Based on the blog post from Another DAM blog:
Written and read by Henrik de Gyor
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Judy Colbert discusses Digital Asset Management
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 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.
Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic, Spotify, TuneIn, and wherever you find podcasts.
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David Austerberry discusses Digital Asset Management
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 David Austerberry.
David, how are you?
David Austerberry: I ’m fine, thank you.
Henrik: [0:11] David, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
David: [0:13] Well, I guess it started about the turn of the century. At that time,
I was working in the video area. I got involved with a group of people who are
actually setting up a Digital Asset Management system. I got involved with it
very much hands on. [0:29] Back then, Digital Asset Management was fairly new
in the video field. There was a lot of it around photography for image libraries,
but nothing specifically for video.
[0:45] Now, the project we were working on was a service that would encode
and host people’s video and we’d be able to serve it over the Internet. I guess
today that would be called a cloud.
[0:59] I think we got into it far too early, though, because back then, everybody
was using dial-up modems. Although broadband was around, it was hardly
ubiquitous. The idea of delivering video over the Internet, although you could
do it, the reality was that very few people had broadband connections, so they
weren’t really able to use it. I guess we were too early.
[1:30] Out of that project, I learned a lot about Digital Asset Management.
Henrik: [1:33] David, you wrote a definitive book called “Digital Asset
Management” in 2006. Do you see DAM changing or evolving?
David: [1:41] Well, I actually wrote it, originally, in 2004, because it’s had 2 editions.
The first edition was 2004. I guess I did the research in 2003. I think it has
changed a lot over the years. [2:01] The initial products that I looked at when we
were setting up a Digital Asset Management system, on the whole, were not
really products. Let me qualify that a bit.
[2:12] They were projects that one particular customer had, had a requirement
for Digital Asset Management system and a software company had written
a custom system for them. Very few of the products had sold to more than a
handful of customers. They were not really salable products, more a custom
project. Along with that went a very large price tag.
[2:43] I think that was the big barrier to the sale of Digital Asset Management to
a lot of potential customers. The early systems ran on things like Sun hardware
platforms, they used historical enterprise databases, and the entry-level was
somewhere in the region of $1 million for a system. And you probably would
need to spend about $5 million to get a fully working system. And that was
completely out of the reach of most of the customers. Even the large broadcasters
balked at those sort of sums of money.
[3:24] What’s happened since then? Well, some of those companies have gone
out of business. I seem to remember one of the early ones was the Informix
Media 360, which probably pioneered a lot of the ideas around Digital Asset
Management. And that Informix has disappeared now. I think it’s been subsumed
into IBM. Some of the systems were just too complex. And at the end of
the day, they’ve got to sit on everybody’s desktop, be easy to use, and a lot of
those early systems just weren’t.
[4:00] So I think what’s happened since 2004, when the first edition came out, is
that people had got real about what customers really want from a Digital Asset
Management, and what they’re prepared to pay for it. On the point of what
they’re prepared to pay for it, it was always a problem proving an ROI for the
big systems.
[4:24] I think a lot of the customers looked at it from the point of view of this perceived
cost, that they know what it costs to put Microsoft Office on a desktop,
that sort of thing. They know what it costs to put video editing software. And
the early DAM systems cost about $1,000 a seed, and I don’t think most of the
customers felt that was value. Because to a lot of people it was just a fancy version
of a file search, and, well, from Google, you know, you get that for nothing.
[4:56] So until the seed cost came down to something more realistic, it was
very difficult to prove a return on investment for a DAM system. Google represents
just the search side, and there’s obviously more to DAM. There’s all
the indexing and the management of hierarchical storage systems. I think that
what has evolved is that a lot of the customers, what they’re really wanting is
management of the entire workflow, from ingest of a digital asset right through
to its publishing.
[5:35] Although the early Digital Asset Management systems handled the management
of that asset, there’s a lot more to dealing with assets beyond Digital
Asset Management. I think that some of the newest systems now include a lot
more workflow management, and they can also handle external media, like
video tapes, for example.
[5:59] You have a crossover between managing media assets, which, to me,
a physical assets, like a video tape, and digital assets. The thing which really
makes it much easier to prove in ROI for a vendor is to introduce management
of workflow processes, as well. Digital Asset Management has become a component
within the management of the entire workflow.
