Many institutions who have systems that were implemented over 4 years ago are now facing the challenges of an over-accumulation of content, poorly defined DAM scopes and ones that are no longer meeting the needs of the staff. First and foremost DAM systems should be a means to efficiently and effectively transmit ‘valuable’ and high-use assets throughout an organization. Some of these complications arose out of the transition from analog to digital with no change in staffing. Old staff were just ‘transitioned’ into working in the digital realm without any real training or professional development requirements. The skills used in managing analog materials were not the same as those necessary for the effective management and creation of digital materials. Analog workflows do not cleanly transition into digital ones, nor should they, there are better ways of doing things now. So many institutions had to ‘make-do’ as there were no other options that didn’t involve sweeping the human resource slate clean and starting over again.

Digital asset management is not just the system (i.e The DAM), but a combination of content management related professional disciplines. These disciplines include, but are not limited to: business management, information architecture, library and information science, software engineering/development, content creation and publications development. So who or what are these most integral roles at the bare minimum of the resource chain to make a DAM project successful? What follows is a summary of 4 essential DAM roles, some of which originate from the epic work The Content Management Bible by Bob Boiko. However, many folks will never get around to reading this most essential work, so I’ve made it easier for you. If you don’t have at least these three roles present in a dedicated DAM team, you’re not doing it right.

Business Analyst:
They need to fully understand the discipline, concepts and execution of digital asset management. They are the business representative for the digital asset management project to the rest of the organization and the outside world. They understand how digital asset management fits into the overall strategy of the institution. The business analyst will negotiate support and cooperation from the institution in regard to digital asset management initiatives on behalf of the DAM team. They perform business analytics on all processes and workflows that are effected by digital asset management. They will then help the team to apply these analytics to the creation of new processes and workflows to meet organizational needs.

Content Analyst:
They need to gather content requirements and determine the value of assets to be managed in the DAM. They create standardization documentation for polices surrounding the cataloging and management of rich media assets. Design the framework for the architecture of the information (metadata schemas, folder architecture). They will need to establish a asset lifecycle schedule from the birth or creation of digital assets to their retirement. They will need to have a strong background in cataloging and standardization skills. The content analyst determines project plans for the ingestion of new rich media into the DAM system, workflows and surrounding processes. In leaner times the content analyst also performs the role of a content metator for the DAM (digital librarian). This entails the review of incoming assets to make sure they adhere to written standards, add metadata where needed, perform training in all aspects of DAM (end-user to admistrator). Information Science professionals are often ideal candidates as content analysts, however not all library science professionals are good fits for the role. The library and information science professional should be well rounded and come from various environments (for-profit and not-for-profit), have experience in working with digital creative agencies and in more traditional archives.

Rights & Usage Analyst:
The focus of digital asset management is on the distribution of valuable assets both within and outside the organization. The rights and usage expert will evaluate the the organizations rights and usage approach and workflow. They will streamline the distribution process of assets both within and outside the organization, standardize the rights associated with assets, and increase the amount of assets available for use. They will work closely with the Digital Asset Manager/content Analyst to asses the collection based on rights and usage. They will have advanced experience with creative commons, PLUS and other rights management initiatives, workflows and tools.

Programmer/Developer:
This person will implement necessary changes, enhancements and extensions to the digital asset management system or chose the development environment for new DAM projects. They are able to automate acquisition routines, create and run system diagnostics and provide system intelligence to the DAM team. They have expertise in database and XML technologies. They need to be a SQL ninja as some DAM systems do not provide an easy front-end for doing analytics.

Along with these four roles you may have some borrowed talent such as a administrators, project managers, usability/user-experience professionals, production mangers or even a CIO. Some of the roles above may even overlap into a general Digital Asset Manager role depending on the project. In the short run if you do not have at least these 4 professional roles (this does not mean you can lump them all into one person), your DAM might survive, but its success over time depends with the inclusion of these individual professionals in your project budget. If you want more on this topic as I have really glazed over what takes many pages to describe into a few short paragraphs please read The Content Management Bible by Bob Boiko, specifically chapters 12-14 and 33. In short, Digital Asset Management is too big to saddle on the shoulders of any one person and requires at minimum a team of 4 dedicated, experienced professionals to be effective.

