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Another DAM Podcast interview with Heather Hedden about The Accidental Taxonomist Third Edition and Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

Who are you and what do you do?

How are you involved with 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 0:00
This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor.

Who are you and what do you do?

Heather Hedden 0:07
My name is Heather Hedden, and I’m a Taxonomist. I design, create and edit taxonomies, which are structured, controlled vocabularies of terms or concepts used to tag, manage and retrieve content, and thus play an important role in metadata.

I’ve been a Taxonomist for over 25 years. This has included working both in information management roles and companies and as a consultant externally, both as an employee and self-employed.

For the past two years, I have been employed by a Taxonomy and Ontology management software vendor, Semantic Web company, whose product is called PoolParty, whereby I help our customers with their Taxonomy and Ontology products. I also teach taxonomy creation, through online and in-person workshops, both independently and through conferences or other organizations.

Finally, I am an author of a book about taxonomies and how to create them called The Accidental Taxonomist, which has just been revised for its third edition, which came out now in November 2022. I also author a blog called The Accidental Taxonomist.

Henrik de Gyor 1:22
How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Heather Hedden 1:27
I’ve been involved with a number of Digital Asset Management projects as a Taxonomist. Some of the past consulting projects for which I have created taxonomies included a photo editor and graphic design maker web application available to buy by subscription, which included its own stock photos, drawings, icons, and animations all needed to be tagged with a taxonomy. I did a consulting project for a hotel company, which included general marketing images for its websites, and images for specific hotel properties. And a project for our business information publisher, which had a large collection of short audio recordings from business leaders providing advice. That’s just some of them.

I also in my taxonomy training courses, I have had participants involved in Digital Asset Management. For example, in early 2020, I gave a two-day on-site training to the photo archivists of the US Senate House of Representatives and Architect of the Capitol. That means involving the building of the Capitol altogether,

Henrik de Gyor 2:35
What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

Heather Hedden 2:40
A continued challenge us in tagging image assets. For text-based content, text analytics-based auto-tagging has become common, but nontext content remains a challenge for tagging, audio and video can be transcribed and the transcriptions can then be text mined, but images remain a challenge. So captions and other manually added metadata is important.

Another challenge is in the issue of content silos. There is increasing interest in the fields of data and content management to break down silos and eliminate the use of so many different content management systems in an organization. But Digital Asset Management systems are optimized for the needs of DAM and it’s not practical to manage digital assets in a generic content management system. So the focus needs to shift from breaking down silos to bridging them.

As for successes, I think it’s been the wider recognition of the importance of Digital Asset Management in all industries, and organizations of all sizes, not just large media-producing companies.

Henrik de Gyor 3:50
What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Heather Hedden 3:55
I advise to combine Digital Asset Management with another field or skills, such as taxonomy creation, or knowledge management or content strategy. Subject matter expertise is also good to have. And I recommend to think broadly to be open to work in any industry and not just those traditionally involved in digital, and media assets.

Finally, when it comes to specific implementations and projects, it’s important to consider metadata and taxonomy for a wider content use in an organization and not just the metadata and taxonomy specific for digital asset management.

Henrik de Gyor 4:33
Thank you. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. For more podcasts like this, visit anotherdampodcast.com. Thanks again.


Questions?

Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts,  RadioPublic, RSS, Spotify, TuneIn, and more

Need Digital Asset Management advice and assistance?

Another DAM Consultancy can help. Schedule a call today

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Laura Patterson about Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

How does a leading health solutions company 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 0:00

This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Laura Patterson.

Laura, how are you?

Laura Patterson 0:08

I’m doing great. Thanks. How are you?

Henrik de Gyor 0:10

Great. Laura, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Laura Patterson 0:14

I have a lot of different roles in asset management for my organization. I am part strategist, part project manager, developer, coder, I do a whole gamut of different things within the DAM world. And it’s been about 10 years of me being in this field. And within the organization I’m in now, I have actually built three different DAMs, and each one has been progressively more complex than the next. And we’ve done so because of obviously, the technology changing in the world and the changing business needs of our organization. So we’re just finishing up building our third DAM for the company.

