Another DAM Podcast

Audio about Digital Asset Management

Tag Archives: #reDAM


by

Another DAM Podcast interview with Julia Kim on 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 Julia Kim. How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Julia Kim: Sure. I’ve been working, managing digital assets at the American Folklife Center for a little over a year. I also worked in preservation previously at New York University and with a commercial company as well. At the American Folklife Center, we received not only a lot of born digital collections, but we also have a large ethnographic folkloric multiformat collections that span from 19th century Edison cylinders that have been digitized multiple times as technologies increase to stuff like application, programming interface, grabs from https://storycorps.me. That all falls under the purview here.

Henrik de Gyor: How does the largest library in the world use Digital Asset Management?

Julia Kim: Sure. Here at the library, it supports our basic core functions and mission to preserve and provide access to Congress as well as the people of America here. Digital Asset Management here really encompasses a number of different systems, so we actually use, not only some in-house, homegrown repository systems, but a lot of different collection management systems that support our ability to locate, provide intellectual controls, do things like mass folk migrations, for example, or off of older servers or older systems or even formats. Of course, serve that up. One of the big pushes this past year in order to serve at a larger public is taking a lot of collection material that was previously analog and digitizing it in bulk, so we’re talking about 20 terabyte collections, easily, and putting them online.

All this requires a lot of management and control in terms of understanding the derivative creation. Also, managing the different staff, people involved throughout this process, and that includes not only vendors, but multiple departments external to the archive here that work with the larger library initiatives. It’s just really the core of what we do. We are a library. We are an archive. Without Digital Asset Management, whatever its forms may be, we would not be able to function. It’s not periphery. It’s the core function of … without it, the library would not be our library. The archive would not be our archive, I would say.

This past year, we’ve also switched from a previously … what was a rich, multiformat collection with a lot of sound recordings, actually, quarter inch audio or different tape formats, magnet media to primarily being born digital, about 2015, we totally flipped to being 98% in coming acquisitions being born digital, and that’s because, in some ways, with the born-digital shift, there has been much more. It’s so easy to create. The collections we get are becoming more, more massive in size, so scaling up and creating more flexible Digital Asset Management systems has also been a big shift in this past year. Again, that includes not only systems but staff as well, so cross-training so that using Digital Asset Management is not only just something I do, but it’s across our staff and our archivists where it’s something that all archivists have to do here, now.

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

Julia Kim: Some of the biggest challenges include trying to talk across these different systems, I would say. One of the pushes this year is actually creating more robust microservices for bashing actions that simultaneously update different parts of the Digital Asset Management systems that were previously isolated from one another, required more human intervention and, therefore, were more prone to human error, I would say. Another challenge is simply the fact that Digital Asset Management changes so quickly where the field was several years ago, where it is now, especially with more complex content to formats, means that you constantly have to educate yourself and to learn and understand and stay involved with the field in a way that you might not need to in other areas. One example of that is where you’re receiving DPX files, which is massive file type for movie image formats for scanned cellulite film, where it’s literally a image by image that it’s drawn together.

The standards in this are just evolving right now and being created. The standards bodies are trying to understand embedding metadata and appropriate ways to do that in creating tools, so this means there aren’t clear answers all the time for some of these things, which is also what I would say is the most exciting part of this profession and why I’ve been drawn to it.

Another success is the integration of digital forensics applications from more of the law enforcement computing fields to archival workflows in recent years. Just this morning, I was taking some old floppy discs, zip discs, for example, and I was able to migrate content off of that and read it, and I will ingest it later to our content management system, which is a great success because before  really I would say that, at least in the archival field, these tools weren’t readily available, so a lot of this, what is really foreign digital content, was locked on this folder physical media and there weren’t the protocols in place to safely retrieve and ingest that content.

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

 Julia Kim: My advice to existing DAM professionals is to stay involved in the field because it does change so quickly. Whether this means coursework or conferences or simply networking and finding people in the field that you can talk to and talk these issues out, it’s, I would say, totally necessary involvement to be able to keep up as the field changes. My advice to people aspiring to become DAM professionals is to get a little taste of what it means to become a DAM professional. At least, in my experience, it means a lot of communication as well as technical issues and the technical troubleshooting.

That can mean a lot of meetings and a lot of advocacy across different departments. Trying to explain why things like metadata, for example, matter so much, or trying to explain why automation is important, but I think I’m just basically echoing a lot of what other people say and you got to stay involved. You have to maintain. You cannot just go to work and expect bigger data to work, necessarily. Since a lot of our work is tied up with the way different other technology, different shifts in vendors, different shifts in the consumer market. You have to just stay involved in a way that you, maybe, at least in the archival world, may not need to with analog stuff, or analog collection, necessarily, I think.