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 cross-over into your own. You might be saying “that’s great, but what do you mean by this?”.

One of the best examples is that Digital Asset Management, which is a product of the “corporate” world, now exists within libraries, archives and museums. However, many people involved in those projects at those institutions are unaware of the existence of the profession of digital asset managers or the world of digital asset management. From the start they are cut off from both those networks and the resources available to those working in the field of DAM. So, they are forced to reinvent the wheel when it comes to DAM within their institution and tend to only source other “like” institutions for help cause that’s all they know.

Also, many corporate digital asset managers and their years of experience do not work for cultural institutions. Therefore, the person who ends up being the digital asset manager, for all intents and purposes, at the institution is not trained in that profession. Yet they are being asked to take on that role as well as its responsibilities They then begin to apply their analog collections management practices to a digital process that already has rules and standards and often times do not understand the repercussions of certain decisions. This causes the inexperienced to use applications outside of their intended purpose and warp the scope of what certain applications are meant to do, creating a bastardized implementation. These types of technology implementations will never solve the problems they were intended to, because the products have been implemented outside their scope.

When I gave my talk to the New York Archives Conference, I spoke about interface design. Crazy topic to bring to a forum where most people don’t even think about design or just thought I was giving a talk on “websites”. However, it was relevant. The people in that room are the same people that are being tasked with choosing a digital asset management system and even designing the “look and feel” of websites used to expose their digital collections to the world. Yet, some of them don’t even know basic design heuristics or that such a thing even exists. Not to mention there is a whole profession of people out there doing usability and interface design specifically for information retrieval applications. They don’t understand the differences between applications, websites, software, webapps etc. They also miss the mark on understanding searching and how the semantic web plays an integral role in how they should structure information. There are fundamental concepts here that cannot be ignored.

These less savvy folks, working in their professional silos, are then forced to approach a project with little to no training and absolutely no scope on how giant of a task they are actually being asked to do. Sure, you can stay up to date and read blogs, but not having the years of experience that digital media and digital asset management professionals have behind in order to successfully execute those types of projects is a VERY tall order. Bravo to those that do it well, but have you visited a Library or archives website lately? There are so few elegantly executed ones to pick from. Aren’t librarians and archivists supposed to be information retrieval/representation professionals? It’s shocking how so many miss the mark completely. Blaming it on available resources is a cop-out. It’s the result of not staffing your institution appropriately and recognizing when some roles cease to be relevant, then making those hard decisions. Luckily, for some folks CMS systems came along (WordPress, Drupal etc) and some brave souls (probably operating alone and against much resistance) rescued their institutions websites from the world of geocitites-esque design and architecture.

Library Science Education isn’t doing much to lessen this professional divide. So often I’ve seen curriculum trapped in the “working in a library” scenario, when that barely even scrapes the surface at what Information Science covers and the applications of Library Science to the outside world. One exciting development is the addition of digital asset management and interface design courses to Library Science programs. However, this is not enough. Unless the christened “digital asset manager” sees beyond the professional silos the project will undoubtedly fail due to implementation issues and poorly specked out scopes. Harsh yes, but realistic.

One thing that will help them get there is EDUCATION. I can’t stress this enough. Education is needed in order to help people understand technology and its touch points within their professional realm and where those touch point cross over into other professions. Without this “awareness” the wrong solution will be implemented to solve a particular need. This is dangerous, as once something is implemented it is very hard to turn back the clock and do it properly.

Another repercussion to being unaware is this. Folks, the implementation of technology is not an opportunity to mirror that analog workflow or analog collections structure and replace it with an exact digital copy. You have to entirely revisit your workflows and collections and determine the new way to implement and represent them. “Going digital” isn’t just an intensive scanning project with some metadata in a database thrown in. “Going digital” requires an entire shift in thinking and a complete overhaul of institutional processes. There is no digital “paperclip” holding those relevant materials together. Nor do you need one, there are better tools for that now. Don’t approach your digital projects thinking its just a representation of the analog. Don’t implement technology just for the sake of doing so. You must have a really clear strategy and understand the relationship between the information and its digital representations as well as your users in order to execute a project well.