Henrik de Gyor 0:59

Laura, how does a leading health solutions company use Digital Asset Management?

Laura Patterson 1:05

We use it in a very wide variety of ways. We are all encompassing our entire enterprise is utilizing this DAM to search and download assets. And this is across many different business areas. We have our retail marketing and creative teams, obviously, they’re one of our primary users. But we also have folks in corporate communications and HR, learning and development, our prescription benefits management groups. So we have a very broad audience. But we also service a number of external partners, including design agencies, photographers, and illustrators, some of whom might be coming to the DAM to consume our assets, utilize them in partnership work that we’re doing with them, or they might be contributing assets to us, such as photo shoots or video shoots, etc. And our other primary external users are our product vendors, they are actually our heaviest uploaders of the system. We have a partnership with these product vendors, where we advertise their products, and they help us with our marketing campaigns. So they will provide us with their imagery that then gets stored in the DAM, access by marketing and creative and subsequently used in our marketing materials. We are expanding very quickly, we are getting more and more people that are involved in participating in the DAM. And I think with the technology and digital transformation, we’re really bringing a lot of consistency to our technology stack across the organization.

Henrik de Gyor 2:47

Laura, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

Laura Patterson 2:52

I’ll start with one of my biggest challenges that I’ve experienced, and then how it became successful. So one of the biggest challenges that we have had is user adoption and change management. That can be a really big deal for folks that have never used an asset management platform before and trying to understand why we need it, why we have to participate in it, what benefits does it bring. So, you know, definitely with different types of business areas that can be far more challenging to convince than others. And I would say that the success of dealing with that challenge is as you’re building out your DAM, whether it’s from the very getgo, starting your strategy, metadata development, the actual platform development, any business areas that are going to be touching this platform at any level, you should engage with them right at the start of the project and get their input and their feedback, understand their problems and their needs, and work with them to come up with solutions. I found that it’s more successful when you involve all of these different groups that you want to adopt the DAM, and how let them have their say, and how it gets applied to their world and give them those sorts of real life experiences and how it will directly relate to them. And you will find that the adoption and the change management becomes much smoother when you have that communication and that open door for them to give them what they need.

Henrik de Gyor 4:27

Laura, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Laura Patterson 4:34

I would say my advice is and this would go for both new and existing again, really thinking through your strategy really working with the different business areas. Not thinking about DAM in a vacuum of how you as the asset manager is going to work with the assets, work with the application, but to think broader in terms of how it’s going to to impact your direct users, both incoming and outgoing, and if you really put your focus on the users, you’re going to have a much better DAM solution, a better experience for your users. And you’re really going to get people engaged and wanting to participate. I found that has been probably the biggest success for me in my career in really getting the asset management out into the organization and really making it successful and worthwhile for all of our users.

Henrik de Gyor 5:35

Well, thanks, Laura.

Laura Patterson 5:36

Thank you very much.

Henrik de Gyor 5:37

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.


Questions?

Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts,  RadioPublic, RSS, Spotify, TuneIn, and more

Need Digital Asset Management advice and assistance?

Another DAM Consultancy can help. Schedule a call today


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Another DAM Podcast interview with Leah Carlson on Digital Asset Management

Leah Carlson discusses 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 Leah Carlson. Leah, how are you?

Leah Carlson:   I’m great. How are you?

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

Leah Carlson:   I’ve been working with DAM for over six years. My first role in the field was with National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. I was responsible for application support and the IT department and I had the opportunity to roll out and manage DAM for the organization. And then two years ago, I took the role of Global Digital Content Manager at McCormick and here I get the opportunity to develop global content strategy, which means frameworks and best practices to promote synergy and consistency between our regional creative operations. And with that, I’m also responsible for our enterprise DAM and global content management strategy for our 30 plus consumer brands and our industrial flavor solutions organization. I am responsible for overseeing governance and roadmap for our assets and embedding that content management best practice into our region.

