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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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