Elizabeth Keathley discusses Digital Asset Management
Here are the questions asked:
How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
You recently authored a new book called Digital Asset Management: Content Architectures, Project Management, and Creating Order out of Media Chaos. Explain why you decided to write this and why people should read it.
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: [0:00] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, I’m speaking with Elizabeth Keathley. Elizabeth, how are you?
Elizabeth Keathley: [0:09] I’m well. How are you?
Henrik: [0:12] Great. Elizabeth, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Elizabeth: [0:17] Wow. [laughs] I’m involved a lot with Digital Asset Management. I’m on the board of the DAM Foundation. I’m currently head of the education committee. I’m also an author. I have a book that just came out.
[0:31] Didn’t you see that on Amazon? Gosh, I write a lot about Digital Asset Management, and I own Atlanta Metadata Authority which helps people with staffing for Digital Asset Management, and I also go in and do a lot of arrangement and description of large sets for people.
[0:47] When you work in Digital Asset Management for a while, you get to this point where you grow the skill set or you can start manipulating thousands or even tens of thousands of assets at a time instead of touching individual ones. Although, you’re still going to do that from time to time anyway.
[1:04] I help people with their metadata modeling and flip everything into CSV sheets usually and help them with their controlled vocabulary and making everything standard and maybe some digital preservation concerns and, evening out their library so they can find things basically which is really just called metadata management. Some people call it metadata cleanup. In the old days, we used to call it library cataloging. Now, we just call it Digital Asset Management work mostly, I guess.
Elizabeth: [1:45] Yes, I did and you were the technical editor on that book, Henrik.
Henrik: [1:49] I was.
Elizabeth: [1:50] Yes, I was so glad to have somebody who gets it there and make me mind my Ps and Qs as we went through. I’m really glad the book is out. If people are thinking about buying it, I highly recommend trying to get hold of the PDF copy. I think that’s the best copy because it’s in color and all the links are active.
[2:08] I’m making the audio copy. It’s an abridged audio version, free on my website. If you go to atlantametadata.com, you can get the abridged audio version and the reason it’s abridged is that the book and its other forms has all these charts and graphs and illustrations and photos, but of course in the audiobook, you don’t get those and that is also part of why I made it free, because there is a substantial amount of the content missing in the audio version, but I wanted to do an audio version anyway because I remember when I was student I wanted to read these kind of books and I didn’t have the money, so I thought, “I kind of want to learn how to do podcasting and this kind of thing anyway, so a free audiobook version of my own work is a good way to start.”
Henrik: [2:52] Can you explain why you decided to write this book, and why people should read it?
Elizabeth: [2:56] I decided to write the book because for the past couple of years, I’ve been writing some articles for the Journal of Digital Media Management and working for the DAM Foundation. I realized that I have a lot of knowledge that people were interested in, and I really like writing about Digital Asset Management. I actually enjoy that process as masochistic as that may seem.
Elizabeth: [3:16] Some people find it really painful but I kind of enjoy it, because when I sit down to write about Digital Asset Management, it makes me think about the things that I know in a different way and it forces me to express sort of the tenants of the practice of the systems that we work on in a way that I ordinarily wouldn’t do for myself. Honestly, it helps me remember things more.
[3:40] I have had the experience, and I don’t know if you’ve had this Henrik, where I would be working on a DAM and I would go back to do a task that I had done before, maybe altering a metadata model or getting beyond the code base of something. I couldn’t remember how to do it, and so I would email one of my workers and ask them, “Hey, could you just remind me how we do this?” They would forward me back the instructions I had written them a couple of years earlier on how to do that task. It’s just because if you don’t do it everyday, you forget the steps and that kind of thing.
[4:17] The book is very general. It doesn’t go with any specific systems because I think that the evolution of DAM systems is moving so fast that any book on that would be quickly dated. It’s more of a overview of what DAM systems are and how they work and how you can set one up and this sort of common issues. I want to get it all down in print form before I forget it, because we’re always learning new things and working on different things. I think it’s fun.
Henrik: [4:43] What are the biggest challenges and successes with Digital Asset Management?
Elizabeth: [4:48] Gosh. What are the biggest challenges and successes? I think the biggest challenges with Digital Asset Management are simply change management. In particular, I think that the way that we do hiring and promotion and human resource, in general right now, is really broken across corporate America.
[5:07] We have these human resource officers, and I tried to address this a little bit when I did the DAM Foundation Salary Survey, but I address it more in the book. We have these human resource officers and they want to put people in a category. They want to say either you’re a tech worker or you’re a marketing worker or you work in creative services or you work in print. Digital Asset Management is all of these things and more.
