DAM podcasts | Another DAM Podcast

June 2, 2016
by Henrik de Gyor

Another DAM Podcast interview with Lisa Grimm on Digital Asset Management

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor: This is Another DAM Podcast about digital asset management (DAM). I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Lisa Grimm. Lisa, how are you?

Lisa Grimm: I’m very well thank you, how are you?

Henrik de Gyor: Good. Lisa, how are you involved with digital asset management?

Lisa Grimm: It’s a great question. I’ve been in the field with a few exceptions here on and off about twelve years. Before that I started off as a web developer back before we had any kind of real either web content management or digital asset management and as my career sort of grew and evolved it got more and more towards the digital asset management side of things. I started off as an end user of a lot of different sort of we’ll call them early stage digital asset management systems and then as things progressed I got more into building some homegrown ones especially when working in nonprofit and academia world where you don’t necessarily have a lot of resources to go out and buy the most amazing system on the planet. That sort of came around full circle where I then worked with some very large enterprise systems a little bit later in my career.

[01:00] Not in my current role but in my previous one, I led all global digital asset management initiatives for GlaxoSmithKline, GSK, working with an interesting system. We can talk a little bit more about there and now I work for Amazon. I’m part of AWS where digital asset management is one part of what I do along with a sort of broader range of knowledge management. I think as we’ll see in my world a lot of the things tie very closely together and I’m also on the board of the DAM Foundation since I’m really interested in driving some global standards and having a lot more consistency in the world of digital asset management. That’s a reason I like to sit on the board.

Henrik de Gyor: Lisa, how does a company focused on cloud computing use digital asset management?

Lisa Grimm: [02:00] It’s an interesting question and I think people will know that Amazon is quite secretive so can’t give away the secret sauce for what we do specifically, but I will say there is a great need with any company whether you’re a company at a large scale or a small scale. Once you start creating those assets whether those are images, whether those are audio, video and I think especially when you’re working with we’ll say more technical people they realize very quickly you need to manage those just because they quickly scale down what you can do on someone’s desktop.

The other exciting thing we do I think is that kind of that’s what we do and more with a lot of our customers do is there are a lot of cloud-based DAM vendors now as I’m sure everyone’s well aware, that are doing some really interesting things sitting on the platform and sort of enabling what they’re doing. It has been really interesting to watch and I think that’s been one of the most interesting evolutions in the field. I think for a while it was a little bit slow to embrace the cloud and I don’t think that was because of lack of innovation in the DAM field itself but more some of those really large enterprises that have invested a lot in their DAM solutions had really kind of invested in that on-premise kind of solution or maybe had some security sort of fears around that.

[03:00] I think we’ve evolved beyond that a little bit now. We’re seeing more happen in the cloud especially you think about some of the major media organizations or things like sports broadcasting where they have to scale so quickly and they have so many hours of video that they get added every day, every week that there’s not really a good way to do that unless you’re in the cloud. Again it doesn’t have to be us specifically I think that other cloud vendors are the same and other cloud DAM solutions can sort of latch onto that.

I think as we’ve seen just the scale of what’s out there and what people are consuming and what the people who are creators and managers of those are helping them to consume as those things get bigger and bigger and kind of more and more difficult to describe, I think we’re going to see a further evolution into the cloud and hopefully some more innovation in that space too.

Henrik de Gyor: What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with digital asset management?

Lisa Grimm: [04:00] I think one of the biggest challenges you come across in a lot of organizations is just it’s actually sort of two-fold. There’s choosing the right system and the adoption of that system. Sometimes even if it’s the right one it can be difficult to get people to start using it because it can be a big shift in terms of the sort of change management within that ecosystem especially the larger company. That’s certainly something I encountered a lot of working at GSK was that it was such a shift to go from having all of your assets either again managed on people’s desktops or managed by an agency to having those in one place even though that sounds to us in the DAM world like an obvious win, it can be a big shift to people who have not been working that way especially when you’ve been working in a system where there hasn’t been a lot of change.

That can really be difficult to one, not only pick the right system but then too, make sure that people are really happy with that system, really feel comfortable with that system and that you can actually go out and be an advocate for the system.

Of course, when you’re an advocate for the system you’re also advocating for your users. You want to make sure that they feel comfortable, they feel like they’re able to speak up like their feedback is being taken on board. If there’s something they don’t like, you want to make it better. I think it’s interesting that when you have those sort of challenges you have to really walk this fine line of being essentially a product manager for your DAM as well as making sure you’re the gatekeeper for what’s coming in and out and that you’ve got all your ducks in a row just from sort of technical and metadata perspective.

