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Another DAM Podcast interview with Jared Bajkowski on Digital Asset Management

Jared Bajkowski discusses Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • How does a Medical Institute use Digital Asset Management?
  • What are the biggest challenges and successes with Digital Asset Management?
  • What advice would you like to share with DAM Professionals and people aspiring to become DAM Professionals?

Transcript:

Henrik De Gyor: [0:02] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Jared Bajkowski. Jared, how are you?
Jared Bajkowski: [0:10] Good. How are you?
Henrik: [0:11] Great. Jared, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Jared: [0:15] I’m the Digital Assets Manager for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. What the Medical Institute is, what we do..we are philanthropic organization. We fund by medical research across the United States. We’re a lot like the NIH.
[0:30] Being the Digital Assets Manager, I am in charge of cataloging, and keeping all of the photos that we use for our publications, all the photos, and graphics, and illustrations that we use on our websites, anything that we use internally for advertisements.
[0:49] Anything that we put out, we want to keep in our management system. What I do is, I gather it, I catalog it, I manage the metadata, I train the other users of the systems in the various departments, whether they be with the Science department or the Science Education department.
[1:10] Personally, I’m in Art Communications, that means that I’m in charge of whatever publications that we put out.
[1:15] The system that we use is a repository for all of the illustrations and all of the photos and everything that we’ve put out. What we want to do is make sure that everything is searchable, everything is findable, everything is safe.
[1:32] That’s an important thing. They’re not scattered around on this hard drive on that hard drive. I run the database and that’s primarily my day to day duties.
Henrik: [1:44] Why does a medical institute use digital asset management?
Jared: [1:46] We’re a large institute. We put out a lot of content and we have a lot of content on our website. We do have publications, we have educational materials that we put out. We have recruitment advertisements for scientists. That ends up being, it’s a lot of content.
[2:03] Now, without a digital assets management system, it’s really hard to keep track on what’s being used where, when it was made, what kind of rights permissions go along with a certain item or a certain record.
[2:18] It can get quickly overwhelming if you’re not certain about where something is or how something should be used or how something was used in the past. What we use it for is pretty much any illustration or photograph or graphic that we use gets put into the database system.
[2:32] It gets tagged with metadata, so we know what it is, who it is, where it was used, why we created it, who created it, who owns the rights. All of the information is important for tracking this kind of thing.
[2:46] I put it into the database before it’s actually published. There we have it, so we can reuse it in the future. It’s something that we can leverage.
[2:54] Someone asks us, “Oh, can I use that illustration? It’s a perfect illustration for an article I’m writing. I’m writing an article on such and such scientist, and I see you have a good portrait of him on your website. Can we use that?”
[3:06] Having a digital access management system allows us to quickly find that item, for one. And two, see who created it, and if we can even can distribute it or who owns the copyrights?
[3:21] This is all important, whenever you’re a large organization, or even a small organization, you have to keep track of this kind of thing.
[3:26] You don’t want to be distributing any materials that you don’t have the rights to. Even if you wanted, even if you could distribute it, you want to have that original high resolution scan or the original version of it to be able to distribute.
[3:42] The essence of this system is basically, it’s almost twofold. One, it’s the repository for everything that you’ve created. And two, it’s a system that you can use to distribute.
Henrik: [3:54] What are the biggest challenges and successes with digital access management?
Jared: [3:59] One of the biggest challenges I’ve found coming in to this job is, whenever you start a digital assets management system, it can be a bit overwhelming trying to track down all the different items that you know should be in there. It’s easy, if you’re starting from the ground up.
[4:16] But hardly, at least it has been my experience, with the other digital assets managers that I’ve talked to. Often, you’re not starting from the ground up.
[4:23] Often, you are coming in midstream where you either have an access management system in place already, or it’s an old system that maybe isn’t being used.
[4:37] Or maybe there is no system at all, and just now your organization is just coming to see the light of why digital access management is important, and then you’re charged with trying to gather up everything that you can.
[4:51] It’s very easy to get overwhelmed by simply the amount of material that’s there, or maybe the amount of material that’s not there and supposed to be there. It’s hard to prioritize, what do I take here, what do I take there? And it feels like it’s easy to get overwhelmed.
[5:08] That often is a challenge, to try to just prioritize what goes in first. And I think that’s how you have to do. You have to sit down and say all right, this is the most important or this department’s the most important, or everything in the past year is the most important.
[5:25] And we’ll get the previous years as we go. You have to sit down and and make a hierarchy of what needs to be in there first, and then start at the beginning. If you take it step by step, it takes a huge project and makes it much easier for you to get a handle on it.
