Marketing your metadata schemas: Break them out of the spreadsheet!
With most things in life, context is key. We work with it so much we often forget how abstract a metadata schema trapped in a spreadsheet can be. All our hours of work, relegated to a boring set of rows and columns. It’s anti-climatic and no one except for a few right-brain folks, usually tech, even want to read it. In some cases its necessary to get your message across to other stakeholders outside the realm of IT. Therefore, its important to boil your work down to the most important aspects. I’ve found the thing that they are looking for most is context and simplicity. Whether you are creating a metadata schema, a content blueprint, a metadata matrix, or whatever you are calling it these days, relate it to your audience. Here’s some examples of how: Annotations: For the design of a website or application for example, do what you… Read More »
What kinda ‘Who’ do you need to make DAM work?
Digital Asset Management is not just an application, but it is a business practice requiring certain roles in place for success in any organization. For the most part the profession of Digital Asset Management is not fully understood, except for by those in the ‘know’. This is due in part to the maturation and growth of the field in just over the last few years. Have you taken a look at the landscape of content management technologies recently? This is no longer a one-trick pony in a one-horse town, but a process that requires support from a skilled selection of professionals and has touch-points across the organization. To quote one of my favorite bloggers on DAM, H. de Gyor, “Digital Asset Management is a business need, not just a technology or another database”. Many institutions who have systems that were implemented over 4 years ago are now facing the challenges… Read More »
Professional Silos: Don’t Reinvent the Wheel!
Call it a rant, I call it a blog “posting”. Lately, I have become acutely aware that there exists a major hurdle to digital project success (specifically digital asset management) that we who work in institutions need to be aware of. I recently had a colleague return from an Archives Conference abroad that focused on Digital Asset Management and to put it lightly her mind was blown. She’s not an archivist, she’s not a digital asset manager, but she is an administrative assistant in a cultural institution. Her reactions to what she learned further confirmed some of my own feelings I had after recently speaking at both a Digital Asset Management conference and an Archives conference. Which is that, technology has changed our work environments and roles more than most people are aware. It is no longer acceptable to operate in a silo and remain unaware of how other professions… Read More »
Food for thought…a wandering down future lane.
I’ve recently been working my way through Terry Goodkind’s, Sword of Truth series on audio book. Great series, I highly recommend it. The audio book version I have was digitized from the original cassette tapes (don’t worry I’m not lugging around a cassette player, I gave that up two years ago) and this morning I took note of something really interesting about them. Although my recordings are .mp3s they still have the original cassette tape intros and outros still present. Part of the intro to each “cassette tape” is the narrator stating the recordings Library of Congress’ RC number, “RC41067″, page count (573) and the number of cassette sides (21) it covers. Cataloging Yesterday and Today: Where am I going with this? Well, other than the obvious kitsch value, think about how these cassettes might have been cataloged. You would assume the cataloger would have recorded that the audio recording… Read More »
About me:
Metadata and Taxonomies are my thing. I spend an awful lot of time drinking coffee and having existential dilemmas on how to categorize what the hell I do for a living.
Recent Posts
Blogroll
- Alpha One Labs: Community Hackerpsace in Brooklyn
- Content Marketing Nirvana My favorite SEO guru’s latest.
- The Hacker News Network
- Virgil Griffith Wikipedia Master
What I’m Reading Now
- The Milky Way's black hole may spring to life in 2013 December 15, 2011 (author unknown)
- Book Deals: Blogging team Blondie and Brownie got... December 14, 2011 Amanda Kludt
- Twitter hits the big time with its new Art Deco headquarters (pics) December 8, 2011 Jolie O'Dell
- Apparently The Internet Is A Complete Waste Of Time December 2, 2011 Jon Mitchell
- Startups Are Hard. So Work More, Cry Less, And Quit All The Whining November 28, 2011 (author unknown)
- Man With 15 Kids by 13 Different Women Isn't Done Making Babies Yet [Uk] November 27, 2011 Lauri Apple