Henrik de Gyor:   Leah, how does a global leader in flavor use Digital Asset Management?

Leah Carlson:   McCormick uses the DAM as a global platform for all of the organization’s digital content, so photography, videos, brand guidelines, social content. It’s also our historical asset repository. We support the majority of all of our internal teams as well as our partners and agencies, including joint ventures and distributors. And, one of the cool ways that we use it is to better get our users to the latest content and information. We develop curated landing pages within the tool. In addition, we use our DAM to benchmark and measure digital performance by analyzing KPIs to drive efficiency and effectiveness within our content operations. So for example, this might look like optimizing our operations by shooting a video for one brand and then swapping products stills in simple elements to create content that work for the entire family of brands.

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

Leah Carlson:   One of the challenges that I’ve had for myself is that there’s no really one blueprint for marketing technology metadata since it’s such a new field. I find myself always trying to seek out the best practices and evolve our internal metadata to support the search and keep robust and rich information on the content for us to better connect with other tools and workflows within the organization. In addition, some of our various stakeholders obviously use a variety of tools to support their needs. And as you know at many others there’s always constant changes and the technology world. On the other hand, success is really seeing those downstream benefits to our pragmatic approach to solving these challenges. So for example here, one of the things that is so encouraging as when we receive great feedback that we have helped enable sales and marketing by serving up the right content and information at the right time and that has made their job easier and more efficient. And then

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

Leah Carlson:   For those considering the field, it’s really a collaborative and fun community. People help each other out and they share their information. So when you get into the field, you can learn from building these relationships and really taking those applied learnings and applying them into your own organization. The other thing that’s great about the DAM field is you get to wear many hats, so all in one day you may be a librarian, you might be designing user interfaces and you might be training and collaborating with different users and stakeholders. Also for other professionals in the field, one thing that I recently did was I took a formal change management training and those methodologies have been really an effective tool for me and assessing my stakeholder engagement, my project management, and my change management, which has enabled me to be more successful in the way that I roll out the various projects.

Henrik de Gyor:   Great. Well thanks, Leah.

Leah Carlson:   Thank you.

Henrik de Gyor:   If you enjoy this and want to hear more about the Insight Exchange Network DAM Practitioners Summit happening in January 2020 in New York City along with a discount code, links to register and more details, visit the show notes at anotherdampodcast.com

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 (applicable to the early bird pricing rates too).

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

Need a Digital Asset Management Consultant?

Another DAM Consultancy can help. Contact us today.


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Another DAM Podcast interview with Paul Garrison on Digital Asset Management

Listen to Paul Garrison talk about 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 Paul Garrison. Paul, how are you?

Paul Garrison:   I’m good, thank you. How are you?

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

Paul Garrison:   I’m currently a Digital Asset Management Supervisor for McCann World Group here in Detroit. Previously, I worked as an Account Manager for the Getty Images DAM product called Media Manager and I had several accounts throughout the Midwest. And then on a personal note, I’m also working towards my Master’s in Information and Library Science at Wayne State here in Detroit with an emphasis on digital content management. So my involvement goes a little bit deeper than my 9 to 5 job.

Henrik de Gyor:   Paul, how does a marketing and advertising company use Digital Asset Management?

Paul Garrison:   Well, we’re an agency and obviously in advertising, an agency creates campaigns and those campaigns create assets. We have an internal DAM system here for our in-process creative assets and this DAM holds our photoshoots and purchased stock images, things like that for our creative department to access and use.

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

Paul Garrison:   Yeah, there are several challenges I’d like to talk about. The biggest of which that I’ve seen is migrating an existing system to a new platform. I’ve been involved in this a few times and the big underlying question is who is making the choice of which system to purchase and how are they deciding that. There are so many systems available now and how do you discover which is best for your installation? That’s frustrating to go down this path and then later discover that the specific features you highlighted or needed in your RFP are weak or not offered at all. So do you backtrack at that point or are you financially committed and have to go with what you have?

