Good metadata helps improve your Digital Asset Management ROI and time-to-market. Learn why, when, and how to conduct a Metadata Audit in this webinar featuring a panel of DAM experts. Metadata is the cornerstone of findability for Digital Asset Management.
Listen to Another DAM Podcast interview with Iqvinder Singh about Digital Asset Management
Here are the questions asked:
How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
How does a distributor of creative products use Digital Asset Management?
What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen 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 (00:00): This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, I’m speaking with Iqvinder Singh. How are you?
Iqvinder Singh (00:09): I’m great. How are you?
Henrik de Gyor (00:10): Great. Iqvinder, How are you involved with digital asset management?
Iqvinder Singh (00:14): I’m the DAM Librarian and Taxonomist for one of the country’s largest art supplier. MacPherson’s are based out of Emeryville, California. So my role is to manage all the assets associated with our over hundred thousand products. So our products are distributed through companies like Michaels, Blick Art and thousands of other art retailers across the country. And I basically activate three areas and in the DAM ecosystems. So I manage the day to day asset management. I define the taxonomy. I also manage the eCommerce business that comes out live on sites like Amazon and walmart.com. So that’s kind of what I do digital asset management.
Henrik de Gyor (01:12): Iqvinder, how does a distributor of creative products use digital asset management?
Iqvinder Singh (01:17): We get digital assets from many different sources. The main one is we get the product imagery directly from our manufacturers. So they send us anything and training videos through actual product photography. And then, we take those assets, we bounce it against our brand standards to make sure that it aligns with what we need to publish for our retailers. And at times, we also do our own in house photography and video to make sure that we have the needs for anything that a supplier or our vendors can supply to us. So we take the products and then we send it out to companies like Michaels, they might have needs for their catalogs. They might have needs for their social media. They might have needs for their website. And each one of these thousands of retailers across the country, they might have unique needs, which might be, you know, different in size, you know, some, it’s like a product from one angles. Others like it from a different angle, some prefer videos, you know, some prefer JPEGs and PDFs and TIFs and all kinds of different attributes. In our DAM we have total of, I would say, close to 200 different attributes tied to each product. So anytime a retailer comes back to us and say, Hey, we need the following for this particular product, we can easily automate that process and send them exactly what they need. And so, you know, at one point all of this was done manually, but we have the tools where we can output all this information automatically and we can do it for thousands of items at once.
Henrik de Gyor (03:23): And just to clarify, the attributes you’re speaking of, is that metadata fields?
Iqvinder Singh (03:26): Exactly. It’s a metadata field.
Henrik de Gyor (03:31): What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Iqvinder Singh (03:36): Right now? You know, we, we are in the process of cleaning our DAM libraries, so we have assets that are outdated. You know, we have products that were shot, you know, 20 years ago. And so it’s, it’s somewhat of a manual process to get some of the newer imagery for these product and deactivate some of the old product imagery. And oh, so, you know, when you have over a hundred thousand assets, you know, it’s, it’s hard to identify which ones are new and which one are outdated. We do have a process in place where anything that’s older than five years, we are reaching out to our distributor to validate, to make sure that there’s no newer packaging out there. So getting the product out to the market in a speedy manner is always a challenge. We have to make sure we’re not only getting first in the market, but also we have the latest and greatest product imagery and just, you know, simplifying some of our own internal processes.
Iqvinder Singh (04:52): And, we still have so much, um, metadata sitting in spreadsheets and antiquated old tools and drives. So we’re just trying to flush out our own system too have the latest and greatest in our central hub.
Henrik de Gyor (05:11): And what advice would you like to share with them professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Iqvinder Singh (05:15): I would say anybody who’s coming into or even thinking about becoming a DAM Specialist, I would say is learn. Learn the life cycle of a product. In a lot of organizations nowadays you’re going to end up wearing many different hats. You’re not going to be just strictly a digital asset manager. You’re going to be providing creative feedback, you’re going to be managing, you know, assets for both web and print.