[5:42] And that goes both hand in hand with another major issue that a lot of digital assets managers have, is getting the organization to buy-in to it.
[5:49] You have people, if they’re busy, they’re already working at their jobs and then you come along, trying to get them to use the system, trying to get them to work with you to load their assets into the system and so you can catalog them. So, that can often be a bit of a challenge.
[6:07] Because people frankly, either they’ve had bad experiences with databases before, or they don’t see the value in it. And it takes a lot of effort on your part to show them that it is in their benefit to use these systems, because it is.
[6:22] Whenever it works, it works fantastically. It’s almost like magic, someone comes to you and says “Oh, there was this illustration that I believe we used in an issue four years ago. I don’t know who made it.
[6:38] I don’t know the article that it was in, but I do remember it was an illustration of a red blood cell or what have you.” And if you have a good access management system with good metadata.
[6:51] Look at what the access management system was, or even something as small as perhaps, maybe a year or even a color, you should be able to find it for them.
[7:00] If you can produce something like that on a consistent basis, it really shows people the value of the system that you’ve created. If you can pull out with relative ease the items that people are looking for without having them search too hard for it.
[7:16] That’s the dream of the digital asset management system. I mean, that’s something that makes it worth their while. We’re bringing, it’s almost a cliche to say you’re bringing order to the chaos, but that’s what you’re doing.
[7:28] If your organization has a wealth of materials, but if you have a consistent system and a consistent database, all of those materials should be easily found and easily usable again.
Henrik: [7:40] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals, and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Jared: [7:45] I would say my advice, to be fair, I’m still pretty new to the profession myself. I’ve only been doing this for about two years, and I can say what was the biggest help to me really was getting to know the community of digital assets managers.
[8:03] Going to conferences, trying to link up with people through LinkedIn or joining professional groups, or subscribing to trade journals. That’s a wealth of information, you’re drawing on information of people who have been there, and have been in your position.
[8:19] And they know, they’ve done, they’ve probably heard of or done themselves whatever project that you’re currently working on. And being able to draw on past experience is a huge, huge thing for helping you develop in your career.
[8:35] Being able to ask advice is so big, and being able to have somebody to go to is huge. Another piece of advice that I would give would be really, if you’re trying to prove that the worth of your organization who is investing in a digital assets management system.
[8:53] Really, return on investment, ROI is huge for that.
[8:57] I mean often, I know and you know, people probably listening to this podcast know, you know the value of a digital asset management system. Because that’s what we do, we live it. We know why it works, and we know why it’s a valuable thing to have.
[9:12] Management may not always know that, so if you can go and you can prove to them how a database such as this is going to save money or save time, or make people more effective workers, that kind of speaks management’s language.
[9:29] And that’s how you’re going to get them to buy in to a system such as this. And you do that, I remember, I went to a conference, and it was a presentation from a major company, a major manufacturer.
[9:45] How they got their management to buy-in to the digital assets management system is that they made a presentation, and they had groups of photographs saying here are blueprints. Here’s a picture of the product, here is the commercial that we advertise this product in.
[10:04] When they went through all these different things, of all of the photographs or illustrations or video, or documents, all of the items that go into making a single product, and it was up there all on the screen. They said, “This is what we’re keeping now.”
[10:20] Everything on that screen fell off except for one thing which was the actual photograph of the product itself. What they were saying, and what they were showing is, “This is a multi step process from the idea scribbled on the napkin to the actual item being created.”
[10:39] All of this is getting lost except for photographs of the actual item itself. This is valuable things that we should be keeping. This is legacy data. This is a narrative of how an item goes from idea to product.
[10:52] This is something that can be leveraged for future products. All of it was not being kept. By showing their management by instituting this database for every product that we make, this is the amount of stuff that we can catch, and this is value.
[11:12] This is something that we can use again. This is something that we should be keeping.
[11:16] You want to speak management’s language. You want to show them how you can save money or how you can make your organization better by having a Digital Asset’s Management System.
Henrik: [11:28] Thanks, Jared
Jared: [11:29] You’re welcome. Thank you.
Henrik: [11:31] For more on Digital Asset Management, logon to anotherdamblog.com. Another DAM Podcast is available on Audioboom and iTunes.
[11:39] If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at
anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.

Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic, Spotify, TuneIn, and wherever you find podcasts.