Henrik de Gyor: Thanks, Julia.

Julia Kim: Thanks.

Henrik de Gyor: For more on this, visit AnotherDAMPodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to e-mail 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


by 1 Comment

Another DAM Podcast interview with Stacey McKeever on 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 Stacey McKeever.

Stacey, how are you?

Stacey McKeever: I’m fine, Henrik. How are you?

Henrik de Gyor: Good. Stacey, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Stacey McKeever: To just give you some background, I have a Masters in Library and Information Science, so I’m an actual Librarian, and the way I’m involved with Digital Asset Management. Currently, I am the Manager of Digital Asset Management at Team One. I worked in some sort of digital asset management for 20 years, and I fell backwards into it from library school.

I found out I was a latent techie, and I like that side of libraryship, information, professional situations, whatever you want to call it. It’s been a natural progression from librarian into doing things like cataloging, indexing, and just making sure that people can find assets. Also, my undergrad was in social psychology, so it really ties in together.

Henrik de Gyor: Great. Stacey, how does an advertising agency use digital asset management?

Stacey McKeever: It depends on the agency. My particular agency, we use it as a delivery system for our art creatives, as well as a repository, so that people can review and take a look at assets and repurpose the collateral that we created in previous years. It’s also used in some parts of an archive, so we can go back and pull up previous assets from many years ago in order to be able to reuse them for anniversary pieces or other types of case studies, things of that nature.

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

Stacey McKeever: The biggest challenge I see with Digital Asset Management, in some ways it’s moving from its infancy into adolescence, and people still seem to think of Digital Asset Management in the same way that they can manage their iTunes or, I think I’ve just dated myself, or Spotify or their files on their desktop or anything like that, that anybody can do it.

Really, Digital Asset Management, part of it is a mindset because the way I see it is I have to be able to understand my user and be able to think like they think, and so there’s that point where it’s seen as it can be tacked on to the very end, as opposed to really thinking about it as the robust portion of the company that can support the workers much better, as well as, in some cases, possibly be a monetary stream that can be used to help go to their bottom line.

Some of the biggest successes I’ve seen is that it’s starting to grow and that people are starting to understand that, “Oh, wait, the assets that we have are really important, and we can use them and they can be re-purposed, and we can put them out and hold onto to them, more or less, ad infinitum.”

Another big challenge I see, I keep going back and forth, is that in some ways because we’ve been Googlized, everyone thinks that Digital Asset Management is as simple as putting just a couple of words into a system and it’ll pull up exactly what you want, and that’s not the case. The big challenge with Digital Asset Management is for people to understand that there is work involved when you have a digital asset system or when you are doing Digital Asset Management. There is that human portion of it. It’s not just all technology.

Henrik de Gyor: Good points. What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Stacey McKeever: Some advice that I would like to give is that you need to have in some ways pretty thick skin. People will underestimate what you can do and what type of benefit you can bring to the situation. I like to say that as part of my training as a librarian, I have a very high tolerance pain level for searching, and so that’s one of the skills that you’re able to develop. This ability to be able to search as well as being able to conceptualize what the DAM needs and what your user base needs.

As for aspiring DAM professionals, whatever you have in your background, bring it into your DAM life. It’s part of your toolkit. It will keep you in good stead, and it’ll come up in very strange and odd ways, so don’t forget what you know, just bring it into what you’re doing to enhance what you know.

Henrik de Gyor: Great. Thanks, Stacey.

Stacey McKeever: You’re welcome. Thank you.

Henrik de Gyor: For more on this, visit anotherdamblog.com. For 190 other podcast episodes, visit 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.

Need Digital Asset Management advice and assistance?

Another DAM Consultancy can help. Schedule a call today


by 1 Comment

Another DAM Podcast interview with Jan Delos Santos on 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 Jan Delos Santos. How are you involved with the Digital Asset Management?

Jan Delos Santos: I’ve been involved with Digital Asset Management for over a decade now. Currently, I’m the digital asset manager for RPA, which is Rubin Postaer & Associates. Prior to my stint here, I’ve worked as the Digital Asset Management for Saatchi & Saatchi LA for two years. Prior to that, I was an art producer/digital asset manager at TBWA\CHIAT\DAY for about eight years. Really much of my experience has really been on the agency side of things. Back in 2003, when I first became involved with DAM, I was just starting out as an art producer and was responsible for commissioning various artists for the different campaigns that came through. The agency needed a way to keep track of these assets that were being produced, especially as the amount of digital files grew. Because I was one of the most tech-savvy members of the team, they pretty much charged me with creating the system. I worked with our internal IT department at that time to create an in-house solution.

