slowest. [6:26] Another big tension for us is flexibility versus reliability, or maybe flexibility versus consistency. A lot of different people in the building, and you want to allow people to work the ways that they work best so that they can get their jobs done. That means you need to be flexible in daily workflows, but at the same time you really want to produce consistent results for this archive. You want metadata that’s full and complete, and you want things to be very consistent for the long term. [6:54] That’s a big tension for us. The last one I’ll mention is usability versus quality. Ideally, and this is very true for video files, you want the highest possible quality video file in your archive, but there’s a price to that. The highest quality video files not only can be very big, which makes your system much more expensive, because you have to build in extra storage and extra bandwidth to accommodate such big files. [7:22] It can also be complicated when you’re dealing with the highest quality files, because often these are original files that came right out of a camera, and many different cameras use many different types of video files. The video world is very fragmented when it comes to types of video. If you put the original video file, which is arguably the highest quality, into your archive, you may be dealing with a file format that doesn’t exist in a few years, or a file format that’s very complicated to get into the system that want to use it in. [7:55] You end up with these very complicated workflows that make the system less usable. By streamlining a system on just a few codecs, a few types of video, and making them compressed or standardized in a certain way, it can make the system much easier to use, much easier to build. But that’s a real tension that we’re always trying to figure out, because the archival aspect demands quality, and the workflow aspect really demands usability. [8:25] These tensions, I’d imagine, are in a lot of different technologies, but I think they’re just amplified in a big broadcast news environment, because there’s a huge difference between how the fastest system would perform and the safest system. Small choices you make in different types of video formats would demand a whole different type of architecture. [8:45] Really, we need, for the broadcast world, systems that can serve both masters. We need a short-term fast and flexible workflow enabling tool, and we need a long-term, secure, high quality, centralized repository. Both those things need to happen, and I think that provides some interesting challenges and some opportunities.
Henrik: [9:05] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Dave: [9:09] For people who are DAM professionals, I’ve actually listened to some of your other podcasts, I wouldn’t necessarily purport to have any advice to offer them. I’ve gotten some useful tips from the ones I’ve listened to. But, for people looking to get into it, or looking in from the outside, I can tell you there are a few things that have really helped organize my thinking around Digital Asset Management since I’ve gotten into it. [9:31] One of them is about these choices that you have to make, and understanding that Digital Asset Management, once you really get into it, I think is about making some tough choices, often between two different things that are right, but they can’t both be right at the same time. Successful organizations are the ones that, at the outset, do a lot of self-analysis, really look at what the organization needs and wants, and take times to discuss these tradeoffs, because not only does that help you build a better system, but I think that helps you build consensus and set expectations about what your DAM will do and what it won’t do well. [10:12] The second thing is, as a technologist, I’m constantly trying to remind myself that technology doesn’t always have all the answers for us. Those answers are really within the organization or within workflows. [10:26] Rather than just adopting whatever new technology comes out and then trying to force that into the workflow for the users, I think it’s a much more powerful way to work when you centralize on your workflows, how people want to work and how your organization wants to be. Let that drive your technological decisions. [10:46] Then, I think those technologies can really fall into place. You make those decisions from a place of much more power. [10:54] The final thing I might share is that I really believe Digital Asset Management is a journey, not a destination, per se. There are a lot of vendors that I think will encourage this big bang idea of you buy something off the shelf, you implement it and you put all your stuff inside. Bang, your assets are managed, problem is solved. [11:16] I think the more you do things with Digital Asset Management, the more you realize that’s not the case. It’s an ongoing process. Even once you’ve got a very good system in place, over time it’s going to need to adapt to new people, to new workflows, new technologies, new ideas. A good system is going to do that for a very long time, and that’s OK .
[11:37] Once I stopped looking at Digital Asset Management as a problem that could be solved and started looking at it as a process that could be managed, that really helped me, not only make some better decisions, but set some better expectations within the organization and help build systems that just made more sense. [11:57] For people starting out or looking at this process, I think those are some things that have helped me ground my thinking.
Henrik: [12:04] Well, thanks, Dave.
Dave: [12:05] Thank you. It has been a pleasure.
Henrik: [12:06] For more on Digital Asset Management, log onto AnotherDAMblog.com. Another DAM Podcast is available on Audioboom, iTunes and the Tech Podcast Network. Thanks again.
Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic, Spotify, TuneIn, and wherever you find podcasts.
Need Digital Asset Management advice and assistance?
Another DAM Consultancy can help. Schedule a call today
Another DAM Podcast