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Another DAM Podcast interview with Yonah Levenson about Digital Asset Management

Listen to Another DAM Podcast interview with Yonah Levenson about Digital Asset Management

 

 

Here are the questions asked:

How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

You were involved with the Language Metadata Table. Tell us more about this.

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 Yonah Levinson. Yonah, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Yonah Levenson:           00:11                I work in the broadcast and media space and I work on metadata strategy and terminology governance. In my past, I’ve also worked in the publishing industry. That’s where a lot of my background is from and I’ve been heavily involved at DAM throughout my career because it’s very important to make sure that your assets are managed properly. My particular area of specialty is metadata because without the metadata it’s really hard to manage your digital assets in your DAM system.

Henrik de Gyor:             00:42                Yonah, you were involved with the Language Metadata Table. Tell us more about this.

Yonah Levenson:           00:47                The Language Metadata Table, which we refer to as the LMT is basically a table of codes that describe the different languages that can be used throughout really any industry. The initial focus has been on the, in the broadcast and media space. And it came about because I was in meetings at my company where people were talking about, you know, what code were they going to use for Latin American Spanish. And in one system it was Lat Am and another one was LAS for Latin American Spanish and other one was Lat Am Span. And I thought to myself, being the metadata geek that I am, I said, this is crazy. We need something consistent. So we began looking at what codes could be used that would be standard across the industry. You know, I don’t like to reinvent the wheel when it comes to metadata. So if something’s out there that exists already, let’s use it.

Yonah Levenson:           01:42                And at the end of the day, we determined that, IETF BCP 47. So that’s the Internet Engineering Task Force Best Current Practice number 47 fit the bill for what we needed in-house. And we created a table that had about 128 different languages included in it. Now, the next part was that I was at a meeting at MESA Alliance, which is the Media Entertainment Support Alliance, which is very useful in the broadcast immediacy base. And they said we would love you to present this LMT and we think it’s so good that it should become an industry standard. Or a couple of years ago, we published the initial LMT and we’re now on version two and there should be another one coming up in the near future. So basically, there’s over 200 languages in the language metadata table now and it’s being, we have a tremendous amount of support and participation across the, not just the broadcast and media industry, but also standards organizations and other groups as well.

Henrik de Gyor:             02:50                Yonah, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

Yonah Levenson:           02:55                I’ve been in this space for a while. That’s a really good question, by the way, Henrik, I appreciate that question. I’ve been in this space for quite a while and what I have noticed is the evolution of DAM. So initially, people had their assets, you know, on their local computers. They would push them up to shared drives, when I started at one of my jobs working in the publishing industry, we were looking for some files. And one of the people on my team said, Oh, I know where those are. They’re at, they’re at Rocky’s house. And so Rocky had them and you know, the assets copied onto a CD or DVD at his home and happened to not have thrown it out yet. So we were able not to have to recreate the entire, it was like a statistics book or something really complicated with Math, there was just.. that would’ve been expensive to recreate.

Yonah Levenson:           03:48                Other assets were in boxes, you know, again, on movable media, under people’s desks. And so what I have seen is that first was getting the assets onto a DAM and then there were challenges in how to better describe them and to get people to put the metadata, to apply the metadata to the assets that they have. So that’s when those are some of the big challenges. I mean, people now understand, are starting to understand better about the value of reuse of assets. They’re looking to monetize what they have already and in a different way. Whereas in metadata, I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. People don’t want to reinvent the wheel with the assets that they may own already. So those are some of the challenges.

Yonah Levenson:           04:37                So the successes end up being that people are because they do understand more. There is more of a metadata capture is included in workflows. Maybe not everything that we need, but it’s getting there.

Henrik de Gyor:             04:53                Yonah, What advice would you like to share with them professionals and people inspire to become DAM professionals?

Yonah Levenson:           04:57                What I have found in my experience is that there are many people who did not necessarily choose a career in DAM. Many of us fell into it, you know, DAM systems were being set up in companies. Somebody needed to run it. Maybe they were working in and you know, just an archival space or some kind of storage or a library. And then it moved over into DAM as people realize that they could do more with the assets if they were available. And not just, you know, tucked away in a, you know, in a system where somebody had to go and retrieve it and burn it to media or to, you know, to call it back from some other kind of system.