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Ed Klaris on Digital Asset Management

Ed Klaris discusses Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • How does a magazine publisher use Digital Asset Management?
  • What are the biggest challenges and successes with 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, and I’m speaking with Ed Klaris. Ed, how are you?
Ed Klaris: [0:10] Fine, thanks. Thanks for having me.
Henrik: [0:12] Ed, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Ed: [0:15] I am Senior Vice President in charge of Editorial Assets and Rights at Conde Nast, which includes asset management and rights management across the entire portfolio. Conde Nast owns 18 consumer titles and three B2B titles, all of which have articles and photographs from the traditional print publications. We also produce a lot of video, blogs, and web content, all of which I’m responsible for taking after publication and putting it into a repository.
[0:49] We use our Digital Asset Management system to house, search and discover previously published assets, so that we can reuse them for various purposes. I’m not a technologist, I’m a manager. I’m an executive at the company and I oversee Digital Asset Management. In fact, under my management, we created asset management here at the company and we converted print titles backwards, back to 2002 into XML, and every month that the print titles are created here, we convert them to XML and then put them into our repository.
Henrik: [1:26] How does a magazine publisher use Digital Asset Management?
Ed: [1:29] Similar to what I just said, we convert all of our content into a structured format. We use our PRISM Spec XML format to house all of our previously published content. It’s a video or Web‑based content that can go into the asset management system fairly cleanly. However, we do try to add metadata so that it’s easily discoverable. We use Digital Asset Management as a repository so that we can reuse content as broadly as possible. We can distribute digital content across the world to our publishers around the world, to our licensees, our content syndication partners, etc.
[2:09] It’s a repository discovery device and a distribution mechanism.
Henrik: [2:14] What are the biggest challenges and successes with Digital Asset Management?
Ed: [2:18] The biggest challenge that we face are combining asset metadata with rights data around exactly what we can and cannot do with a given asset. As an IT publisher, we tend to not acquire all rights to all content, we have limited rights. Many of the pieces of content have different use cases. We can make a book out of one title’s photograph, but not out of another.
[2:43] We can crop a photo here, and another photograph we might not be able to. We can use an article on the Web, and another article, we cannot. The biggest challenge is, I’m not discovering the asset, it’s knowing how you can reuse it, and having pretty easy access by the user into the asset and exactly its suitability.
[3:04] Then, the biggest successes so far have been our ability to take a robust database. We use an underlying database for our Digital Asset Management system and building a DAM app on top of it, which is the underlying database is an unstructured database that has great search capability, but it really didn’t have a lot of specified magazine publishing needed asset management tools, like a front end. It didn’t have carding, or reuse capabilities.
[3:37] It didn’t have the ability to segment and use taxonomies quite as well in our specific field, so we have been able to build on top of our unstructured database, a thin app that is very robust and serves the magazine publishing business very well, but when in fact this industry has really not had a DAM product that did serve our needs.
Henrik: [4:00] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Ed: [4:04] I think that DAM requires a great knowledge around search and discovery. It’s an undervalued skill set, and with search and discovery, I mean the ability to create and employ taxonomies to use segmentation and granularized search in a way that makes your assets findable. I think the people who are going into the field don’t know, just need to know how to manage binary assets, but also need to be very familiar with search and discovery, and they need to be able to be technologists.
[4:38] Not necessarily everybody needs to be able to code, but they need to be very familiar with technology around these databases and such, because otherwise, it maybe kind of get lost. They need to know what they’re getting into. What it was, if was they were really interested in, are they interested in that, more so content management than Digital Asset Management as a repository, and really know what direction they want to go in.
[5:02] Often times I find that people are ultimately interested in creating content rather than figuring out how to store it and find it and re‑purpose it, it’s the latter that people in this field really need to focus on. I’m looking for people who are both content specialists and people who can convert content into XML or HTML, mostly XML, and also technologists who understand search primarily, and can do front‑end development. Both of those skills are very useful and especially the technology side.
Henrik: [5:31] Thanks, Ed.
Ed: [5:31] You’re welcome, it was a pleasure.
Henrik: [5:33] More on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, logon to anotherdamblog.com. Another DAM Podcast is available on iTunes and AudioBoom. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.

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The People Aspects of Digital Asset Management: Part 2

In October 2013, I gave a presentation on ‘The People Aspects of Digital Asset Management (DAM)’ during the Createasphere DAM Conference in New York City. This presentation was audio recorded so it could be shared with you. Enjoy.