[5:32] We see this weird problem where people spend all these money on these solutions and they don’t necessarily get adopted across organizations because there’s this division of labor and this categorization of labor that in a lot ways is very artificial.
[5:47] The other thing that we see is that quite often, people who maybe are younger or coming at this as their first career or maybe even their third career, the job has been typed one way or the other and they can’t get there because it’s perceived to be wrong rung on the ladder, either too low or too high. That’s just ridiculous [laughs] . We can do the work and you’re good at the work. You should be allowed to have that position.
[6:11] This is something we are just going to continue to struggle with. There’s a lot of societal shifts going on with that now. I really like this Zappos model. Have you heard about this?
Henrik: [6:19] Yes.
Elizabeth: [6:20] Where there’s no hierarchy?
Henrik: [6:22] Mm‑hmm.
Elizabeth: [6:23] Can I tell you why I think it’s brilliant?
Henrik: [6:24] Please.
Elizabeth: [6:25] I think it’s brilliant because what I saw during my time in corporate America is that you have people who are maybe at the end of their career and they want to dial it back. They want to dial the responsibilities back. A lot of times, you see people saying, “Oh, they’re just sitting out their time or whatever.”
[6:41] Unfortunately, they’re sitting out their time in the management position and that can really mess everybody else up. What they should really be allowed to do is retain that seniority because they are valuable to the company for being there, but they shouldn’t be in a position of power but at the same that shouldn’t be viewed as a demotion.
[7:01] We want to keep those people in the workplace. They’re very valuable. There’s no reason they can’t continue to contribute, but why are we insisting that these people are senior management? At the same time, you might have people lower down the scale who don’t have a lot of project management skills because they’re new to the workforce or maybe because they’re younger, they’re starting a family.
[7:22] There’s all these different reasons why you might be given more responsibility, or less responsibility, but that doesn’t necessarily fit with the title of associate or newcomer or middle manager. You need to be able to take up steps up and down in responsibility in relation to what’s going on at your stage of life and not view that as having you take a hit, or for my generation of women who tend to be super educated, they shouldn’t have to drop out of the workforce at any point. They should just be able to dial it back for a little while.
[7:55] I think the Zappos model really allows for that. I think it’s going to allow for much more intergenerational harmony. Also, it’s going to compensate for the fact that we have this weird thing that’s happened for everybody who’s younger has all the educational credentials because they’ve had to get them with the baby boomers who are still in the workforce. It’s very weird right now. I think with that Zappos model is kind of brilliant. I hope it works and I hope it gets adopted, but I’m not holding my breath either. What do you think of it?
Henrik: [8:25] It’s an interesting idea of having people being able to try new things, which is a struggle younger people, who are more junior in their career. Also, more senior people, to your point, going back down to basics, which I’ve seen many people try to do towards their retirement is they want to go back down the basics and not be remembered as ‘the boss’.
Elizabeth: [8:47] If you have some 27‑year‑old who’s really got a good idea and just lighting it on fire and wants to work those 50‑hour weeks and manage a product, let him. I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t harness that energy. Rather than say, “You need to slow down because you’re not going to be a manager for another 10 years and you just need to wait.”
Henrik: [9:13] That’s primarily one of the reasons why the younger generation may leave a job.
Elizabeth: [9:19] Because they’re not getting the chances that they want to take.
Henrik: [9:22] Because the growth isn’t there.
Elizabeth: [9:25] Yeah. I love the Zappos model. I hope that moves on. I guess the biggest challenges that I see in Digital Asset Management are just that human resource thing, and the biggest successes that I see, oh, my gosh, really, in the field of photography. Period. I’ve seen a lot of people that have able to start their businesses because they get Digital Asset Management in a way that no one else does.
[9:49] I saw this earlier in my life in the ’90s. There were a lot of people my age who just got the Internet early on in a way that other people didn’t and were able to make a good living out of it while being self‑employed. I see that a lot with Digital Asset Management, too, and it makes me really happy.
Henrik: [10:07] I’ve noticed that the creation of photography doesn’t pay as much as the management of photography?
Elizabeth: [10:14] Absolutely. When you have these kids now who’ve grown up with digital photography, which means they’ve always gotten instant feedback on lighting and composition, they never have a wait for a film to get developed, to learn what makes a good photograph. If they have the capacity to understand visual composition and light, they’re going to instinctively get it just by having a phone.
