My So-Called DAM Life

For the most part it just kinda happened and I eased into this profession. I still have loads to learn and I always feel like I don’t know anything, but I think everyone feels that way. Shifting sands this profession is, everything is a moving target. So, at the request of one of my loyal readers, I will blog about the fantastical makings of this particular digital asset manager. I’ll just Insert some atmospheric Leatherface into the iPod jukebox and just start at the beginning, the very beginning.

The 1990′s…

My very first “real” job ever. I spend a lot of time online in the 90s, a very inappropriate amount of time. This was back in the day when AOL charged by the hour, and since I wasn’t smart enough (yet) to get AOL for free, my bills were high. So I started building websites for fun, then my friends and family started asking for websites and so on. Soon I started taking jobs listed in the classifieds building “home pages” for small businesses. Long story short, I soon found myself with the title of “Web Designer” and went on to make many websites that today would challenge the aesthetics of Geocities. It was total crap. I used Front Page and whatever other cheap tool I could get my hands on (eventually I upgraded to Dreamweaver) and with some “borrowed” code that I could manipulate. For the most part, I was on my way to a very bright and shinning career in computer assisted design (hey, that’s what it was called then). The important take-away, there are actually two, is I learned how to organize information and blend that with design. Albeit very ugly design, or at least it was after I was through with it. I’ve always been more of a wireframer. I also had to do a LOT of searching for just he appropriate inspiration and images to match the concepts I had created to implement in the design. That’s the second important take-away, I learned a bunch about how to find a needle in a haystack, from first hand experience.

So I was a designer/web designer for around 6 years or so, give or take. Now, in amongst the design gigs I would also get these interesting side-gigs. They generally consisted of, “we’ve got a mess of files here, can you clean them up as you seem smart?”. Also, “we’ve got a lot of collected imagery, can you fix those too, so we can find what we are looking for when we need to?”. I quickly learned you could store information in the files themselves and there were some real low-cost-of-entry tools (i.e. Portfolio) that helped you keep lots of images, etc organized. Yes, my first DAM was Extensis Portfolio. I went about littering the known universe with installations of Portfolio and users were happy for a while anyway. It wasn’t until much later, I learned that this thing I found myself doing was called “Digital Asset Management”. My important take-away from these less-traditional DAM gigs was how to quickly asses an information problem, come up with a solution and utilize technology to solve the problem.

Into the New Millennium…

In 2003, I met my good friend and fellow Digital Asset Manager, well at the time he was working under the title archivist. He brought me on as a project assistant for the GAP and under his tutelage I learned what was to shape my formidable DAM years. Along the way, somewhere in between working as a designer and organizing the known universe (I even did some bookkeeping too) I had set my sights on wrapping up my BA and going to get my Masters in Library Science. I heard it was all the rage with folks that had a natural talent for organizing stuff. So working in the archives at the GAP was both my first experience with an archive and with a home-build DAM (I still have nightmares about that one) and cataloging. At the GAP, I learned how to shoot digital and all things related, image quality (they got better with time), lighting, how to upload into a DAM and catalog my brains out. I also learned to leverage existing standards, such as books (some of which I still use today in my work) on particular topics to construct controlled vocabularies and keep my language consistent. In short, I learned to be really anal retentive, stick to the standard and shoot pretty good record photography. All things which have served me very well in my career.

After my contract gig at the GAP was over I decided that the Archives thing was for me and quickly begged my way onto a project at the 92nd Street YMHA. Again, luckily for me, I got to apprentice under one of the most talented archivists I will ever meet and another really amazing archivist in training. One of whom which now happens to be the Head of Archival Processing in the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library. Both of them, amazing. From these two lovely ladies, I learned a very important lesson, how to determine what’s valuable and worth saving from the junk. Every decision had real, visual consequences. The more boxes and more folders you keep, the more space you will need. Think on that with NYC real estate prices being what they are. You can’t weed down a collection that spans several hundred linear feet, by hanging onto everything. So, here I learned how to label folders the right way, shred until my fingers bled, type up killer finding aids and gained the handy ability to take one look at the contents of a box and determine what’s valuable. A VERY valuable skill indeed which translates to the DAM world well when you find that you need to assess a drive full of who-knows-what and determine what’s worth saving.