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor:  [0:01] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking about the people aspects of Digital Asset Management. Here is part two of the Createasphere DAM conference presentation I gave in New York in October 2013. Enjoy.

[0:20] You may need a gatekeeper. Most people don’t consider that when they get a DAM. They think that it’s just technology, it’s just software. No, that’s wrong. It’s not just software, and it’s not just technology. It involves people, process, technology and information. If you don’t have all four working together, you don’t have a working DAM.

[0:43] The other thing that I’m going to throw in there is, are we the new Mechanical Turks? How many of you are familiar with the Mechanical Turks? Not just the service that’s available today, but the chess playing tool from many years ago, where there was actually a skilled chess player underneath and nobody knew how the system worked.

[1:04] It just had a… “robot”. Not really, underneath there was a human, someone who did all the work underneath. No one realized what was under there. We may be the new Mechanical Turks. Are we? DAM is not a game, so not really. It involves more skills than just chess and it takes far more patience than chess.

[1:31] People don’t understand DAM, and it takes often a lot of explanations. Everyone who’s worked in DAM long enough understands that they have to educate a lot of people in and around and across their organization, and whoever is going to touch their DAM. Make them understand why this is important for the organization, what value it serves to them, not just to me because I don’t count. It’s what the organization needs, and they need to be able to find their assets, otherwise you’re wasting money.

[2:09] Your DAM is only as good as its metadata and how well it’s been curated, and how well it’s cataloged to find those assets over and over again. There may be less reasons. You may have heard of others why we are not the Mechanical Turks, we may find it insulting. There’s a lot to consider in DAM, way too many acronyms and terms to consider and things to think about.

[2:36] Back to the who, there’s plenty of different roles to play within organizations that are involved with Digital Asset Management, at least when you’re starting out. These are all different roles that play a part, whether it’s temporary or permanent within your organization.

[2:54] A DAM shouldn’t be really stagnant. It should evolve with your organization, and the people should evolve too. That may take significant change management amongst all of you, and your organization itself. There may be resistance because [sarcastically] people love change, right? No, they usually don’t.

[3:16] One of the phenomena I’ve seen is, people are volunteered for DAM, or on rare occasions, people volunteer themselves to do DAM. Typically, they are volunteered and typically it’s not their core competency…what they were hired for.

[3:32] A designer or marketer or photographer or PM, they didn’t really sign up when they were first hired to do that. What is their passion and why would they stay through all this pain? Anyone who’s worked through DAM knows how much pain you have to go through to make people understand and show them the value, and explain it over and over and over again, and illustrate why this is important.

[4:02] You can show them the numbers, you can illustrate why it’s important to them, how it’s important to them, how they could use it themselves and how it could make their lives easier. They have to understand it themselves, otherwise you’re not going to win and you’ll keep on explaining it over and over and over again. Then, you’ll keep burning money until that issue is resolved.

[4:24] There’s often a lot of guidance, there’s a lot of training and it’s not just training once by a vendor and then they run away, but ongoing support has to exist for a DAM. Otherwise, you will not get the adoption, the user adoption of a system. You will stand up a system and it will be what’s called a ‘shelf baby’. How many of you are familiar with what a shelf baby means?

[4:44] Yes, it’s one of those systems that you pay lots of money, you put lots of care, lots of nurturing into it and then it just sits there and nobody uses it. That’s a big waste of money, right? It’s not a ‘check box’, you want the system to be used that’s why you invested in it. You want people to be able to find their assets. That’s an investment in time.

[5:05] If you are not tagging your assets and you are accumulating more and more every day, that means you have to tag those new assets almost every day, appropriately, so you can find that content within those assets. Not just, it’s a photo! How many photos do I have? 20,000. Well, I’ll just scroll endlessly.

[5:24] [laughter]

Henrik:  [5:25] Bad idea. That doesn’t scale, right? It’s not scalable. You’ll just continue scrolling endlessly. It doesn’t work. Some organizations think that works. No, it doesn’t. Those solutions often don’t scale either, so there’s a lot to do there.

[5:45] There’s also the question, do I need additional headcount? Well, it depends on the volume of assets that you have. If you have a set number of files and you upload them, and you never have more assets…

[5:58] [laughter]

Henrik:  [6:00] …maybe not, but if you accumulate on regular basis a small volume that it takes N number of people to tag and this is something that you have to measure. How long does it take someone to add the appropriate metadata so you can find it again?