[05:00] You really have to make sure that your users are right there at the forefront of it too. On the flip side of that then you can see a lot of success when you’re really working closely with your users, when you have some really good standards about what’s coming in, how you’re describing it, that people are actually able to find what they want. I think you see especially a lot of success now with some of the industries that embraced DAM early on certainly a lot of the creative agencies. I would point to a lot of the innovation we’ve seen in coming out of academia with museums, digital humanities where they’ve been really embracing what DAM can do and starting off thinking about things like digital collections that used to be online. I’ve had some really good experiences working with those in the past but I think we’ve seen a lot of innovation there where they really said, “Hey this could really be a great outreach mechanism for us not only with organizing our things but making sure that people can find them outside of our system.”

[06:00] It’s really been a good way for organizations like that to open the door to a wider audience and let people in. A good example of that is I worked at the Drexel University College of Medicine in their Legacy Center their archives and they have an amazing digital collection that’s in what’s essentially a homegrown DAM but because it’s in there now they’ve been able to use that to really … They have really great control over their things now. They can get them out in the wider world and I’ve seen individual pictures now that had previously just been sitting in a box say ten years ago. They’re digitized, they’re well described and they’re being picked up really by things that you wouldn’t even expect.

There’s things like a Mighty Girl on Facebook or a lot of these other organizations that have kind of reached out and say, “Oh wow there’s this amazing corpus of historical material we can get in there and get to,” and I think a lot of the innovation we have seen in the DAM field is coming from those museums, those archives who realize it’s a way to not only get good control over their collections but to get them out there.

[07:00] I think it’s interesting to tie back to that when a lot of the focus you see in where is DAM going in the next five to ten years is very much focused on how can it support my marketing work or how can it really help drive my sales organization forward. While those are important, certainly working in the e-commerce or if you’re in advertising it certainly makes sense, but there are all these other use cases that I think have really driven things forward. I think certainly some of those marketing and e-commerce sites have been a beneficiary of some of the work done before by folks using DAM in academia and in museums.

Henrik de Gyor: What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to be DAM professionals?

Lisa Grimm: I think for people who are already in the field, I’d say buckle up. I think it’s going to get even more exciting. I think we’re at sort of a tipping point where in the past few years we’ve gone from people saying, “Oh how can I get buy-in to get a DAM? How can I make the business case to sort of having one being that it’s working,” and then now thinking about, “Okay now we can actually go beyond what we have. We can get a little more exciting here. We can really start.”

[08:00] Again I think innovation is going to be one of the key things we’re going to be seeing. I think we were slightly stagnant for a little while where it was more just about having something that worked but now I think people are starting to push the boundaries a little bit more both on the vendor side and on the user side to say, “Hey wouldn’t it be great if …,” then we can see if that’s going to go together. I think especially as we think about not just video but I think we’re also going to reach a point where the DAM is going to be your single source of truth for almost any kind of digital object where at the moment we still think of it quite often not exclusively but quite often in terms of the DAM is where we’re storing our images, our audio/video, having one place to go to get to really define anything we need not just those things that we think of in the traditional DAM.

[09:00] As far as people who want to become DAM professionals, this is an area I’m really passionate about. It’s reaching out to people who have the skills but may not know that those are the skills they have especially librarians, archivists and certainly I have a bias towards that. I come from that world even though I started off as a developer. I then went back to librarian school mid-career and came back out again the other side doing more DAM specific things. Even here at Amazon I found some other people who have followed a similar path. I think just reaching back out to people who are either in school now or who are early career in those fields who often are not being paid very well to reach out and say, “Hey there are other alternatives. There’s this great career you probably don’t even know exists. You’ve got the skills for it whether it’s in having a great understanding of taxonomy and metadata or having a lot of really kind of scrappy technical skills where you just kind of go in and get things done.

I think that’s something that really only helps DAM drive forward as a field where you’ve got these people who really want to make a difference and who have these really key skill sets when it comes to describing things, finding things. That’s kind of what we do but I think that’s a really important thing is making sure that those people know that this field exists and that we’re doing a good job of promoting the field to whether that’s … I think we certainly like to all talk at conferences and I don’t think it’s insular. I think we do a good job of outreach but I always think we can do more and just publicize it a little bit more.

[10:00] One thing I’m actually trying to do in the next year or so is to work with some folks here to try to get a panel at Society for American Archivists next year and saying, “Hey this is an alternative career for people who have the skills you have but we’d love to get you in here and love to teach you a little bit more about the field.” I do think it’s incumbent upon those of us already in the field to make sure we’re making sure that the ladder doesn’t end with us. We can reach back down and reach back out and say to people, “Hey, come on in, water’s fine and there’s a lot of work to do yet, come join us.”