Henrik: [6:29] David, what advice would you like to give to DAM professionals
and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
David: [6:34] First of all, DAM is a rather vague term, and it means different
things to different people. To a photo library, it’s dealing with IPTC metadata,
and it’s managing maybe a website to sell the digital assets. To somebody, say,
in the broadcast or the media and entertainment space, it’s a lot more complex,
in that they may be wanting to handle the many thousands, or even millions,
of digital assets that go into creating something like a movie. [7:14] There’s that
front end side. Once the salable asset that the movie, the television program, or
the TV commercial is finished, there’s the managing of that finished asset and its
distribution.
[7:29] There’s very many facets to Digital Asset Management. For the DAM professional,
first of all, they’ve got to decide, do they want to be involved in the
entire business, or do they want to focus on particular area, like video production,
movie production, or image library management?
[7:54] I think somebody coming to it afresh will see that there’s a very large
number of different standards bodies involved, and they’re all vying for users
to adopt their tagging systems, their standards. There’s the IPTC, which I mentioned,
which is very strong in the newspaper industry, and has come to be
found to be very useful across the entire photographic profession.
[8:30] But the IPTC is focused, at the moment, on still images. I know they’re
looking at extending it to other areas. But if you look at audiovisual assets, there
are a number of organizations looking at Digital Asset Management and metadata
schemas for audiovisual systems. That can be rather confusing for somebody
coming into it from afresh, because there’s just so many standards.
[9:07] The SMPT is very strong in this area, but then there’s other things, like
MPEG 7. There’s 10 to 20 international standards group that are developing standards
that can be used within Digital Asset Management. This clouds the whole
issue, and removes some of the potential clarity within the area.
Henrik: [9:30] True. They’re adopting what’s needed of all those standards,
rather than necessarily, would you say, instead of reinventing the wheel, pick
what best fits the need of the organization that they are working with? Is that
what you’re saying?
David: [9:47] Yeah, very much so. I think one needs to have a pragmatic approach
towards choosing how you run a Digital Asset Management system. You
could overtag your content, and there is quite a cost involved in tagging content.
You have to balance that against the business need, the business value.
Henrik: [10:17] That’s true.
David: [10:19] I think that one of the areas that’s very important to focus on is
how one gathers metadata when one’s ingesting digital assets. In principle, that
should be done as automatically as possible. [10:35] Now, that is getting a lot
easier with, for example, video and still cameras can have GPS systems built in,
so that you immediately get assets tagged with the geographical location.
Henrik: [10:52] Yeah, it’s true. Geotagging as a they call it.
David: [10:57] Yeah. Things are getting easier and easier. But one of the big
problems with Digital Asset Management is that an asset will pass through
several organizations during its lifetime. The organizations downstream are the
ones who benefit from Digital Asset Management, if it’s well tagged. Because
they can then find things and makes it easier to monetize it. [11:26] The person
upstream who is actually adding all the metadata doesn’t see the value from it.
That’s always been a bit of an enigma with Digital Asset Management. Those
who do the work don’t necessarily benefit.
Henrik: [11:42] Yeah, I see what you mean. Thanks, David.
David: [11:45] Right, you’re welcome.
Henrik: [11:46] For more on Digital Asset Management, log onto
anotherdamblog.com. Thanks again.
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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 Charles Cole.
Charles, how are you?
Charles Cole: [0:09] I am doing well, Henrik. Thanks for asking.
Henrik: [0:11] Great. Charles, how are you involved with Digital Asset
Management?
Charles: [0:15] Well, I manage Digital Asset Management at a film studio where
I handle mostly home entertainment assets, so for the marketing department
and creative aspects.
Henrik: [0:31] How does that organization use placeholders for packaging?
Charles: [0:38] Well, placeholders, it’s an interesting concept. First, I guess I’ll
explain the concept of placeholders. It’s a pretty interesting concept. Essentially
the way to upload traditional embarks is whoever is uploading the file will select
the file, and they’ll tag it with whatever metadata. That’s the traditional model.
[1:00] What placeholders does is leverages upstream work that has to take place,
say in a marketing system where somebody is essentially planning out the marketing
and says, “I need this asset to fulfill my marketing requirements.”