I was hired by RPA to revamp the system they currently have and just develop their workflow processes for DAM. Prior to my arrival here, there wasn’t anyone devoted solely to the Digital Asset Management who understood the particular needs of an advertising agency. The system was basically being used as file storage. The taxonomy was out of date. There was no overall structure to the system. Since there was no clean ingestion workflow, many of the assets in the DAM were either incorrect or never even made it to the DAM. That’s been my challenge to leverage the technology already in place, to introduce some best practices, and to broaden the agency’s understanding of the benefits of having a DAM. Anytime you’re going through this type of DAM revamp, restructure, and expansion, it’s never a quick fix. It’s been really important to me, through this transition, to work nimbly and have flexibility, but at the same, stick to a well-thought-out roadmap for implementing the new processes, technologies, and operating procedures.

Henrik de Gyor: How does an independent advertising agency use Digital Asset Management?

Jan Delos Santos: As a creative agency, we’re responsible for generating many individual visual assets used. Even though we’re an independent agency, we still have to work with a number of different client partners that rely on the assets we create. Because we have so many different teams, clients, or client partners that need these assets, we use DAM to keep track of the product metadata, usage rights, and to distribute those assets across the network. In that may, being in an independent agency is not that different from working at other agencies. We run into similar issues and have similar needs, so standardizing our workflow and getting users to adopt the system is key. Much of my experience has been with the various automotive clients, so it’s vital that they DAM keeps track of the product information for the vehicles featured in the assets. What’s product correct for one model year could change in the next. Depending upon the nature of the marketing, users may need a vehicle with very specific options. By centralizing and keeping these assets on the DAM, it ensures that users are locating the correct image for their needs. Also, it helps to make the branding consistent across the different media channels, whether it’s print, digital, or social media.

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

Jan Delos Santos: I think that although awareness is growing, I still find that many companies don’t understand what Digital Asset Management is and what the benefits are for having a DAM system in place, or if they have heard of DAM, they focus all their efforts solely on the technology when really there’s so much more to it than that. You can have the greatest technology in the world, but you still have to adapt it to your needs, especially as they change, and have people behind it to support, maintain, and grow the system. It’s not uncommon for a digital asset manager to be hired onto to clean up a previous situation. Often those responsible for creating the system don’t communicate clearly to all necessary holders involved, so no one utilizes the system either correctly or at all.

In one case, I had to cull down the required meta data fields from 140. After meeting with different stakeholders, I quickly realized that none of the users ingesting assets had the time nor were there a need for this huge set of data. I was able to pare it down to the essentials, and I reduced the number to 38. By doing this, it made the process significantly more efficient and made the option of this step less of a concern for others. Because I was focused on their needs and valued their input, those stakeholders became more willing to work with me and through me to solve future problems and eliminate future technical roadblocks.

I think that success for me happens as our user adoption grows. I love it when the light bulb clicks on for people when they work with their DAM and realize how it can make their work life easier. They’re no longer bogged down by spending so much time digging for files, and they can find what they need quickly and can move on to the more important stuff.

Henrik de Gyor: Great. Sounds like a great investment. What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Jan Delos Santos: As much as the industry is growing, I still think it’s a niche area that even some long-time agency veterans aren’t aware of. There’s certainly not a lot of information to new, prospective candidates unless they have been in this type of role previously. Most digital asset managers don’t start out as such, and they’re coming into the field from very diverse disciplines. I think that it’s important for someone aspiring to work in DAM to always be curious. You never know what experiences will help you along the way, so you have to be open to a variety of challenges. It’s not just learning about new innovations and technology. You have to be proactive and get to know your users and their needs. Also, never underestimate the value of the human part of DAM. The more you’re able to connect with people, the more successful you’ll be.

Henrik de Gyor: Great. Thanks, Jan.

Jan Delos Santos: Thanks for having me.

Henrik de Gyor: 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.

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


by

Another DAM Podcast interview with Mike Bevans on Digital Asset Management

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor: This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Hendesirik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Mike Bevans.

Mike, how are you?

Mike Bevans: I’m good. How are you doing?

Henrik de Gyor: Good. Mike, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Mike Bevans: I’m currently the senior digital asset manager at The College Board, but I’ve been involved with large-scale digital collection since 1998 when I was a digitization specialist at Cornell’s Fine Art Museum. It was one of the first large-scale digitization efforts in the country, and it became kind of a model for subsequent digitization projects. In any one of these large-scale projects, of course, you have asset management concerns because you have your whole workflow that has to be designed. Granted, this was back before people were talking about digital workflows. It was actually kind of the birth of the thought process of digital workflows, getting from the camera through editing and creating an archive and creating derivatives, so that was actually my first exposure to asset management.