Yonah Levenson:           05:42                But really to have it available. So what I have seen is that the whole field of DAM has really been evolving quite a bit. And I do encourage people to study DAM in a more formal setting in some cases, especially those who are new and coming up in space, you know, or wanting to participate in some kind of an IT field. But they may not necessarily be programmers or developers. Not everybody wants to do project management. And so you need these actual people who are going to do the hands-on work of managing a DAM making sure that the content is, you know, the assets are retrievable. So along those lines, one of the things that I’ve been involved with recently is I’m the co-founder and co-director of Rutgers University’s Online Digital Asset Management Certificate Program. And this is a series of six courses.

Yonah Levenson:           06:42                Each course is four weeks long, where at the end of the six month period of taking all these courses, then you end up with a DAM certificate in Digital Asset Management. So that can really go a long way towards for people who are new to DAM but are interested in it this way. They have the background and awareness of what is needed in either setting up a brand new DAM or updating an existing one and you can come out with a portfolio piece. In addition, I also see a very strong need for people who have the, you know, library science background, particularly, you know, taxonomists and ontologists because in order to really get the most that you can out of your DAM, the content in the DAM and it really needs to be described well, there are many different industry standards that I also encourage people to participate in.

Yonah Levenson:           07:39                You know, first of all, you have to know a little bit about, or a good amount about what area you’re in and what your subject matter is. But, participating in standards and having a voice in the creation and the updates of those standards also could go a long way because you could make sure that your organization’s needs are being met through metadata standards and, and therefore the requirements of what’s needed to describe the assets in your DAM. So, and always read a lot, keep listening to important things like podcasts and other kinds of presentations that are out there and be active and participate so that you can learn lots of great articles out there as well.

Henrik de Gyor:             08:20                Well, thanks Yonah.

Yonah Levenson:           08:22                You’re welcome.

Henrik de Gyor:             08:23                For more on this visit anotherdampodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email to anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.

 

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Ian Matzen about Digital Asset Management

 

Here are the questions asked:

How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Why is Digital Asset Management so complex?

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 Ian Matzen. Ian, how are you?

Ian Matzen:                  00:08                I’m well, thank you very much, Henrik.

Henrik de Gyor:             00:09                Ian, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Ian Matzen:                  00:14                I’ve been involved with Digital Asset Management for about six years professionally. Four of those years, I’ve been a remote Digital Asset Manager. I’m currently working as the Digital Asset Management Librarian with Wells Fargo. They have a Marketing Department and they have a Digital Asset Management system there. I’ve been helping with the system’s rollout and testing new features, training new groups, and setting up the system for those new groups. I’ve also been working on asset migration, workflow automation and spending a bit of time on user adoption. In my work there, I have been serving as a consultant. We had a DAM reporting project that involves data analysis and display… or working with that… Visualizing that data for us to understand that better. I’ve also been working on some projects involving record retention and various user adoption projects including a DAM gamification project that I’m currently rolling out.

Ian Matzen:                  01:24                Before that, I was the Digital Asset Manager at America’s Test Kitchen, which is a Boston-based publisher where I managed not only the Digital Asset Management system, but also their content management system and our workflow management system. I did a fair amount of metadata modeling for both the DAM and the CMS, Digital Asset Management system and the Content Management System. And one of the high points there is I built, designed and deployed an enterprise taxonomy and did a fair amount of automation, including asset ingest automation and digital rights management tagging automatically to digital assets for digital rights management tagging. I also did a bit of work on capturing raw data around system usage and analyzing that data to measure specifically the way that our users were reusing digital assets to show the value of the system.

Ian Matzen:                  02:24                Even before that my work was as a Digital Asset Technician for a Net-a-Porter. They are a London-based luxury brand online retailer. They have offices around the world. And there, I developed a controlled vocabularies for various groups. I configured the user interface and did a quality assurance during various upgrades.

Ian Matzen:                  02:45                But my work with digital assets really predates the six years I’ve been doing Digital Asset Management professionally. I’ve been working with digital assets ever since I took my first film editing class in university. I was part of the first class to really move away from the Moviola flatbed and into nonlinear editing. So, I’m really passionate about rich media, about audiovisual media workflows and technology especially as it relates to part of the creative process. For me, nothing’s really more exciting than helping art directors, designers, editors, and motion graphic artists and other artists create their work.