Henrik de Gyor: Well thanks, Lisa.

Lisa Grimm: Thank you very much.

Henrik de Gyor: For more on this, visit anotherdamblog.com. If you’d like to listen to another 185 other episodes of Another DAM Podcast, go to anotherdampodcast.com. 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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August 28, 2014
by Henrik de Gyor

Another DAM Podcast interview with Alex Struminger on Digital Asset Management and Storytelling 3.0

Alex Struminger on Digital Asset Management and Storytelling 3.0

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 Alex Struminger. Alex, how are you?

Alex Struminger: [0:09] Fine, Henrik. Thanks for having me again.

Henrik: [0:12] Alex, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Alex: [0:15] Henrik, in the last time we spoke, we talked a lot about the big enterprise rollout of the UNICEF Digital Asset Management System. That was a big project. It was terrific the way it came off, but one of the things that wasn’t happening then, that’s happening a lot now is the focus on transmedia storytelling. This has shifted my focus and the focus of a lot of folks in that direction.

[0:38] One of the areas I’m working on right now is the idea of storytelling. Storytelling supported by technology. I’m calling it Storytelling 3.0 to acknowledge the advent of semantic web, search and taxonomy, DAM enabled technologies, and you got to include mobile apps in that as well.

Henrik: [0:59] How is storytelling supported by DAM?

Alex: [1:01] It’s always been important. It’s one of the most engaging things you can do as a human being, I think. If you’re talking about engagement, you can point to the track record of stories as being the longest and best measurable forms of communication engagement out there.

[1:17] That runs the gambit from the famous “Star Wars” franchise and its success. If we go back 3,000 years and talk about The Iliad and The Odyssey, we’re still talking about that 3,000 years later. I think that that’s a measurable success.

[1:30] We’re talking a lot more about storytelling now in the digital world. And of course, Storytelling, especially the storytelling as it supports brands, has to be done in a way where you can manage the story across the franchise. Everybody took a different approach to how they did it, but it all required technology support, partly because there’s a lot of digital assets involved now in storytelling. We’re not squirting ink on paper like we did in the old days. We’re not even doing the digital form of that, which is the old web. We’re doing a lot of rich, layered media, and managing a tremendous number of assets to make that happen.

[2:06] I heard one person talk about 80,000 pieces of video that had to be managed. That didn’t even include the metadata or the supporting brand assets. So digital asset management is needed on the scale that we’re trying to do it with brands, especially global brands.

Henrik: [2:22] What is a co‑creation network and how does it fit with DAM?

Alex: [2:26] Co‑creation network are things to talk a lot about these days. Essentially, the idea behind a co‑creation network is if you have a group of people who are working on different kinds of product sharing a similar story. This could be for the Star Wars example. We talked about transmedia being something that literally transcends different kinds of media. I don’t know if transcends is the word I’m looking for. It is transmedia.

[2:51] It’s transmedia in the sense that there’s no uber story in any particular media so it’s not like “OK, I created the film. The film’s got all the bits in it. We’re just going to then repurpose those bits in these other places. I got the book, and I’m going to take all the stuff of the book.”

[3:06] The idea in Star Wars, again, is a great example, is that there are bits that are in one area and other bits in other areas, and they don’t quite overlap, but they share a common story. You can tell if they’re wrong.

[3:22] A great example of that, there’s the Star Wars films. I’m a big fan of them. I watched all of them several times. There’s the cartoon series about the Clone Wars, then there’s action figures, the product, there’s comic books, the novels, and all that stuff.

[3:39] Five years old at the time, my step‑son came in and he was trying to throw off the yoke of the homemade costume. After a lot of battling back and forth, and a good effort on the part of my wife and I to try and do the homemade costume thing for a few years, we finally capitulated.

[3:56] When he comes in with the costume catalogue from the online store, or the mail‑order store, and he’s got this whole page, there’s like six different bounty hunters he can be in Star Wars. He names every single one of them. I’ve seen every single one of the movies many times. I only knew the name of two of those.

[4:14] This is a great example of how the uber story and transmedia isn’t carried by one particular media type. It’s literally in that sense transmedia. In order to accomplish this, you have to have a co‑creation network in the sense that you’ve got to have a network of people who understand the brand, who understand the story, and who are essentially stewards of that canon, so that you don’t go over here and make that piece about the brand and the cartoon, or on the online thing, or this video over here, or an event in the physical world, and have it not be completely in line with the story. This is how the network has to be brought together.