Iqvinder Singh (05:49): So I would recommend learn all the ins and outs of those… how your product’s going to be outputted so you have a better understanding of what you know, what you’re working with. And it will also make you a better communicator when you’re dealing with vendors and internal creative and marketing teams. because it’s, you know, your role as a DAM manager, it’s, it’s not a standalone role, at least not in my world. You’re going to be dealing with merchandising teams and marketing teams and logistics outside third party agencies. So kind of learn the whole ecosystem of where your role sits, learn the ins and outs of marketing and creative. And it will just make you a not only great digital asset management, you know, you’re going to be a librarian and a day to day and you’re sort of the role of a taxonomist and a lot of those companies that I worked with didn’t have that particular role, so I had to quickly speed up myself to kind of understand, uh, how the product is being used and what it means to the internal teams, what it means to people outside of our company that will be using this product and learning the proper terminology to house these products in a hierarchy that’s easy to understand and download by all different parties. There are great tools out there, but the one thing to kind of keep in mind is that, you know, all products have a lifecycle and at some point a new product comes in and we discontinue something else. So a lot of DAM Managers, they make the mistake of fulfilling their hub with all the products, but there’s not a cleaning up. There’s gotta be a process in place for a continuous cleanup of all the different assets we have in our libraries. Just in the last year, we wiped out over 30,000 assets either they were dated or no longer carried by our company. So you get to keep those kinds of things in mind. Otherwise, if the wrong product gets out in the market, that means you have to send retraction letters and could cause some other indirect issues. So just kinda keep that in mind.
Henrik de Gyor (08:30): Good point. There’s a lot of lifecycle management challenges because things keep evolving and it is not a one and done, to your point, in the world of DAM.
Iqvinder Singh (08:39): Exactly.
Henrik de Gyor (08:40): Well, thanks for your advice. Appreciate it.
Henrik de Gyor interviews Alan Gottlieb about Digital Asset Management
(duration 8:43)
Questions asked:
How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
How does a nonprofit environmental organization use Digital Asset Management?
What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people who aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Transcript:
Henrik de Gyor (00:00):
This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Alan Gottlieb. Alan, how are you?
Alan Gottlieb (00:08):
I’m doing well, Henrik. How are you?
Henrik de Gyor (00:10):
Good. Alan, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Alan Gottlieb (00:14):
So I’m the Digital Asset Manager at a national environmental nonprofit. I maintain and develop a DAM system that serves upwards of 600 users at our headquarters in New York and in Washington and at state and local offices across the country. I’m something of a one-man-band. I’m currently doing much of the ingest, description and creating rules and standards as I move ahead of with development of the system while also identifying new content providers and monitoring users on the system.
Henrik de Gyor (00:50):
Alan, how does a nonprofit environmental organization use Digital Asset Management?
Alan Gottlieb (00:55):
So, on the downstream side, our contact team includes photography from the DAM to illustrate stories in our beautiful magazine and our websites and with reports that we share with the public. We’re a nonprofit, so we also use assets for fundraising and marketing. And we use assets for communication. Communications with media organizations and on social and we also have a large outreach and education component to our organization. So educators use these assets to help create public programs. On the upstream side, our organization runs a popular nationwide wildlife photo contest for amateurs and professionals and contestants who enter photos may as part of their of their entry grant just rights to reproduce their images to further our mission. The photography from that yearly contest is at the core of the wildlife photography on our DAM. And many people use those assets and you know, our efforts. We also maintain an ever expanding collection of creative photography shot by our photo department staff and network photographers. They shoot activities and events across the country, conservation efforts, legislative initiatives and local programs or citizen science events. Also scientists may do field work and contribute photography that documents that.
Henrik de Gyor (02:33):
Alan, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Alan Gottlieb (02:38):
So when I arrived at the organization, the DAM was about two years old and it was still in a pretty early stage of development. People who knew about it were using it. It was, you know, clearly meeting a need for high quality, interesting wildlife photography, but not everyone in the network was aware of the DAMs existance and if so, how it could work for them? Also, you know, initial metadata profile had been set up, but largely abandoned, you know, say for one important searchable field. There were really no controlled vocabularies, just backlog of assets and there was really no file naming convention either. So, since then I’ve worked to establish basic DAM design and good practices, you know, establishing workflows, creating system rules and governance structures and improving security and establishing, controlled vocabularies. You know, because there was a lack of metadata fields.