Ian Matzen:                  03:24                That was the case when I first started working at an advertising agency and remains so in my work at I’m Marketing Department at Wells Fargo.

Henrik de Gyor:             03:34                Ian, Why is Digital Asset Management so complex?

Ian Matzen:                  03:39                There are several different aspects that are complicated or complex about Digital Asset Management. I think the first that I can think of is the ever-expanding definition of what we mean by digital assets. And in most circles, when we think of or talk about digital assets, we think of audiovisual media including images, videos, animations and audio. However, more recently in some of the jobs that I’ve been in, we’ve added a lot, many more different types of files and formats for that list, including emails, text, HTML, even data are being managed by DAM Managers. So the question is, you know, should every type of visual file be supported by the DAM system?

Ian Matzen:                  04:22                Ideally, they should be, but not all of the DAM systems out there are created equal. And really, you mean what it comes down to is, is choosing the best option for the digital content you’re managing. For example, the Digital Asset Management system I worked with at America’s Test Kitchen worked very well with images, whereas the current system that I worked with at Wells Fargo worked very well with video. So when it comes down to, you know, finding the right system for the material that you’re managing.

Ian Matzen:                  04:53                Another aspect that adds to the complexity of Digital Asset Management is managing expectations. And that goes for users as well as the stakeholders and folks who you might report to. I think many users expect the Digital Asset Management system to behave in the same way that a search engine does. They might be similar, but the two are inherently different when it comes to search.

Ian Matzen:                  05:19                Content is index differently. For starters, search engines rely on inbound links and sitemap indexing. Whereas Enterprise search requires applying terms from a controlled vocabulary and the context, of course, is very different. Also, companies want to capitalize on their investment in a DAM system. And so they turned customizing the system to meet their business requirements rather than opting for another best of breed product. So in this way, companies unknowingly risk customizing themselves into a corner, making system upgrades and migration, very challenging if not prohibitively expensive. So before or enhancing the system, it’s a good idea to ask whether another reasonable, reasonably priced system might be a better option and seek out other customers of that system who have done some enhancements to the same system that you’re using. There are risks for either option, whether you want to customize or build out your current DAM solution or go with another system.

Ian Matzen:                  06:19                So a good project manager can help mitigate those risks. Finally, I think the other aspect that lends itself to the complexity is the accelerating pace of technology. Whether you know how to build an extension in Java, design a workflow automation using logic or having a solid understanding of what these are, I think it’s a good idea to at least be aware of them and have some idea of how to develop a software, how workflows can be put together and at least designed, because I think there are a lot of aspects to Digital Asset Management and the more you know, I think that the more valuable, the more helpful you’ll be in your work.

Henrik de Gyor:             07:00                Ian, What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

Ian Matzen:                  07:07                I think one of the main challenges to Digital Asset Management is search. Search is dependent on metadata. Much of the metadata needs to be manually entered. Though some of it can be automatically appended to digital files or to the records within a DAM system. Really it comes down to users devoting the time to adding that descriptive information. it is challenging to get them to do that and even more so getting them to do it consistently and over time. That time never really ends because metadata must change to reflect new contexts and new users that are being onboarded. So I think that that is a challenge to managing digital assets. I think the other aspect that is challenging with Digital Asset Management is showing trust. And I think what I’ve seen with many of the systems that I’ve managed is that slow interfaces or slow experience, buggy systems. If there was poor UI or lack of transparency, they all had people’s view of that DAM system.

Ian Matzen:                  08:17                Their trust in that DAM system will be impacted by those aspects. So it’s much harder to win back that trust if people are experiencing one of those issues. So it’s important to, I do a lot of testing to ensure that the system is working. Quality assurance is a huge part of my job. And also to a certain extent doing a fair amount of examining the user interface and doing a UAT to ensure that the interface itself is making sense to them. And, of course, having some sort of way of tracking the digital assets through their life will end, have they been downloaded when they’ve been used in a layout perhaps if there are images. All that adds to the trust that the users have in the system.

Ian Matzen:                  09:05                Some of the successes that I’ve seen in Digital Asset Management have been that for one, Digital Asset Management is a bonafide profession. I think because we have conferences now there are many job postings that ask for Digital Asset Management professionals. I think that that is a win. I think it’s very important to acknowledge and acknowledge the work that you’ve done and that other writers and other folks who are in our industry, I think it’s that’s good. Also, I think another success is centralization, and I’m not just talking about having all of our assets in one system, but also consolidating the number of systems that are found at that various companies. I think, in a rather than having, you know, four or five different, systems, some of which might be system of records, some may not be. I think it’s important to acknowledge that being able to consolidate them, that the material, but also reduce the number of systems that are being used and paid for by companies is a success.