Paul Garrison:   Another challenge is having serious competent people working on the system. Quality metadata is so mandatory and the saying ‘garbage in, garbage out’ is so true in DAM. Metadata differentiates the assets. So if you just tag 100 assets with all the same information, how can you find the one asset that you need? So often just the minimum information is provided and this does a disservice to users of the community. Another challenge is system adoption by end-users. Often, development is focused on what the developers can do or think is best and this does not always coordinate with what the end-user community understands or can navigate. It really benefits the whole system to engage the end-user before or during development to make sure that what you are building is compatible to their thinking. And so surveys, interviews, and focus groups will to better understand the user’s mindset and to build towards that as much as possible. The user also has to understand that the DAM is not Google. So there is training that is necessary to properly and successfully use the system without frustration.

Paul Garrison:   And the last challenge that I’d like to mention is governance. There needs to be someone monitoring this site, especially an enterprise site to make sure that the information is clean in quality. Someone to uphold best practices and train when necessary to make sure the sites succeeds. That person must have the backing of a corporate champion as governance flows from the top down and without backing it is very difficult to enforce the necessary rules for the site.

Paul Garrison:   Successes… I would like to say that I’m very interested in reporting and analysis and we monitor our KPIs to see if any trends are happening month to month on the site, either good or bad and we’ve noticed a surge in certain product images and since then we’ve gone farther to increase their availability, especially in domestic and global dealer markets to maximize their usage. That particular classification of images now our second most popular on a site that has over a half a million downloads a year, so paying attention to what works or doesn’t has been very helpful and for those looking to develop a DAM, involve with an professional from the start. This is not work for an administrative assistant to do in their free time. Someone knowledgeable about library science, assets and taxonomy who can work with the departments of the organization to understand their pain points and gather their feedback to build into the system. You need someone to spearhead the project and work with IT to make sure all the technological aspects are covered. Picking a system is difficult and working your way through all the RFPs, demos and sales pitches. It takes understanding and knowledge. You have to do your homework to begin on having successful footing.

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

Paul Garrison:   Sure. As a wrapped up in the daily work as we all get, it’s always key to consider the end-user of the system. Is Your taxonomy consistent with their jargon? Can they find the great assets that you just uploaded for their sales push? Do they understand the layout of the interface and how to use the facets to search and filter? Talk to them when you can and listen to their comments, successes and failures. I like to make job aids [brief task-specific PDFs] for issues that come to my attention. If one person is having difficulty, I’m sure there are many other silent ones who are as well. I tried to distribute them [PDF job aids] when possible or at least have them easily available to send out with an email. This gives the issue a visual and walks the user through it step by step for potential DAM professionals.

Paul Garrison:   I personally have a lot of patience. Patience for users who contact me and for the system that typically will hiccup just when you don’t want it to. I have attention to detail, obsessively so, and that makes me want to do it right the first time and not to cut corners. I’ve learned a lot going back to library school, even with 15 years of DAM experience, many existing resources have been brought to my attention. Things like the Library of Congress subject lists, the MARC standards and these resources that standardize values across many mediums. If you plan to eventually work and integrate with other systems, these resources are important to know and to utilize. And lastly, I know myself and what makes me tick and I enjoy this work. It will bore some people and drive other people crazy, but I enjoy this work and seeing the results by analyzing reports from the system and I track it year over year for performance.

Henrik de Gyor:   Great. Well, thanks, Paul.

Paul Garrison:   Yeah, you’re welcome.

Henrik de Gyor:   For more on this visit anotherdampodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email 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 (applicable to the early bird pricing rates too).

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

Need a Digital Asset Management Consultant?

Another DAM Consultancy can help. Contact us today.