Alan Gottlieb (03:46):
A search wasn’t very flexible and people were getting, you know, I thought very incomplete search results. So as an interim solution, identify the info that we wanted to maintain and, you know, use a free text keyword fields to answer those values. And finally, now I’m in the midst of making more permanent changes by establishing metadata profile, finalizing controlled vocabularies and developing rights metadata. And you know, I think establishing this should make a lot of things easier, including, you know, ingest and just further stabilizing description. Oh. So I think managing rights on our systems is a challenge. And one I’m also tackling now, less than half of the photography on the DAM was shot by employees, is work for hire or is otherwise owned by us. The rest of the photography was a shot by some combination of contestants, freelance photographers on assignment and other employees. That is, you know, people who still own their work and also the rights that we requested from contestants change somewhat from year to year early on.
Alan Gottlieb (05:05):
So we have a big variety of rights situations that we’re trying to grapple with. And I’m in the midst of setting up rights metadata fields so we can maintain a self service model where users can understand that at glance, I hope, how they can use the assets at least for, you know, various editorial uses. And in the more complex uses usage situations, we’re going to have users come to us and request permission. I’m trying to get a bead on all our upstream content producers and media, you know, and that’s a challenge maybe in part because we have a kind of a nod, entirely centralized structure. Our DAM is administered in the photo department so we have that large amount of content being driven by our shooters. But we have shooters and videographers among our communications people and social media people and scientists may have content that our national local users would find useful.
Alan Gottlieb (06:09):
And identifying those people I think is also a work in progress for me. Our organization is also not entirely centralized for a historic reasons. I think I just mentioned that for example, our local chapters and there are a lot of them are each independent nonprofit organizations themselves and though the national organization support salmon, we coordinate so well. There was initially strong adoption by the people who knew about it. Making more people in these chapters aware of us in what we offer is a challenge and we’re using internal newsletters and web pages to make our presence known. And there’s been some word of mouth growth. Also. New initiatives brought us new users and, and between us, between it all, we’ve tripled the number of users or almost tripled the number of users and doubled the downloads on the system. And the time that I’ve been there.
Alan Gottlieb (07:09):
And I think a last challenge that we’re grappling with is trying to understand how people in the organization are using the system. What are they downloading? What are they doing with those files? Once downloaded, our vendor gives us a robust audit trail so we can understand a lot of what a search for viewed and downloaded and who’s doing it, but creating reports, consolidate this information to give us a broader understanding of subject use is another current initiative. Also conducting user interviews to bolster our understanding of what’s being done downstream.
Henrik de Gyor (07:51):
Alan, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people who aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Alan Gottlieb (07:57):
Well, I’d say if you’re coming out of library school, library world, working a basic cataloging internship in the library or museum, be it with digital media, but also analog media. I think that’s really very helpful. Also, if you’re on a system, understand your users. Use system statistics, interview people, do outreach. Find those people who are using your DAM, you know, and let them give you information about what’s happening.
Henrik de Gyor (08:32):
Thanks Alan. For more on this, visit anotherdampodcast.com. Do you have any comments or questions? Please feel free to email me at
Henrik de Gyor (00:00):
This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Alan Gottlieb. Alan, how are you?
Alan Gottlieb (00:08):
I’m doing well, Henrik. How are you?
Henrik de Gyor (00:10):
Good. Alan, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Alan Gottlieb (00:14):
So I’m the Digital Asset Manager at a national environmental nonprofit. I maintain and develop a DAM system that serves upwards of 600 users at our headquarters in New York and in Washington and at state and local offices across the country. I’m something of a one-man-band. I’m currently doing much of the ingest, description and creating rules and standards as I move ahead of with development of the system while also identifying new content providers and monitoring users on the system.
Henrik de Gyor (00:50):
Alan, how does a nonprofit environmental organization use Digital Asset Management?
