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 »
Getting Rid of the R.O.T!: A friendly reminder
It’s my favorite and most well suited acronym and I apply the philosophy behind it to just about every project I encounter. It stands for: Redundant, Outdated and Trivial and it refers to content and information you’re just better off living without or not creating in the first place. In order to really see something clearly you have to get rid of all the crud thats surrounding it. I (others included) call this simple method “getting rid of the R.O.T”. Nothing is worse than finding the same digital asset in over a zillion places in one system, it devalues the original and is a headache to seek out and destroy all existing versions. For the next point, nothing makes information more irrelevant that when it is outdated. Outdated information can not be leveraged nor can you receive any ROI on it being available, the best thing to do is just… Read More »
A Librarian at the H.O.P.E (Hackers on Planet Earth) Conference
So, this weekend I attended my first hacker conference, “The Last H.O.P.E (Hackers on Planet Earth)” sponsored by 2600 Magazine. Featured con speakers were: Steven Levy, Kevin Mitnick, Jello Biafra, Steve Rambam and Adam Savage of MythBusters fame. Some of the sessions I did attend included: “Evil Interfaces: Violating the User”, “A Hacker’s View of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)”, “Hacking Democracy: An In Depth Analysis of the ES&S Voting Systems”, “One Last Time: The Hack/Phreak History Primer”, Wikipedia: You Will Never Find a More Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy”, “YouTomb – A Free Culture Hack” and all the featured speakers (except I very sadly missed Steven Levy, I loved that iPod book!). So what’s a librarian to make of all this? Well believe it or not, there is some common ground between the hacker community and us information science professionals. Chief among these are copyright (especially now… Read More »