[1:18] They put in all the information they need into the marketing system, and
then what happens is a placeholder automatically gets created in our Digital
Asset Management system where it’s already pre-populated with all the metadata
that’s required. So now whoever is uploading needs to find that placeholder
and just drop the file in. What happens is it’s automatically tagged with
all the appropriate metadata, and can even be sent downstream based on what
the marketing system says.
[1:47] If they for instance say, “I’ll pick the print vendor,” who is going to actually
manufacture this asset, this physical asset, then as soon as the file gets uploaded,
it can then be tagged with all the appropriate metadata and automatically
be sent downstream to whatever company has been selected.
Another D 82 AM Podcast Transcribed
Henrik: [2:07] Just to clarify, this is basically creating metadata and putting a
placeholder for an asset that will be created in the near future because there is a
schedule for it.
Charles: [2:15] Exactly. It is dependent on you having a plan and knowing what
assets you need. It’s not for everybody. So in a trim or ad hoc environment, or
you don’t know what assets you need, then, yeah, it may not be as useful. It has
been extremely useful in our case where we have thousands of assets that need
to be created, Yeah, it’s been great.
Henrik: [2:39] Granted, there’s a time frame or schedule of when you create
those things for your organization, so you already know that packing needs to
be created for that individual project.
Charles: [2:51] Exactly. Maybe it’s better just to explain it. A marketing manager
for a given territory, say Romania or whatever territory, will go into the marketing
system and say, “I need this specific asset, on this specific date.” The marketing
manager will go in and say, “For this given territory, for this given title, I need
these particular assets to fulfill my marketing plan. I need them on this specific
date. I need them from this specific vendor.” [3:28] As soon as they assign that
date and assign that vendor, that’s when the placeholder gets generated in the
Digital Asset Management system. Now, rather than the vendor just uploading
that file and tagging it with the metadata at the time of upload manually, it’s
done automatically. So they go in.
[3:49] The onus is on them to search for that placeholder using all the correct
metadata. It’s that subtle shift has created a really great situation in terms of our
metadata is now 100 percent accurate, 100 percent complete vs. before, just
trying to twist somebody’s arm into entering all the metadata and entering it
correctly. This just seems to be a much better approach.
Henrik: [4:19] Is there an incentive for getting that information correct in the
beginning, and actually delivering the assets on time in respect?
Charles: [4:27] Yes, actually. If you are responsible as marketing, for putting
together a well-executed marketing plan, obviously the goal is to generate the
most revenue possible. If you want those assets to be created, you have to ask
for them. You have to go into the marketing system and say, “These are the
assets I need to execute.” [4:58] If you don’t do that, those assets will never be
created, and you’ll be viewed as having falling down on the job. “Why this product
created and released? Well, I didn’t ask for it.” There is definitely incentive
there. If you fall short of your revenue targets, that’s a direct asset to revenue
correlation there. You want to make sure that you get those configured and set
up, the marketing funds configured and set up, including the assets that you
need in the marketing system on time, and we take care of everything downstream.
Create that container, and then creative vendor will go in above the file.
Henrik: [5:44] That’s a good way to keep people accountable. What advice
would you like to give to DAM professionals are people aspiring to become
DAM professionals?
Charles: [5:52] I think the best advice I can give which it’s sort I guess you
could say generic advice for maybe getting a job in general in the field that you
want is just really do your research. Go in, and if there is a company that you
want to work for, and do all the research regarding that company in that industry
space, as well. Do your Google News searches, see what all the relevant
happenings have been. [6:22] From a Digital Asset Management perspective, I
would say just network, ask questions. Go out there, do your research and sign
up for industry events, sign up for conferences. There are a lot of well-respected
digital a few really well-known Digital Asset Management conferences that you
can just sign up for. Go and just sit. Get an idea of what the relevant topics are,
and just familiarize yourself with the industry terms.
[6:57] I think that will go a long way towards getting you where you want to go.
Henrik: [7:00] Thanks, Charles.
Charles: [7:01] Absolutely.
Henrik: [7:03] For more on Digital Asset Management, log onto
AnotherDAMblog.com. Thanks again.
Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic, RSS, Spotify or TuneIn
Need Digital Asset Management advice and assistance?
Another DAM Consultancy can help. Schedule a call today
Another DAM Podcast