[10:36] The creation of great photography is less technical as it used to be. The value of that has dropped, but the management of photography, you’re right, that’s a rare skill. If you can do that, you could have your own business and you can travel the world and do what you want to do.
[10:51] I actually did a talk at Henry Stewart, New York in 2013 last year called ‘DAM in the Post‑Modern Workplace’, and I don’t remember if you saw that or not, I knew you were there.
Henrik: [11:02] I did.
Elizabeth: [11:03] I’m re‑releasing that as a video sometime in the next couple of weeks. I don’t know if anybody is going to watch it. It’s going to be weird because it’s going to be me talking over like a bunch of film clips and stuff, but I’m going to put it out there on YouTube because I really enjoyed giving that talk, and I think the people who got it got it and people who didn’t didn’t. I’m hoping it’ll get a wider audience. The people who need to pay attention to that will.
Henrik: [11:26] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Elizabeth: [11:32] Never stop reading. Read the Journal of Digital Media Management, listen to this blog, read the transcripts of your blog, which by the way, there’s a ton of quotes from your book in my book. Keep learning. It is moving so fast that if you stop for minute [laughs] or maybe not a minute, if you stop for 6 months or 12 months, you would not know what was going in Digital Asset Management.
[12:00] It’s moving so fast. If you don’t pay attention, you’re going to get left behind. The great way to make money on the Internet, of course, is to try to stay just a little bit ahead of what conventional practices are so that you know how to do the things that maybe other people don’t and then they can pay you to do them.
Henrik: [12:20] Thanks, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth: [12:22] Thanks, Henrik.
Henrik: [12:23] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, just log on to AnotherDAMblog.com. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at AnotherDAMblog@gmail.com
How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
How does the Philharmonic use Digital Asset Management?
What are the biggest challenges and successes you have seen with DAM?
What advice would you like to share with DAM Professionals and people aspiring to become DAM Professionals?
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 Mitch Brodsky.
Mitch, how are you? Mitch Brodsky: [0:09] Great. How are you? Henrik: [0:11] Good. Mitch, how are you involved with Digital Asset
Management? Mitch: [0:14] I work for the New York Philharmonic. My official title here is Digital
Archives Manager. I was hired to manage the three year project with support
from the Leon Levy Foundation to digitize 1.3 million pages of historical material
here in the archives between the years 1943 to 1970. My role has largely been
project manager for that project. However, I have branched out into other responsibilities,
such as web archiving, electronic records management, and other
sorts of Digital Asset Management issues here within the organization. Henrik: [0:52] How does the Philharmonic use Digital Asset Management? Mitch: [0:55] As the result of our digitization project, we have a website that was
launched in February 2011. You can find it at archives.nyphil.org. That is a site
where you can view the 1.3 million pages that we’ve digitized, and that is under
an Alfresco Repository. That’s one element of what we do, is to manage that
large repository and continue to grow it into the future. [1:22] We have printed
music, which includes scores and orchestral parts used and marked by Leonard
Bernstein, Andre Kostelanetz, and other conductors. And, of course, the parts
are marked by the orchestral musicians. We also have every printed program,
which you can flip through online. We are beginning to go back and complete
the digitization of 1842 through yesterday’s program. We do have online right
now everything from 1943 to 1970.
[1:58] In addition, we have all of the photographs from that time period, glass
lantern slides that were used in the first Young People’s Concerts, and business
records, which is actually the bulk of the material. What we call business records
are correspondence, contracts, financial documents, anything related to the
daily running of the Philharmonic. This is really what we, as records managers,
accession every day from the administration of the organization.
[2:33] We have digitized everything in TIFF and JPEG . All the images that you’re
seeing online are JPEGs that are being represented in the Internet archives
book reader, which I believe now is hosted on the Open Library. We adapted
that book reader to pull the JPEGs associated with assets you’re looking for
into it so you can flip through it as though it’s on the reading room table in
front of you.
[2:58] That said, since we have digitized everything from 1943 to 1970, we are
continuing to go back and digitize everything from 1842, now, to 1943. We will
be eventually completing the digitization of all of the historical assets owned by
the Philharmonic.
[3:20] In addition to that, we’re beginning the process of sessioning born digital
material into the archives. The idea is that, at one point in time, we will have a
single repository that contains all of the intellectual assets of the organization
from 1842 through today. We’ll be able to facilitate the discovery of items that
follow certain themes throughout the entire history of the institution.