Alan Gottlieb (00:55):
So, on the downstream side, our contact team includes photography from the DAM to illustrate stories in our beautiful magazine and our websites and with reports that we share with the public. We’re a nonprofit, so we also use assets for fundraising and marketing. And we use assets for communication. Communications with media organizations and on social and we also have a large outreach and education component to our organization. So educators use these assets to help create public programs. On the upstream side, our organization runs a popular nationwide wildlife photo contest for amateurs and professionals and contestants who enter photos may as part of their of their entry grant just rights to reproduce their images to further our mission. The photography from that yearly contest is at the core of the wildlife photography on our DAM. And many people use those assets and you know, our efforts. We also maintain an ever expanding collection of creative photography shot by our photo department staff and network photographers. They shoot activities and events across the country, conservation efforts, legislative initiatives and local programs or citizen science events. Also scientists may do field work and contribute photography that documents that.
Henrik de Gyor (02:33):
Alan, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Alan Gottlieb (02:38):
So when I arrived at the organization, the DAM was about two years old and it was still in a pretty early stage of development. People who knew about it were using it. It was, you know, clearly meeting a need for high quality, interesting wildlife photography, but not everyone in the network was aware of the DAMs existance and if so, how it could work for them? Also, you know, initial metadata profile had been set up, but largely abandoned, you know, say for one important searchable field. There were really no controlled vocabularies, just backlog of assets and there was really no file naming convention either. So, since then I’ve worked to establish basic DAM design and good practices, you know, establishing workflows, creating system rules and governance structures and improving security and establishing, controlled vocabularies. You know, because there was a lack of metadata fields.
Alan Gottlieb (03:46):
A search wasn’t very flexible and people were getting, you know, I thought very incomplete search results. So as an interim solution, identify the info that we wanted to maintain and, you know, use a free text keyword fields to answer those values. And finally, now I’m in the midst of making more permanent changes by establishing metadata profile, finalizing controlled vocabularies and developing rights metadata. And you know, I think establishing this should make a lot of things easier, including, you know, ingest and just further stabilizing description. Oh. So I think managing rights on our systems is a challenge. And one I’m also tackling now, less than half of the photography on the DAM was shot by employees, is work for hire or is otherwise owned by us. The rest of the photography was a shot by some combination of contestants, freelance photographers on assignment and other employees. That is, you know, people who still own their work and also the rights that we requested from contestants change somewhat from year to year early on.
Alan Gottlieb (05:05):
So we have a big variety of rights situations that we’re trying to grapple with. And I’m in the midst of setting up rights metadata fields so we can maintain a self service model where users can understand that at glance, I hope, how they can use the assets at least for, you know, various editorial uses. And in the more complex uses usage situations, we’re going to have users come to us and request permission. I’m trying to get a bead on all our upstream content producers and media, you know, and that’s a challenge maybe in part because we have a kind of a nod, entirely centralized structure. Our DAM is administered in the photo department so we have that large amount of content being driven by our shooters. But we have shooters and videographers among our communications people and social media people and scientists may have content that our national local users would find useful.
Alan Gottlieb (06:09):
And identifying those people I think is also a work in progress for me. Our organization is also not entirely centralized for historic reasons. I think I just mentioned that for example, our local chapters and there are a lot of them are each independent nonprofit organizations themselves and though the national organization support salmon, we coordinate so well. There was initially strong adoption by the people who knew about it. Making more people in these chapters aware of us in what we offer is a challenge and we’re using internal newsletters and web pages to make our presence known. And there’s been some word of mouth growth. Also. New initiatives brought us new users and, and between us, between it all, we’ve tripled the number of users or almost tripled the number of users and doubled the downloads on the system. And the time that I’ve been there.
Alan Gottlieb (07:09):
And I think a last challenge that we’re grappling with is trying to understand how people in the organization are using the system. What are they downloading? What are they doing with those files? Once downloaded, our vendor gives us a robust audit trail so we can understand a lot of what a search for viewed and downloaded and who’s doing it, but creating reports, consolidate this information to give us a broader understanding of subject use is another current initiative. Also conducting user interviews to bolster our understanding of what’s being done downstream.
Henrik de Gyor (07:51):
Alan, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people who aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Alan Gottlieb (07:57):
Well, I’d say if you’re coming out of library school, library world, working a basic cataloging internship in the library or museum, be it with digital media, but also analog media. I think that’s really very helpful. Also, if you’re on a system, understand your users. Use system statistics, interview people, do outreach. Find those people who are using your DAM, you know, and let them give you information about what’s happening.
Another DAM Podcast 