[4:55] The role of DAM plays here is this is a really difficult thing to do. The challenge has been not just different skillsets with people doing different kinds of product, but they also span things like different localities. “I may need to have this done in French,” or “I may need to have this done in Chinese”. We have to make sure that that local translation works. Where do we keep all this stuff? In the DAM.

[5:21] The rights, the ability to use things for certain purposes, all that stuff has to be put somewhere. Otherwise, this whole thing has become way too expensive. DAM supports the co‑creation network in that sense.

Henrik: [5:32] It sounds like brand consistency.

Alex: [5:34] Brand consistency, brand protection, licensing. You don’t want to be shadowing the door of the lawyer’s office all the time, because you didn’t know you couldn’t use the product in China, or whatever it is. In this sense, I think the co‑creation is where the people, the creative people who are making the product, and all of the rules, the availability of the assets, their application, and who can do what with what come together. That’s technology‑enabled.

[6:05] That makes us better, faster, and more accurate doing what we’re doing, hopefully cheaper.

Henrik: [6:10] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Alex: [6:14] One thing that’s really caught my attention recently, that I think is super important. Zach Brand of NPR has mentioned it as he ralled against the monolithic giant one‑size‑fits‑all system. We really want to avoid that kind of thing.

[6:27] This has been back and forth for various reasons. There have been times when a standardized platform has benefitted the organization, but there’s also a give‑and‑take with it. There’s a cost. I think that we’re seeing now more bespoke or custom tools for particular creative tasks. You don’t want to force the creative talent to use a tool that’s a one‑size‑fits‑all and therefore going to compromise the quality of the product.

[6:57] More than anything else, we see that in the world of storytelling, and in the world where brand engagement has to come to entertainment and storytelling, mistakes and lower quality products are noticed.

Henrik: [7:09] In a negative sense.

Alex: [7:10] Right. In the sense that the technology of the co‑creation network can support all of the things that help us make use of the assets, find them, use them correctly, and stay on story. At the same time, we don’t want that technology that’s helping us to get in the way of us doing quality work.

[7:26] Caitlin Burns said Starlight Runner talked to me a little bit about the idea of an arts and crafts approach to content creation. We really have to be craftsmen in order to make the kind of product that people are going to consume. If you’re going to be a craftsman, you’re going to have to have the right tools. I am seeing more and more custom tools being made.

[7:47] But here’s the thing. Interoperability is still very important. If we take away the monolithic system that’s supposed to tie everything all together, how are we going to tie everything all together? Are we now back in our silos? We don’t want to do that. What seems to be the approach that is working is the same kind of approach that worked for web 2.0 in a lot of ways. Standards, APIs, interoperability.

[8:13] So if I’ve got a toolset over here that’s working really good for the person who’s curating my digital media video, and I’ve got another toolset over here that’s working really well for somebody who’s creating cartoons, so forth and so on, managing print assets. I don’t want to force them to use one tool that doesn’t do any of that quite as well, but I need them to talk to each other.

[8:34] I don’t want redundant assets. I don’t want redundant metadata. I want to tie it all together, in case I need to bring something from here, and something from over there together to create a product on the web, or through an app, or through any place I want to be able to publish out the content.

[8:51] We can do that by letting the systems talk to each other. We don’t have to insist on the monolithic system. In fact, we’re not dead in the water. We can take a very agile approach to this and knock out little things. Let’s make this system talk to that system. We did this when I was in UNICEF. Tie together taxonomy management with web search engines and web content systems, and basically creating APIs that let them talk to each other and it that turns out, it can do it. Everybody’s happy because I didn’t make the guy over here use something he didn’t like, the data is shared, and it works.

[9:24] That’s the bit, I think, to keep in mind. Stay over the monolithic. The bespoke system. You could do an awful lot that’s not bespoke but still custom these days. Just let them talk to each other, and think about the process, and the people involved.

Henrik: [9:38] Thanks, Alex.

Alex: [9:39] Thanks, Henrik. It’s always a pleasure to be with you.

Henrik: [9:41] For more on this and other digital asset management topics, logon to anotherdamblog.com.

Another DAM Podcast is available on iTunes and AudioBoom.

[9:49] 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, RSS, Spotify or TuneIn

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July 10, 2014
by Henrik de Gyor

Another DAM Podcast interview with JA Pryse on Digital Asset Management

JA Pryse discusses Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
You were recently awarded a fellowship on Digital Asset Management. Tell us more about this.
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 JA Pryse. JA, how are you?

JA Pryse: [0:10] I’m good. Thank you for having me on, Henrik.