[3:47] We do utilize assets relating to certain issues through time. This will be
one day a discovery tool to be able to pull things out that relate to overall topics
as we might be dealing with today, but we had also dealt with in the ‘70s or the
‘40s or the ‘20s, and so on. Henrik: [4:08] What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with
Digital Asset Management? Mitch: [4:12] The biggest challenge is definitely workflow. Now, our case in
Digital Asset Management might be a little bit different from what first would
appear to someone’s mind when hearing that term. [4:27] To me, Digital Asset
Management largely means born digital material that is sessioned into a repository
and managed and then later leveraged however the organization sees fit.
[4:41] What I’ve had most experience with here is digitizing analog material into
digital assets. There’s an enormous amount of challenge from the workflow, because
we have to prepare items for digitization, then it has to be photographed
by our in house photographers. Then every page has to be proofed, which
means compared with the original item.
[5:09] We have this very complex workflow, both in terms of physical logistics,
but also, software, where in between those steps, I have to ingest all these
assets into the system at an enormous rate, create derivative files, and then
put approved items into a queue for release and then finally, release when we
decide to do our point releases.
[5:36] My job as the project manager is to make sure that all the people involved
here have work to do every day and that we’re not backed up or too far
ahead in one part of the process or another. That’s the biggest challenge from
where I sit.
[5:53] The biggest success, well, it’s amazing when you work so hard on a project
like this and the site goes online and it’s living and breathing. The most amazing
thing, to me, is the comments that come in from people, how much they’re
using this now in their research.
[6:15] Only a year, I guess, a year and a half into the project, we are working with
some Columbia sociologists to look at subscription seating through the history
of our ticket sales. They’ve been crunching some of or data and transcribing our
subscriber feed books to determine where people sat in the association to their
status in New York society. It’s a really interesting project that we would never
have dreamed would’ve come out of this, especially so soon and after the initial
release of the digital archives.
[7:03] That’s just one example of many very serious researchers write us and tell
us that they want to use our data for some extraordinary project that will add to
the information that’s out there. I’m just very proud of that.
[7:19] I suppose that’s the greatest success that I see, is just that this thing is out
there and people are utilizing it and they’re responding to it. Every time we’ve
done a release, we’ve seen our numbers almost double in terms of our analytics,
and this has been very telling for us, that people really are interested in this.
[7:42] We are in a really good position with our metadata when we started the
project. Our metadata is housed in two different databases, depending on the
type of material, but these databases have been curated and utilized since the
‘80s. Our metadata is in very good shape.
[8:04] What we do is we have metadata on what we call the asset level. For business
folders, we have metadata on the folding level. For music scores, we have
it on the score level, so each bound volume is described with metadata.
[8:21] We don’t do page level description because we simply would never have
gotten it done. When we started out with the project, our metadata was pretty
clean and so as part of the proofing process, as we were proofing images, the
people who were doing that were also checking to make sure that the metadata
was standardized and cleaning up whatever needed to be cleaned up.
[8:51] Our printed music and our performance history for program metadata
are in an in-house, homebuilt, multivalue database system. Our business records
and metadata is in Inmagic’s DB/TextWorks. We’ve had good success
with those.
[9:14] The way the process works is, when we photograph the analog material,
and I ingest those JPEGS into our Alfresco repository. I also do an export of the
metadata from our legacy systems and import those as well. Everything is tied
by ID. If we do have to revise metadata, we do it in our in-house databases and
then re-import again.
[9:44] One day, we will be doing direct metadata entry in the Alfresco interface,
although we just haven’t started that yet. It’s important to note that these are
not archival databases. The databases that we use, that feed into our digital
archives, are used really by the entire organization for different purposes. For
those people who are listening to this as archivists, we don’t distinguish between
what is our archival and what is current.
[10:15] I think that goes to the same point of, the purpose of this project, to
make one large repository, one continuum of information of history of the
Philharmonic. The information that was being created by the institution in 1842
is just as relevant and just as important as the documents that are being created
right now by our executive director or managers of various sorts. Henrik: [10:45] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and
people aspiring to become DAM professionals? Mitch: [10:49] I would say learn as much as you can about different systems,
different types of repositories and different program languages. I’m not a “developer.”
That’s not my training background. I have a degree in library science,
that I also have a music degree. [11:13] I was also a geek. I loved tinkering with
computers for my whole life. In the early ‘90s when HTML started to become
a thing and the web started to happen, I had a big book of…the HTML Bible. I
went front to back and I learned it. I had no idea, then, that that would form the
foundation for my career in the future. Now, it doesn’t stop. I go home and I
do online JavaScript tutorials and I do online jQuery tutorials and whatever else
because it just never stops, the amount that you can learn.