[6:13] Your user groups, meaning the people who are actually going to use the system. Not the business people who are just going to pay for it and say, “OK, what business value is this bringing me? Why keep paying these $100,000 bills every year”? Or the IT people say, “It’s still up, go ahead and use it. It’s still working. No one’s touching it but it’s still working.” It’s often the creatives, right?

[6:37] It’s often the creatives that are creating more and more files, but they don’t like metadata. How many creatives are in the room? OK, a few. How many of you who are creatives love spreadsheets? OK.

[6:50] [laughter] Survival.

Henrik:  [6:53] Fair, fair, yes, so aside from the one…

[6:57] [laughter]

Henrik:  [7:02] …yes, sometimes you have to do what’s needed, right? A lot of creatives prefer to create files for some reason, because that’s what they were hired for and that’s their passion, right? Getting creatives to actually do that tagging work is next to very rare, to put it nicely, because they don’t want to.

[7:23] They don’t want to…they’ll pretend they can’t spell, they…

[7:28] [laughter]

Henrik:  [7:29] …won’t spell, they won’t use any instructions, they won’t read, they’ll pretend they can’t. I’ve seen it all, so DAM hiring is quite often the need. Your options are, learn what’s out there, there’s more and more resources now. One of the reasons I created my blog is because there wasn’t enough information in the user and administrator perspective of DAM. That’s why I started blogging, because there wasn’t enough information.

[8:00] There is more now, not enough, but there is more now. I blog on a very regular basis about what is needed by the DAM community, not just us, the users, but the vendors, and the readers are users and vendors and everyone else who kind of cares. There’s plenty out there to talk about and I’m not the only blogger, I recently did a talk with some other bloggers and there’ll be more.

[8:29] Bloggers are just one part of it. There are also websites like CMSWire, like the DAM Foundation, the DAM Coalition, a bunch of others that have information about DAM that is very useful, so read about it. Watch webinars from all the different vendors, not just your preferred one. Some of them are more useful than others, especially the ones that are less salesy.

[8:52] Network with others. In New York, we have the luxury of having the world’s largest [DAM] meetup group, which you’ll meet tonight, from 5:00 to 6:30. We have 570 members, 106 of them are coming tonight. I’m one of the co‑organizers, Michael in the back is another one. Chad, if he’s in the room is, is the founder.

[9:13] We doubled the size of our membership this year, so there’s plenty of networking available and we video record every session whenever we have a panel. So worldwide, even if you are not in New York or your schedule is busy, you have the availability to watch our videos and they’re on YouTube for free.

[9:33] Use consultants as necessary. I’m a DAM consultant, full disclosure.

[9:39] [laughter]

Henrik:  [9:40] …and there is DAM hiring. There are more and more DAM jobs, there’s about a hundred almost every day available. You go on indeed.com, on monster.com, dice.com, you can find DAM jobs and you can also post DAM jobs just make sure you know what you’re looking for. When I talk to recruiters, most of the time they don’t know anything beyond a req. Fix that.

[10:03] [laughter]

Henrik:  [10:04] Know what you’re looking for yourself. It takes people obviously. To do the research, to prioritize, to make the decisions, to analyze the information because the analysis isn’t done by a machine, to create processes and actually follow them, to hold those accountable, usually everybody, and to select the right system for your organization, and not to over‑complicate, but to simplify, and to do the DAM work…

[10:38] [laughter]

Henrik:  [10:39] …or to fail or to succeed. It’s up to you.

[10:44] Thank you for listening. For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics log on to anotherDAMblog.com. Another DAM podcast is available on AudioBoom and iTunes. If you have any comments or questions please feel free to email me at anotherDAMblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.

Click here to revisit Part 1 of this presentation

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Doug Mullin on Digital Asset Management