“Going digital” also requires a shift in business process and professional roles. You need to hire different people with skills sets you’ve never worked with before (professional photographers, digital technicians, usability and design people). Your programmer is not a designer, please don’t make him/her do it. Don’t ask your 20 year veteran archivist, to now completely shift and become a “digital archivist”. It just won’t work, they don’t have the time to catch up. That period is over. They may have vast institutional knowledge, but that does not make them the right fit for taking on a role that requires specific technical skill sets. Leverage this person in other ways, but don’t expect them to deliver you great digital content. The professionals that have resided in libraries, archives, cultural collections for years, now have completely different demands placed upon them and need to be able to perform tasks involving technology effectively, not just adequately. Last time I checked, the responsibility of the institution is not to create an oasis of job security, but deliver content to the public and their constituents. Otherwise, the burden is placed on that one lone staffer who “gets it” (if they even exist) to solve all the institutions digital woes.

The realm of Digital Asset Management is starting to look toward Library and Information Science for help (metadata/taxonomies being one of those areas), but Library Science is not looking enough to Digital Asset Management or any other professions for that matter (Usability, Design, Business Analytics, Information Architecture). What gets me is, many cultural collections are far more complicated to scope and manage than any corporate asset management project! The tools that librarians and archivists are now using are the tools that have been developed and in use for some time in other professions. Want to know who uses Digital Media well? Advertising/Marketing folks! Dearest Librarians, why not ask someone in advertising and marketing about “Tweeting” and what it can do for your institution? They know better than anyone else. I would caution taking advice from anyone about how to use social media (please stop calling it “web 2.0″, it’s beyond that now) who isn’t in touch with or came from those worlds.

Library Science as a profession has outgrown its original scope some time ago and its time we start catching up. Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done as there is a chasm of knowledge separating those in-the-know from those that are not. If you are working outside your scope, save time and just admit it. Give yourself the opportunity to learn, and concentrate on what you’re good at. Then hire someone to fill in the knowledge gaps, the reality is that it might require letting go of someone else. Technology costs real money, therefore every seat must be filled with skilled professionals or you are losing money. Spending money without accountability is irresponsible. Furthermore, give that skilled hire the freedom they need to do their job. Trust them and give your talent the space they need to make things great, not just good. Finally, my best advice, reach outside the walls of your profession and see the common threads that tie all of us together. You will find that thread looks remarkably familiar.

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 get rid of it! Trivial content is just that, it’s trivial and unnecessary. For example if you have a system that can generate a particular file type on demand, let’s say it’s one that can generate a JPG from any type of supplied file be it a TIFF or a PSD or whatever you throw at it. Is it necessary to then also keep copies of JPGs versions of everything in your system as a “just in case”? Nope, no way! Get rid of it.

So, for every asset that makes its way across you desk you need to ask yourself, “is this R.O.T?” You will find that if you start approaching all your projects with “getting rid of the ROT” in your mind, you will start to clear away the cobwebs weighing down your system and overall make it more usable (and your life a bit easier) in the end.

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 with all the digitization occurring in libraries), The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), censorship, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) and the ever popular Wikipedia. There are more parallels between library science and hackers than you would ever think possible. We have similar concerns such as: accessibility of information, the sharing of information, collaboration and community outreach.

Hackers get a bad rap. I always had a soft-spot for them, even the nasty ones, as they show great ability to think outside the box and open up previously closed discussions on security and our rights. At the con there were no phones stolen, no re-wiring of the hotel elevators, no malicious hacking, or anything of the like. At the end of the 3-day con I was not surprised to hear this, from the session I had attended and the people I met, I learned a lot about hackers and their community. Hacking from a positive prospective brings attention to topics that definitely need more discussion, RFIDs and electronic voting for instance. Their act of exposing security flaws becomes shared knowledge within the community. They bring to light the shortcomings of processes and systems we depend upon, making way for improvements. Today, many hackers have jobs where they keep our precious data safe by testing systems, exposing vulnerabilities, looking for back-doors and ways to compromise the system, resulting in systems that keep our data safe.