Now fresh off the archivist-in-training bus, armed with archival folders, click pencils, archival staples and the most recent Holligner catalog. I was ready to get down to the business of archives, but I wanted something that blended my prior experience as a multimedia programmer and designer (a topic which I happened to get my Associates Degree on) and archives. I knew it existed, it must. The two things were born to be together. So, in 2004, I got my job at the NYU School of Medicine Archives.

At NYU, where some saw an old card catalog and an alumni register in book form I saw a database. Where some saw old photographs, I saw a database that linked that old card catalog to the images themselves. In short, I think it might have just been laziness. I would spend hours/days looking for a particular image requested by a patron. I thought to myself, if this was digital everything would be associated and with a few clicks I could access what I needed and get to work on the next fun digital project. These pesky patron requests were really in the way of me digitizing the world around me. What startled me is that no one else that worked there had thought of it. I guess people like to do endless amounts of tedious work. To reach this aim of the luxurious, data connected archives life, I quickly went to work, creating concepts (my previous design experience came in very handy as I could execute a wireframe with the best of them and design a UI that made sense) and executing what we had the manpower to accomplish. It was never ideal, but it was a start. Some of my ideas never saw the light of day, but boy was it fun. The archives at NYU was where I found that this interesting blend of a technology background, coupled with some archives know-how made me a unique bird indeed.

While at NYU (it was only PT) I started taking small jobs on the side for folks drowning in information needs. I had lots of conversations that started out with “I have this small archive and I could really use some advice as you were referred to me by so-and-so”. So thus began my small-time consultancy which kept me very busy all the while I’m also finishing up my BA and about to begin my MLIS at Rutgers University. I became so busy that after much thought, I had to leave my digital archives lab (NYU) and pursue DAM consulting full-time. I worked in all kinds of places from photography studios to one-person businesses. Taking all my digital archives street smarts with me in an effort to make sense of it all for my clients. Doing the same thing over and over, fixing these peoples broken information lives. Assessing the problem, finding a technological solution, implementing it, writing up some rules to follow and moving on. To this day I believe the only real way to learn is just to do it, swim through the muck if you have to, make a lot of bad decisions that you have to fix and read everything thats topical to reach your goals. This approach has always served me well.

Now, to the Present…
Otherwise known as Single White female currently Seeking DAMs in need

Then in 2008, a very interesting job came along and I dropped consulting and committed to the most fun advertising job ever. I have no idea why my boss hired me, I wasn’t a librarian (yet) and had a completely nontraditional DAM background. However, I’m glad he did. Here I learned exactly what a GLOBAL implementation of a DAM looked like. Prior to this I had worked on smaller DAM implementations, smaller systems, smaller collections and less lofty DAM goals. We had a killer team, that consisted of my boss, a digital asset manager in Austin and myself. We successfully developed what was most recently referred to by a consultant, as the most elegant metadata schema to hit the advertising world. That was a joy to hear and I knew it to be true. That DAM implementation was one that just worked, sure it had its share of problems. Here I further refined my skills of creating a killer controlled vocabulary, developed a further understanding of the crazy world of production houses and creative teams and finding DAMs sweet spot within that world. Good times indeed.

The rest, is history. I finished my MLIS in 2008 (with a 2009 graduation date) at Rutgers University and I’m still in my current job that I left the advertising firm for. I can’t write about that yet, well at least not until some time passes and I’m off chasing some other DAM dream (only a matter of time). I also still do consulting work and greatly enjoy that aspect of my professional life as if you can’t infer from this posting, I do like to mix it up a bit. I hope to start teaching this year and interacting with other younger professionals looking to break it big in DAM. If you find yourself in need of some DAM SOS, you know where to find me. You know what they say, when your big in Japan…

This post is dedicated to my friend Lilly who urged me to write this. She’s a gifted writer and a digital asset manager to watch out for, but don’t ask her for a ride home or you will find yourself hours later in yet another parking garage looking for a car you’ve never been in and probably never will.