By Cary Canning,
Director of Visual Media, San Diego Natural History Museum
I attended this workshop created by
Extensis, which focused on digital asset management (DAM) strategies and
solutions for heritage and cultural organizations. It wasn’t difficult to
demonstrate the relevance of a DAM for any institution interested in
organizing, managing and controlling the rapidly growing image assets and
document libraries. Like many institutions, the San Diego Natural History
Museum has grown with the digital age, storing photography, graphics artwork,
videos, audio files everywhere – on disks, CDs, DVDs, networked and hard drives
– in flat file systems dispersed throughout the organization. This fairly
random storage method was adequate, though cumbersome, when there were only a
few hundred assets.
Now there are many thousands, perhaps
hundreds of thousands (not including assets not already in digital
format). Even finding a photo taken a year or more ago can be a
time-consuming challenging.
The workshop highlighted the important
issues to consider when undertaking a DAM project of any size. The
benefits as well as the costs are great. From the time spent finding assets, to
the ability to organize and share them. The value of digital asset management
to the organization is tremendous.
Real-world examples were highlighted
(National Wildlife Federation and Miami Dade College training manuals). These
sites demonstrated the needs and processes for implementing a DAM.
Understanding the importance of metadata and taxonomy as well as workflow is
critical to a successful DAM implementation.
Workshop
highlights:
- Design
considerations before implementing a DAM solution. - Defining
future workflow. - DAM
best practices with a focus on digital asset distribution. - Metadata,
schema, and taxonomy definitions for building an effective DAM. - Organize,
archive, and distribute digital assets.
We were also give copies of the Best
Practices DAM presentation, metadata tips and standards cheat sheet that will
be very helpful resource material.
The presenters held roundtable and workflow
discussions which included topics like asset organization and metadata and taxonomy
for effective DAM along with real-world examples presented by a DAM systems
engineer.
I took away from the session a greater
appreciation of our need for a DAM at the San Diego Natural History
Museum. In addition, was given tools and techniques to get a DAM project
started.