Ian Matzen:                  10:11                Another aspect or another success of Digital Asset Management is realizing workflow efficiencies. I think there’s an opportunity to renegotiate and redesign workflows. And I think that many of us working in this arena in Digital Asset Management would say that that’s something they spend a good deal of their time doing. Some examples are auto ingesting digital assets into the system. At America’s Test Kitchen, I set up a fully automated ingest. We went from doing a lot of the cataloging manually and would, you know, the folks who were consuming those digital assets had to wait for that material to be ingested before they could see and use that. Having that automated allowed people to access us those much quicker. The other aspect I think of automation is validating metadata at, again, America’s test kitchen, we found a way to actually go through and ensure that the metadata was there, that it existed.

Ian Matzen:                  11:13                Folks took the time to put it in, but also validating the name against a convention we had set up. And then finally there’s a way that you can do a fair amount of work auto-tagging material. The taxonomy, that I set up for America’s Test Kitchen. One of the aspects that I, or at least challenges that I faced was applying that taxonomy to our existing or legacy content. We had over 800,000 records. Having an enterprise taxonomy is a great accomplishment, but if you can’t go back and, and actually tag that material, it’s not going to have as much impact or value. So I did develop a means of auto-tagging or existing content through automation.

Ian Matzen:               11:59                So, the last success I wanted to mention was the increased value of digital assets. I think by having a digital asset sitting on your desktop, it may be the most wonderful, incredibly creative item, but if no one can see them… To see that asset, it’s not going to have as much value as it would if it was in a Digital Asset Management system where it can be found and reused. So I think access is a huge part of that equation. But I think ultimately our goal is to make digital assets findable and see that their value increase.

Henrik de Gyor:             12:35                Ian, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Ian Matzen:                  12:41                I would suggest that they would navigate to my blog. I have a blog called tameyourassets.com and I do a fair amount of blogging and writing and my intent is to share my knowledge and experience with others, especially best practices. So I hope that listeners would consider going to that URL. I think another aspect or another suggestion that I have is just know your DAM systems. It’s important to know what current systems there are both within the organization that might be a part of, but also, systems that are being offered by other vendors. It’s important to see what current and upcoming features they’re offering so that you could ask for those features for the current system that you’re using. I think another aspect of that is as partner with other system adopters or other people managing the DAM system, the same DAM system that you’re using to drive that vendor road map. So I think partnering and forming that network of system users and managers is very important. And then, also another aspect is education. I think it is very important to learn and master DAM best practices, to ask questions, learn from other practitioners, take online courses or even take courses at a local community college.

Ian Matzen:                  14:05                I think finding courses in library science or computer science or data analysis, will all help you at least to give you that understanding of what those aspects are that, you can talk with other folks in your organization to help manage digital assets. And then finally, I just wanted to mention, finding a mentor in the Digital Asset Management space. They don’t have to be necessarily someone with much more or any additional experience that you might have. It could be a peer, but the benefits of having a mentor would be to find some encouragement and support for your journey in the Digital Asset Management space. They can offer you honest advice and feedback, what you’re doing and how you’re managing digital assets, and then, of course, having a mentor is helpful to expand your professional network.

Henrik de Gyor:             14:57                Great. Well, thanks Ian.

Ian Matzen:                  14:59                You’re welcome. Thank you very much.

Henrik de Gyor:            15:01                For more on this, visit anotherdampodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.

If you are interested in attending the Insight Exchange Network’s DAM Practitioners Summit on January 30-31, 2020 in New York City, you can find more details here. Use the discount code M131ADC for a 15% discount on registration. #IENDAM

Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Amazon Alexa, Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts,  RadioPublic, RSS, Spotify or TuneIn

Need a Digital Asset Management Consultant?

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Erin McElrath on Digital Asset Management

Listen to Erin McEIrath discuss Digital Asset Management

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor:  This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Erin McEIrath. Erin, how are you?

Erin McElrath:  I’m just fine. How are you?