Doug Mullin discusses Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • How does an organization focused on sports equipment use Digital Asset Management?
  • What are the biggest challenges and successes with 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 Douglas Mullin.
Douglas, how are you?
Douglas Mullin: [0:09] I’m doing well, thanks. How are you, Henrik?
Henrik: [0:10] Great. How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Douglas: [0:13] I’m the digital asset librarian for Oakley Incorporated in
Southern California. I work for the design graphics department, which is one
of several silos of content producers. [0:25] I manage primarily final and master
mechanicals for the signage. I would see, let’s say, if you went to Sunglass Hut or
something, you saw the signage of the windows.
[0:34] I have master files, different regions, localities to download, to print their
own files. We also have product photography and video. We have several different
departments working with that.
[0:44] With my executive sponsor, I have a project to try to create a real enterprise
DAM program to bridge a lot of our content production silos. Those are
my two main functions of both working for one silo, currently and trying to build
more of a proper enterprise DAM program to bridge a lot of our content production
silos. Those are my two main functions of both working for one silo,
currently and trying to build more of a proper enterprise DAM system.
Henrik: [1:00] How does an organization focused on sports equipment use
Digital Asset Management?
Douglas: [1:05] As I mentioned, we have a point of purchase signage. Lots of
athlete photos get used. We have the signs that go up in stores that are selling
our products, road signs, billboards, bus wraps, and other things like that. [1:19]
We have, of course, a website, which has a lot of content. Content marketing is a
very big thing at a company like Oakley.
[1:25] We have an in-house photo studio. We have a team of photographers who
go on-site who shoot athletes at sporting events or for sponsored athletes for
events that have we have set up.
[1:37] We have a video team, as much the same thing and produce a lot of content.
Content marketing is a very big thing here. It’s pretty much what DAM is
about from our point of view.
Henrik: [1:48] What are the biggest challenges and successes with Digital Asset
Management?
Douglas: [1:51] For us, the biggest challenge really is user interface issues and
process issues. Currently running Artesia 6.8, which is a very powerful product,
but it is a bit of an older product. [2:04] The user interface is not up to current
standards. A lot of consumerization of the enterprise, people’s tolerance for
learning challenging systems has gone down a lot over the years. Certainly, at
Oakley, that’s an even bigger challenge.
[2:20] A really strong user interface is something that we need. As we look forward,
Artesia is going to go away, at some point, and we will get another product,
either from that vendor or from somebody else. It’s still undecided.
[2:35] User interface challenges are a big thing for us. After that is process. What
photos should be shared? What photos should not be shared? Which videos
should or shouldn’t be shared? There are lots of different factors that go into
that calculation. Is a product a current product? Is it a past product, is it a prototype
product?
[2:55] I would see the legal contract that we have with the athletes. These kinds
of issues be very complex. So, it’s an athlete, let’s say, a whimsy contest wearing
our board shorts, which are not yet publicly released, should we use that
photo? Or should that photo not be used because the product is not actually
publicly released yet, even though the athlete winning a major contest is a major
coup for us?
Henrik: [3:20] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and
people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Douglas: [3:24] I think it’s very important to understand that this is very varied
profession, in which it is people, process, content and technology. It’s not possible
just to focus on any one of those. [3:34] Some people imagine that a digital
asset person is a bookish person hidden away in a corner just attaching metadata
to files. But in reality, it is much more difficult than that. You must be able
to interact with your end users to understand what their needs are. You often
have to be assertive about getting your content people are busy and you often
have to reach out to people, work with them to get content.
[3:58] The process issues are huge. Being able to understand the business in
order to help people solve those problems and come to an agreement about
them. Then, of course, at the technology side, you have to know how to talk
the language of the IT people in order to have credible conversations to be an
advocate for your own DAM health, so to speak. That is very important.
[4:20] There’s sort of a trend going on in the world today of…”marketing technologist”
is a phrase that I’ve heard a lot about. But people who come from the
business side of the company but who understand technology, and I think that
being a DAM librarian kind of fits in with that in certain ways.
[4:36] I very much come from the business side. I understand the people and the
content and process issues, primarily. But I’m also able to speak the language of
the IT department to be an advocate for my stakeholders for their requirements.
[4:49] In addition to that, there’s a lot of training opportunities out there in the
world today. DAM is growing a lot. There are a lot of people trying to learn
about it. There’s free webinars stuff that one can certainly see other opps. That’s
vendor sponsored and so it tends to be very solution focused and not always as
focused on the people, process, content, although people do talk about that,
of course.
[5:11] Then, there’s just great conferences at Henry Stewart and Createasphere.
I’m a member of SLA, which keeps me connected to the library world, the
Special Libraries Association. And then the DAM Foundation. It’s also, I think, a
great resource to learn a lot more about the profession.
Henrik: [5:27] Well, thanks Doug.
Douglas: [5:29] Well, thank you, Henrik.
Henrik: [5:31] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, log
on to AnotherDAMblog.com. Another DAM Podcast is available on Audioboom
and iTunes.
[5:39] If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me at
AnotherDAMblog@gmail.com. Thanks again

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