Henrik: [0:13] JA, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

JA: [0:17] I was hired by the Oklahoma Historical Society in 2010 to process the [00:23] Carmen Gee collection, which is a very large collection. By process I mean the manuscripts, audio, video, and photographs. The project contained over 91 linear feet of manuscripts, close to 350,000 images, 207 mixed audios, and a number of video and some recordings. My job was to digitize and process the collection.

[0:47] That was my first introduction into Asset Management.

Henrik de Gyor: [0:51] You were recently awarded a fellowship on Digital Asset Management. Tell us more about this.

JA: [0:57] Oklahoma is pretty new on the digitizing field, and we’re relatively new as far as policy and procedures go. Of course, we have a huge collection especially with the five million image Gateway to Oklahoma history newspaper project, and the OPUBCO collection that we do have.

[1:14] My proposal was surrounding long‑term Digital Asset Management. I felt the Smithsonian Institute Archives, the way that they run their program and the way that they manage their assets, is something that I definitely want to model and bring back to the Oklahoma Historical Society.

[1:32] The proposal I wrote was concerning that, and the research that I will do for two weeks while I am residing there.

Henrik: [1:39] Is this in Washington DC?

JA: [1:40] Yes, April 5th through the 19th this year [2014].

Henrik: [1:44] Sounds very exciting.

JA: [1:45] It is. I’m looking forward to it, I’ve never been to Washington DC. My mission is to develop a management plan and best practice strategies for all of our assets that we have here.

Henrik: [1:55] Fantastic. What are the biggest challenges and successes with Digital Asset Management?

JA: [2:00] For the Oklahoma Historical Society and for myself and my department, there is pretty much one person handling each media format. And of course, we always go through budget cuts and we’re the first one to be cut in the state since we are a state agency.

[2:18] There’s only one of me, and the ethics grant has a total of one scanner ‑‑ which is a part‑time scanner ‑‑ one part‑time indexer, one volunteer indexer and I. Also, I like to say I moonlight as an audio engineer, an archivist, but have taken a lot of classes and lot of educational steps to get into the audio engineering field and audio archiving in the oral history collection.

[2:45] Whenever we do acquire new audio collections such as the Clara Luper collection, where it was an audio tape…every one of Clara Luper’s…who’s an African‑American archivist in the region. She had a radio show. We acquired that collection. It had 19 linear feet of audio tapes and cassettes. We’re going to digitize those.

[3:07] The biggest challenge is not having more than one me to handle the newspaper project as well as the audio digitization projects that we have.

Henrik: [3:17] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

JA: [3:22] I spoke to a class this morning that was doing a tour of the archives that we have here at the Oklahoma Historical Society. I was asked the same question. What I spoke to them about is becoming more familiar with all digital formats as much as possible, taking as many classes as you can.

[3:40] I mentioned earlier taking classes in audio engineering, taking online classes in video and film production, and getting familiarized with library processes. All different kinds of scanning and digitization as well as the preservation of that material that we are digitizing.

[3:57] Whenever I speak to students or aspiring archivists, I always want to say, “Keep studying. Keep studying everything that you can. Build your knowledge base.” The more that we know about the material that we’re digitizing, the more beneficial we’re going to be with managing that material. Whenever we speak with community colleges or the different universities, I always like to say, “Concentrate on the efficiency as well. Quantity, quality, and efficiency.”

[4:28] I think that we become more efficient as digital assent managers as we educate ourselves more along the different processes, which is one of the reasons why I’m looking forward to going to the Smithsonian for that fellowship. It’s primarily to learn how we can manage our material better.

Henrik: [4:47] There’s still a lot of analog material out there to be digitized.

JA: [4:52] Absolutely. Now that it’s become the time…the archivists before us that have worked here with the Oklahoma Historical Society for 37 years or for 40 years. That material that they have taken care of is expiring. They’ve all retired now and left it to us, which is just the natural progression/evolution of all the material.

[5:11] We’ll do our part, and then in 30 or 40 years, somebody will come in and do their part. Things keep expiring. The new advances that we see every day, I believe…If we fall behind, we fall behind.

Henrik: [5:25] I’ve heard once it is digitized, it may be transferred into a different format eventually because to your point, before it gets expired.

JA: [5:33] Absolutely. One of the other things I was speaking to students this morning is the importance of having a master copy, an access copy, or clones of the master copy for different uses. Online use, copy use, press release use, all different sorts of uses, but securing that master copy just in case anything ever happens to the original format such as fire, flooding, or in our parts, tornadoes. But definitely to have that master copy.

Henrik: [6:05] Thanks, JA.

JA: [6:06] Thank you for having me, and I enjoy your podcast quite a bit.

Henrik: [6:10] Thank you.

Henrik: [6:11] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, log on 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.

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