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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Here are the questions asked:
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.
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
Tony Gill discusses Digital Asset Management
Here are the questions asked:
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 Tony Gill. Tony,
how are you?
Tony Gill: [0:10] I’m good. Thanks Henrik. How are you?
Henrik: [0:12] Good. How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Tony: [0:15] My job title is Global Director of Library Science and Information
Management. I work for an advertising agency that is part of one of the large
global advertising conglomerates. [0:28] We have a single client which is a very
large technology company. My role is theoretic quite general.
[0:35] In practice, I spend the vast bulk of my time running a large multi server
Digital Asset Management System that’s shared between us, our client, and
about a dozen of our sibling agencies within the same conglomerate, all working
on the same account.
[0:53] After defining the initial information architecture for the system such as the
metadata schemer and the control vocabularies, the folder hierarchy that we use
for storing the assets, asset ingest and work flow procedures.
[1:10] I now manage a team, a small team of Digital Asset Librarians who perform
the day-to-day act of managing the flow of assets throughout the system and
throughout their life cycle.
Henrik: [1:20] Great. Tony, what challenges do you face using Digital Asset
Management with a marketing organization?
Tony: [1:26] The challenges are many and varied. One of the biggest challenges
we face is just the sheer volume of assets coming into the system all the time
from a wide variety of different sources both from within our agency groups and
also from the client and from beyond. [1:43] We do have fairly well established
asset ingest procedures that require metadata to be provided with the assets.
But because there are always new users and new communities wanting to
upload assets to the system, it means there’s a constant need to keep training
people and keep bringing them up to speed on the ingest procedures. That’s
fairly challenging.
[2:05] Another factor of my job is that we have a very demanding client and
often times they will make requests to have assets organized for their particular
needs.
[2:18] Often, it’s down to me to say politely but firmly that we can’t do that because
the system has to meet the needs of a very, very broad user community.
We have something like 3,500 users on the system globally, at the moment.
[2:31] We can’t just reorganize areas of it for one group, or one individual’s requirements.
Sometimes I have to be able to politely and tactfully say, “No,” and
explain why we can’t change the structure of the system for individual user’s
needs because of the whole broad range of different user needs.
[2:55] Obviously, rights management is a perennial problem in this field. We have
to make sure we have detailed usage right information for anything where the
usage rights are not just straight forward global unlimited usage rights.
[3:13] Communicating that to people that are uploading assets is also sometimes
challenging because sometimes they haven’t even considered the usage rights.
[3:23] You have to end up doing a little mini tutorial about copyright and usage
rights and explaining why, as the publisher effectively of these assets, if we
publish them and we don’t have the correct usage rights, then we’re effectively
liable for copyright infringement even though we may have had no part in acquiring
these assets in the first place. Of course, that’s also a challenge.
[3:47] Then, the general symptom of working in the advertising industry is that
deadlines are always very short and often missed. People tend to wait until the
last minute and tend to get very anxious when we say that things are published
in a timely fashion.
[4:08] They often leave things to the last thing on a Friday night before they
upload them. We often find ourselves scrambling at the last minute to get the
stuff posted that’s urgently needed by teams all around the world right at the
last minute.
Henrik: [4:21] Sounds like a bunch of challenges there.
Tony: [4:23] Yeah.
Henrik: [4:27] What advice would you like to give DAM professionals or people
aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Tony: [4:33] From my part, if you want to come work on my team, you will need
a Library Science degree. That’s a graduate degree in Library and Information
Science. That’s a really good grounding in the kind of disciplines that are very
good in the Digital Assets Management field. [4:51] It teaches you the importance
of information architecture and information management. It teaches you
to be rigorous and to follow standards. It also teaches you an observance for
finickiness and attention to detail.
[5:05] In the job description that I wrote recently for the Digital Asset Librarians, I
said, “An almost obsessive attention to detail would be a useful attribute in any
of the successful candidates.”
[5:20] I tend to find that there are certain people that are drawn to the librarianship
role, and they also make very good digital managers. Those are the main
things that I can think of just off the top of my head.
Henrik: [5:31] Great. Thank you, Tony.
Tony: [5:33] You’re very welcome, Henrik. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.
Henrik: [5:36] Any time. For more on Digital Asset Management, log on to
anotherdamblog.com. 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