So what can the hacker world bring to the library community? One thing that came clear to me during my attendance at the con was that hackers love to share their knowledge of technology with others. Hackers create community spaces fittingly called “Hacker-spaces” and lots of cities across the world have them, you just may not know it. Visit Hackerspaces.org to find one near you. Many of the attendees to the session I attended on “hacker-spaces” brought up questions such as “I run a hacker-space, how can I get more involved with the community?”. “How can we sell ourselves to schools and institutions as safe places for kids to learn about technology?”. Technology presented the wrong way can be boring, for instance “…so now open your Excel spreadsheet” to quote from one of the talks. However, if you present it properly it can be much more interesting. If libraries or schools are looking to spice up their community learning programs, they could do no better than to get into contact with some of the folks running “hacker-spaces” in their communities and set up an exciting series of technology talks.

There are some very cool projects that speakers at the conference are working on that are great resources for librarians. Take for example Virgil Griffiths “Wikiscanner”. In non-technical short, this tool lists anonymous Wikipedia entries and shows you who’s editing them, what corporations are involved and their page edit histories. Check out some of the great stuff this tool has uncovered and read Virgil’s FAQ. In his talk Virgil also discussed other interesting Wikipedia centric projects such as: Coloring text by Trustworthiness by the UCSC wikilab. In which “The reputation of authors is computed from content evolution: authors who provide lasting contributions gain reputation, while authors whose contributions are reverted in short order lose reputation. Thus, the reputation system provides an incentive towards constructive behavior.” The other fun project is “YouTomb” co-developed by brainaics from Harvard and MIT as part of the MIT Free Culture student organization. In short it “tracks videos taken down from YouTube for alleged copyright violation” creating patterns of information that can be used to gauge current copyright practices and trends.

What can librarians do for hackers? We have lots of knowledge that we could share including, our research abilities, our knowledge of government and corporate organizational processes and our ability to organize information. Lots of projects involved the gathering and recording of data and/or data-mining. Who knows metadata standards and controlled vocabularies better than librarians?

So if you’re a forward thinking librarian or digital archivist out there, support the hacker community and spread the word about its projects. The library and information science community needs to know about great tools like the “Wikiscanner” and “YouTomb” and many others on the horizon and one of the best ways of doing that is to become more involved in the hacker community. I’m not encouraging random “friending” of hackers, but rather encouraging information science professionals to start paying attention to the hacker community especially its projects and conferences. Hackers and their curiosity of all things mechanical, social, technological brings important issues into the public venue and we as librarians are often on the same fightin’ side. They know where the lines are drawn, because they take chances walking really, really close and some times even stepping over them. I take their approach that you can learn much more by breaking something open than you can by just sitting there and watching it work. This thinking “outside the box”, initiates creativity, change and results in a better, safer, more informative world for us all.

To read a more journalistic review of the H.O.P.E conference, here’s a recent Cnet article “HOPE Conference Highlights Everyday Hacking”.

Cnet or rather Elinor Mills, was nice enough to take my picture watching the coffin go by, at the conference as well.

Here are some fantastic shots of the con from alice_zero.

As a digital archivist, I ingest, assess and manage digital files (i.e. images and photographs) and paper records using digital asset and collection management systems. My work includes traditional archives activities such as finding aids, collection processing, assessment, accessions, storage and handling. I am a Metadata specialist for digital arts and photography, working with taxonomies, controlled vocabularies and current metadata schemas (i.e. Dublin Core).

As an information manager, I’m passionate about creating working environments that apply current technologies to business operations and practices. I work closely with staff and create digital workflows, organizational methods and records management policies. I am an ardent supporter of incorporating Web 2.0 technologies in organizations to foster productivity and creativity. I help people gain control of information overload and connect to the information they need.

Environments: Museum Archives, Academic Archives, Institutional Archives, Cultural Institutions, Design Studios, Photography Studios, Private Libraries and Small Offices.

Specialties:

Digital files, Paper records, Photographs, Digital asset management (DAM), Web 2.0, Information design, Usability, Knowledge Management and Workflow creation