Henrik de Gyor:  Great. Erin, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Erin McElrath:  I am the Creative Tools Manager at an e-commerce company called Brandless and I manage all of the digital asset management and content that comes in and out of the company, whether it be on the site or on our printed collateral or on our social media.

Henrik de Gyor:  How does an e-commerce company that puts people first use Digital Asset Management?

Erin McElrath:  We use it just like any other company would. We do a lot of creative assets internally for marketing purposes. We also use it to store all of our product information, all of our packaging. Anything. Any image that has shown up on our site, we like to house on our DAM, but most recently, we’re starting to use a lot of user-generated content (UGC) from social media. So we’re scraping all social media sites and the images that we like and we would like to use further, ideally, we would like to put that in the DAM, in the, in the next coming months. In addition to the digital asset management, I also do all the post-production workflow. So I’m working with all of our outside agencies as the content is funneled in through the company and then approved and funneled back out.

Henrik de Gyor:  What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

Erin McElrath:  Well, I think the biggest challenge, and I think anybody has been in the industry for awhile can agree that the biggest challenges assessing the need of the company for our positions. We do a job that we’re basically when we’re doing our job, no news is good news and everything is sailing right along and very efficient, but to bring other people on as help and as teammates because this is a very hard job to do by yourself. To show the need and the value of the position can be challenging. When the company would rather spend their money on new creatives or engineering team on new platforms to show that the DAM is actually the brain and the hub of the organization.  When that is running smoothly, everybody can do their jobs. It takes a lot to show that value for successes. I guess on that same note when everything is running smoothly, that is my biggest success. Right now at Brandless, I have implemented three workflows using our current DAM where content has flowed in and out through a system with permissions and approvals. Everybody seems to be really happy with it and everything is working. So I think that to me is the pillar of my big success in any job that I have is making sure that the DAM that the company purchases is used to its full capabilities.

Henrik de Gyor:  Would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Erin McElrath:  I think the biggest one is don’t be afraid to assert yourself. We’re often seen as the people in the corner doing manual data entry work. That’s how we’re viewed by certain members of a team or a company, but we’re really not. We do so many things and most of the time nobody knows what we do. Digital Asset Manager is such a broad term that it could mean anything, so define the role that you want within your organization and what will be most appropriate and try to align yourselves with them, with the people in your company that you know you can help them most. Oftentimes, they don’t know what you do. Go up to them and asked them their pain points and see how you can help.

Another big one, most recently I kind of spoke about it earlier… Learn all you can about user-generated content, which is often called in the industry UGC. This is really big now. A lot of Digital Asset Managers don’t like to put that in the DAM because there’s so much. The liability is very unclear. It changes all the time and oftentimes when we have assets, we have contracts and releases for those assets, but for UGC we do not. Oftentimes, we just have a screenshot that our producers said, “can we use this photo?” And the person said “yes,” and that’s it. I think in my opinion, times are changing and we’re starting to formalize that relationship. Now Brandless, for example, is using a lot of UGC content and our marketing and our social media. We like to have and I like to have those in the DAM so I can track where they’ve been used and who is responsible for that connection. If something goes wrong with that initial user that uploaded that content, we can take it down immediately. I know where it lives on everything, so yeah, just familiarize yourself like technology is changing and we’re right at the forefront of that, so just be on the ball.

Henrik de Gyor:  Well thanks, Erin.

Erin McElrath:  Thank you very much.

Henrik de Gyor:  For more on this, visit anotherdampodcast.com. You have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.

 

Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Amazon Alexa, Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Play,  RadioPublic, RSS, Spotify or TuneIn

 

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Insight Exchange Network panel discussion on Digital Asset Management career paths

During the Insight Exchange Network conference about Digital Asset Management (DAM) on January 24, 2018, a panel discussion was recorded on the topic of career paths in DAM.

Panelists:

Jennifer Anna, Photo and Digital Asset Manager, World Wildlife Fund

Kym Coffey, Director of Digital Engagement and Content Strategy, Marketing Media Communication

Moderator:

Henrik de Gyor, Chief Consultant, Another DAM Consultancy

Here is the audio recording from this panel discussion (Duration: 46 minutes)

 

 

Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Amazon Alexa, Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Play,  RadioPublic, RSS, Spotify or TuneIn

 

Need a Digital Asset Management Consultant?

Another DAM Consultancy can help. Contact us today.