From there, I went on to work with other cultural institutions dealing with other large collections and in each one of these projects, there’s a lot of money being spent on equipment and personnel, and all of these were not-for-profits so they really had to justify their expense. The best way to justify their return on investment was through repeatability, quality, and efficiency. I think these same principals apply to asset management as well, being able to have high-quality metadata, for example, being able to apply it on a repeatable basis or on a consistent basis, and of course efficiency so that you’re not spending all of your time tagging and searching. You’re actually producing work.

Henrik de Gyor: Great. Mike, how does a nonprofit organization focused around education use Digital Asset Management?

Mike Bevans: Well, the College Board publishes materials year round to help students achieve a college degree. We maintain over 120 websites. We produce training videos for teachers and counselors. We publish all kinds of printed material from postcards, flyers, brochures, all the way up to publishing books like curriculum frameworks. We’re really constantly churning out products, let’s say. We also host several national conventions every year, national and regional conventions, so we’re producing materials for that, marketing materials. We’re also producing trade show installations, so entire conferences, entire conference halls or lecture halls. We have an archive of over 120 marketing photos, and I just checked this morning, and I think we’re around 10 to 15 terabits of video footage. All of this goes back to about 2008. Because we’re working in a cyclical environment around the school year, we’re constantly refreshing our library. We’re constantly archiving and creating new materials. I just got back from our latest photo shoot, so I’m about to once again overhaul our active collection of photographs.

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

Mike Bevans: I just migrated our legacy photo library to more modern cloud-based asset management system that integrates with our production, our design production, and it was really kind of a revelation for us since I was looking at asset management tools to realize that our assets weren’t just our photographs that we were using and materials we were producing, but actually the materials we were producing are our more valuable assets. Until now, working in a design environment, we would get a task to produce a book or a flyer or something, and as soon as it was done, it went off to print. We considered that done, and the digital files would just be saved on a file server, and that’s where they would sit until next year when they would say, “Oh, we need to update this brochure, this flyer, this book.” Then we’d have to go back into the file server and find it.

We have all of our designers working in a Mac environment and our file server’s a PC, and the Macs for some reason can’t index those files, so it makes searching and finding things difficult for the designers. When we started looking at asset management systems and we saw that these could be integrated with our production, we got very excited, but that, of course, brings up what I think is the biggest challenge, which is getting users to change behavior, to adopt new systems, because you learn one way of doing things, and it may not be the most efficient way, but that’s the way you know, so when somebody comes along with a change, managing that change is actually very challenging. At the same time, the biggest success that I see in asset management is when the users actually start to adopt those changes and start to realize efficiencies and start to come up with new ways of making their work better, faster, and more efficient. On the one hand, I would say user behavior is the biggest challenge. It is also the biggest success.

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

Mike Bevans: One of the lessons I learned was early one, back in 1998, was to establish a good foundation so that you can be flexible to try new things and not to be afraid to make mistakes. If you have a good foundation that you can fall back onto, you have a lot more freedom. For example, when I started working with College Board, just like any large collection in a production environment, the question grows kind of organically, and asset management becomes a necessity. It’s almost an afterthought. You end up with, when I came in we had multiple files with multiples of the same file with different file names, derivatives with different file names that didn’t match the originals, and then originals that were duplicated in multiple places in different sets of collections.

The first thing I had to do was bring all of the originals together and then try to find some order to them. We also had, you know, as I looked through the keyword tags, we had over 8,000 different unique keywords that were not applied consistently throughout. If you were going to search our photo library, it would be luck if you found anything. For example, we had multiple misspellings in our keywords, so we would have one keyword that had 10 different spellings, and that doesn’t help you if you have an exact match keyword search. The next thing it had to do after gathering all that data together, threw out all of the old tags and established a new hierarchical tagging system that again, this way it would be consistent throughout the entire collection. It was very efficient to apply because it was a much more limited set of terms and then basically only applied them to the derivatives that I made from the new gathered originals. Everything had to fall in line with a single naming convention.

There’s a lot of different foundational steps that went into building a good collection and then when it came time to migrate, it was actually very easy because the foundation was in place. We could spend more time working on new production techniques rather than trying to migrate messy data from one system into a new system. Again, my advice would be make a good solid foundation based upon the principles of findability, and you’ll have freedom to expand in other directions.

Henrik de Gyor: Great. Well, thanks Mike.

Mike Bevans: Yeah, okay. Thank you.

Henrik de Gyor: For more on this and 185 other episodes, visit 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.

Need Digital Asset Management advice and assistance?

Another DAM Consultancy can help. Schedule a call today