[11:53] The benefit of being a professional, especially a technology-oriented
professional in today’s world is that there’s so much open source software and
there’s so much community around learning these things. There are plenty of
free or very inexpensive ways, if you’re willing to put the time in, to keep up with
what’s going on out there.
[12:16] I love Codecademy. It’s not huge yet, but the examples in the tutorials
that I have on there have really helped refresh some things for me and in other
cases, learn from scratch. I would definitely recommend it. I try to take my own
advice, in that case, and do it myself.
[12:36] It’s so easy. For instance, Alfresco is a great example. You can download
for free, community version of Alfresco and learn how it works and what are the
pros and cons of it. You can do that with any number of repository systems.
[12:53] Knowing about what’s out there is really important because when an
option comes up in your job, you have to make a decision between one system
or technique or another system or technique. To know all the options that are
out there and why one would choose one over the other is just really important. Henrik: [13:12] Very true. That sounds like a great example of how you made a
personal commitment to invest in yourself in learning those skills. Mitch: [13:20] Absolutely. There’s no reason not to. Henrik: [13:22] Excellent. Well, thanks, Mitch. Mitch: [13:25] You’re welcome. Henrik: [13:26] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics,
log onto AnotherDAMblog.com. Another DAM Podcast is available in Audioboom and iTunes. If you have any comments or questions, feel free to email
me at AnotherDAMblog@gmail.com.Thanks again.
Henrik de Gyor: [0:00] This is Another DAM Podcast, about Digital Asset
Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today we’re talking about Kickstarter, launching the first Kickstarter project related to Digital Asset Management, transcribing Another DAM Podcast.
[0:14] In mid-April of 2013, I launched the first Kickstarter project related to Digital Asset Management. This was to fund the transcription of Another DAM Podcast. Over 120 episodes of this podcast have been recorded, including 80 interviews with different professionals from various organizations. The goal is to transcribe these podcast episodes from audio into searchable text.
[0:37] How do we do this? Using Kickstarter, a crowdfunding website for creative projects, individuals can back projects they believe in. In this case, the project involves transcribing audio podcasts into text. No, we’re not going to ask you to transcribe the audio for us. A transcription service will do all the transcribing of these podcasts for us, and they charge for every minute of audio. There are over 11 hours of audio to transcribe. The bulk of the funding raised through Kickstarter will pay for this transcription work. The rest of it will pay for the rewards that backers get for pledging towards this project.
[1:14] The rewards vary based on the amount of funding they pledge everything from an eBook, exclusive to Kickstarter, of all the transcriptions compiled together, which will only be available for backers of this project. At a higher level of funding, people can speak to me, as a DAM consultant, regarding Digital Asset Management related topics. At the highest level of funding, there’s a combination of either of these, including a limited-edition, printed version of Another DAM Podcast transcribed.
The funding goal for this project is $3,000. At the time of this recording, we
have 53 percent of that funding, from 35 backers, with seven days left to go.
Under the rules of Kickstarter, which is an all-or-nothing crowd funding model, if we don’t obtain that goal, none of the backers get charged anything and the project does not happen at all. The deadline for this project is May 17, 2013, at 6: 26 PM Eastern time. That is when all the funding needs to be in or the project doesn’t go forward.
[2:17] In order to track the progress of this project, either now or in the future, you can go to kickstarter.com, and in their search bar on that website, type in Another DAM Podcast and you will find what’s going on with that Kickstarter project, now through August 2013, when all the rewards are scheduled to be delivered, if this project is fully funded.
[2:44] I encourage you to take a look at the project, support it if you can, and
help spread the word throughout your network, your colleagues, and other professionals you know of who may be interested in this project.
[2:55] Why should you transcribe Another DAM Podcast from audio to searchable text? To make this resource easier to reference. Audio is inherently not easily referenced, nor indexed, nor searchable. Transcribing them would make this possible.
[3:13] People from over 64 countries listen to Another DAM Podcast to learn
more about Digital Asset Management and how DAM is used within various
organizations. Professionals working in the field of DAM listen to these podcasts and enrich their knowledge from the variety of perspectives. College students are assigned to listen to these podcasts as it relates to their coursework, in library science, information management and archival studies.
[3:39] The final transcriptions will be made available, per podcast, online, on Another DAM Podcast. If you make this project a reality, everyone will benefit from it because it will be fully searchable online.
[3:58] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, log on to AnotherDAMblog.com.
Another DAM Podcast 