ExpertExperience - Digital Asset Management Community

The Metadata Manifesto

There is much discussion about DRM and the general control of licensed content. A key starting point, however, in such discussions, that of intellectual property ownership and identification, is frequently overlooked. Regardless of whether a piece of content is licensed on a fee or royalty-free basis, there is still the issue of ownership and appropriate attribution.

Overwhelmed with your project? Start with an asset inventory

A reader recently asked: "My company has not had a digital asset management system.  We are overwhelmed with the thought of a transition to such a system.  We have assets on file servers throughout the organization, our agencies have many of our assets, as do our printers.  How do we begin a plan for corralling our assets and building an organizational structure for them?"

It's easy to be overwhelmed by the magnitude of a project at the start when things look so fragmented and chaotic.  How to get started?  Begin by surveying your content.  Where is it, what kind of shape is it in, who owns it, is it up to date, does it contain metadata, is it redundant?

DRM and IPM - What is the difference?

For many managers who have been asked to look into the need for managing rights and enforcing usage limitations on digital files the broad meaning of the term Digital Rights Management (DRM) is confusing.

There is no true rule but I have found the following distinction between DRM and Intellectual Property Management (IPM) very useful. DRM in this case would describe those technologies that enforce consumer facing usage limitations or those that track the usage of content with the goal to monitor the usage of digital content by consumers or business partners.

Best Practices for Building Metadata and Taxonomy

A recent question was posted: "I am involved in creating a DAM solution for my company. The asset ranges from video, arts, images and photographs etc. I can say that the assets would be similar to what CORBIS, Getty Images have in place today. I would like to know is there any best practices for building Metadata and Taxonomy; What kind of architecture that I should follow etc. Please provide me some links and resources."

Seth Earley's Answer:  Here are a couple of links to start with:

Taxonomy Community of Practice: http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/TaxoCoP/

Metadata Harvesting Tool

A question was recently posted: "I am looking for metadata harvesting and data mining services to gather and organize metadata from years of spreadsheet data plus information from external image vendors' WebPages to input into a DAM with legacy assets. Can you recommend some resources for these service providers?"

Seth Earley's Answer:  Interesting that you ask.  About two years ago, I had asked one of my consultants to go through a web site and harvest terms from the pages.  I was interested in metadata on pages themselves but also in extracting the terms from various kinds of files for inclusion in a taxonomy. We poked around on the web and found some shareware but it did not exactly meet our needs.  So, like any good developer, he rolled his own.

OPI and DAM - Friend or Foe

One question that often comes up in projects centered around creative collaboration in graphic design is where OPI (Open Prepress Interface) and DAM can play together. (More info on OPI)
A not dissimilar issue arises in video where low res editing is becoming an option and web based rough cuts become the norm.

Role Descriptions and Governance for DAM

In my prior posts I had spoken about the need to look beyond technology in defining strategies for successful larger DAM implementations. One such area of focus should be the team that implements and ultimately maintains and manages the DAM application and system. In large systems a model of governances should be defined just as in other areas of business.

Digital Media Production and Distribution Automation

I hear that there is a large number of companies, who are not involved in the media production business, that are simply bombarded with the growing amounts of audio and video content that they must manage. How are these folks (typically marketers) linking the studio to the broadcast booth? Are they even managing the process?

We did a taxonomy last year - so we're all set, right?

In my first post, I suggested a number of questions that I would address here.  The first was "What is a taxonomy?". Here, we'll talk about why taxonomy projects need to be ongoing and not something that is done once and then left alone.

One challenge to success in taxonomy and metadata standards is getting people in the organization to understand that a taxonomy is a living breathing entity.  Products change, markets change, customer needs, competition, technologies, solutions, approaches, and so on, are all evolving.  We use new terms all the time.  Old terms (remember "information superhighway"?) are continually going out of style or simply no longer applicable or descriptive enough.

When we work with organizations to develop taxonomies, after we go through the process, they suddenly realize that getting the organization to use the result of the effort is ongoing in and of itself.  So we need to develop a change management, update, and roll out process.  We need to think about ongoing governance and how managing the taxonomy fits in with other enterprise standards and change processes. 

Asking when the taxonomy will be complete is akin to asking when the organization will be done with sales.  Or marketing.  Or product development. Or manufacturing.  Nothing stays static in business.  Why would the taxonomy be static?

The question becomes how changes will be incorporated and how often the taxonomy needs to be refreshed. 

Changes can come from a number of places. The following are typical change triggers:

• Development of new offerings,
• Expansion to new markets,
• Introduction of new types of content,
• Identification of new terms/concepts needed for tagging,
• Countries splitting or merging,
• Changes in organizational structure,
• Changes in standard taxonomies (e.g. NAICS),
• Proliferation of leaf level terms requiring new grouping categories
• Identification of new frequent terms in search logs,
• Identification of new useful access points or aspects to be used for navigation, personalization, or customization,
• Integration of new consuming systems.

Those are the triggers.  What are the sources for new terms?

• Monitoring standard taxonomies
• Search-log and click-trail analysis
• Tagging needs
• User research and usability studies
• Consuming system requirements

Suggestions and requests can be submitted by:

• e-mail sent to a distribution list set up for this purpose
• Opening a request in a request management tool
• Filling in a suggestion/feedback Web form.

One of the most interesting areas of research that we are exploring is the integration of social tagging (or folksonomies) with structured taxonomies. Basically, this is a way of harvesting terms so that they can be automatically nominated as taxonomy candidate terms and then reviewed by a taxonomist. 

Bottom line is that maintaining the taxonomy is as important as deriving and validating the taxonomy and needs to be performed by someone who understands taxonomy and the implications of changes to the structures used to classify and organize content. 

Consolidating Existing Archives into a Unified DAM

Following up on the last post "Introduction to my Blog" that took a high level look at DAM as an archive of reusable assets this post will take a more detailed look of what companies can do to consolidate existing digital content repositories and allow users a single view of all available digital content.

I want to share some technology architecture approaches that have made it easier to achieve such a consolidated view and also point to some process changes that have proven essential to the success of a larger interconnected content management infrastructure.