Another DAM blog

(about Digital Asset Management)

Archive for January, 2009

Who can do my keywording and scanning?

Posted by Henrik de Gyor on January 26, 2009

Once you get a DAM, you may have a lot of analog data (paper, prints, negatives, etc.) you want to get into your DAM, but you’re wondering…

“How am I going to scan all this stuff and add keywords to it all in a timely manner?”

First of all, you should cull through to see what is worth adding to the DAM and decide what may have value to your organization. Some of the material may not. That is up to your organization to decide upfront on a high level, but consider your organization’s legacy as well as its future with some forethought.

Once you have narrowed down your focus to what is worth scanning into digital form and keywording, you’ll need to decide how and who will do this.

If you may have paper, negatives, transparencies (aka slides) and/or prints you need scanned.  You have a few choices for who can do this:

  1. Hire/assign people to scan part/full time at a workstation.
  2. Outsource it to an outside vendor.

What about the metadata and keywording?

  1. Hire/assign people to collect specific information about the assets and turn that information into metadata within your metadata schema.
  2. Outsource the metadata/keywording task to an outside vendor.

If it is a matter of security or needing institutional knowledge to do this, the simple answer is the first option. Nothing can replace your institutional knowledge unless it is fully documented (which is rarely the case). If this work requires accumulating information about the assets, use these resources to your benefit while they are still around. If it is a matter security or sensitive information, you are should probably keep it all in house.

If it is a matter of low cost, high volume and speed, the simple answer is the second option. These vendors specialize in low cost, high volume and sometimes high speed operations for these services. Usually, they are faster and cheaper than what most organizations are set up to do themselves in house. They will obviously not know much about your organization, what is important to you nor your workflows compared to your internal resources, so results will vary.

If you decide to use vendors who specialize in metadata, keywording or scanning, they will ask a few questions for some  guidance on what you are looking for. They will handle the rest once they get the material from your organization. It is possible you may need both internal as well as external resources to handle all the keywording, metadata and scanning tasks.

Where do you find these types of service vendors? Try Googling keywording or photo scanning or document scanning for a few of these service vendors. I am not going to recommend specific vendors, but if you want to know how to pick the right vendor for these services, here is some criteria to judge them by:

  • Test with a true sampling of your various assets (a small test is sometimes free)
  • Consistent Quality (do they deliver good quality results all the time?)
  • Turnaround time (how much can they handle within a reasonable time frame?)
  • Staffing (do they have enough people to handle your volume?)
  • Reputation (There are some reviews available on the scanning vendors)
  • Cost (they may charge per job, per hour and/or per asset)

The reason I listed cost as the last criteria is simply because what the vendor charges is not always directly related to the results they will yield. What you get will vary between vendors. It is up to you to judge which results suit your organization’s needs the best.  Pick a few to test and choose wisely.

Posted in Digital Asset Management | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments »

What is the difference between a DAM meant for an individual vs. a DAM for an organization?

Posted by Henrik de Gyor on January 19, 2009

I recently compared 90 vendors offering a DAM.  When comparing DAM solutions carefully, you see the true differences between them. There are more DAM vendors than most people think.

I saw a lot of what the vendor calls a DAM which were simply an image viewer for individual use. Sure, an image viewer may help to manage your digital assets such as your family photographs. Once you really scratch the surface, image viewers have little or no ability to:

  • Handle multiple users at the same time
  • Create light boxes of assets separate from multiple collections of assets
  • Collaborate over assets or light boxes with multiple users
  • Handle remote access for users with full functionality off-site
  • Handle versioning of assets
  • Generate reports on assets and activity in the DAM
  • Support metadata and different metadata schemas
  • Handle parent/child relationships for assets
  • Handle transformations (mostly preset functionality to reformat assets) or renditions of assets
  • Be secure
  • Be fully scalable

A DAM for business should be able to do all of the above plus a lot more. A DAM meant for business will need to be much more robust and cost more than a simple image viewer. You get what you pay for (most of the time). You may even need use an image viewer before uploading assets to a DAM or to help collect metadata in the interim.

Each DAM has its purposes and intended end user(s).

There is no one-DAM-fits-all solution available for all businesses.  It depends on what assets you will be working with and how you are going to use the DAM within your business.

In a future post, I will discuss how to vet DAM vendors and pick the right one for your business needs by giving you various criteria to consider. If you need to pick out a DAM, I recommend you look at several solutions, do your homework and/or hire a consultant to analyse your business needs. Make sure the consultant has no ties to any specific vendor which may cause a conflict of interest.

If you want more information about DAM for individuals, take a look at The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers (O’Reilly Digital Studio) which is very useful in explaining the DAM basics for individual photographers who need to keep all their digital photographs organized and searchable. The author, Peter Krogh also has an online forum.

Posted in Digital Asset Management | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Do you use a DAM?

Posted by Henrik de Gyor on January 19, 2009

Posted in Digital Asset Management, Poll | Tagged: , , , , , | 1 Comment »

What does self service DAM and stores with self checkout have in common?

Posted by Henrik de Gyor on January 18, 2009

I was reading Web Self Service -trend in 2009? from CMS Watch and it reminded me of stores with self checkout counters.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of self checkout, you have the choice at some grocery store and hardware stores to ring up your purchases yourself with a computer instead of clerk where you do the scanning, paying and bagging. Some people go to this counter thinking “I can do this faster than the clerk” or “I don’t have to wait in that long line” because you are the clerk doing most of the work for your own purchases. Did I mention it ultimately costs you the same price? Meanwhile, the store gets to employ less staff to monitor four to six of these self checkout counters. This is a smart business idea for the vendor because they save money (but you don’t save money nor time trying to figure out how to use their system). The store only needs one person to monitor and trouble shoot the checkout process for customers. Do you see where I am going with this?

Self service DAM vendors get to do the same thing. Particularly, the open source solutions. Wow, I hope you like coding.

They have less people to give you any form of customer service. You got a problem? Take a number and go to the back of the line again. Slower or non-existent customer service is available for your self service DAM solution too. Where do we sign up for this awesome solution as a client or user?

If you are thinking “Who needs help with technology nowadays?” or “This is easy to implement from scratch without assistance”, you may want to re-evaluate what you are doing and who is going to use this ‘solution’.

This is why many stores with self checkout counters still have full service counters available and many people go to full service with the expectation that the store will do their part and ring up your purchases for you (and maybe even answer a few questions). Customer service sounds like a fascinating concept which still happens in some parts of the world. DAM vendors offer full service contracts for this reason where you get what you pay for. One way or another, you pay for customer service. If you can’t find any customer service, that is because you are not paying for it and neither is the vendor.

If you think you can go with a DAM solution alone (without customer service), go ahead and try. But when you have a problem, get a bottle of  aspirin before beginning to kick yourself. Did I mention you will end up paying the same (or more than full service DAM) in the time spent trying to implement and update the solution for your needs?  Consider revisiting the vendors that do offer customer service. You have a choice and be careful what you ask for.

Posted in Digital Asset Management | Tagged: , , , , , | 4 Comments »

How do I read this DAM documentation?

Posted by Henrik de Gyor on January 17, 2009

Don’t we love reading DAM documentation?  I am not referring to the pretty, glossy brochures you get from marketing that has to look great in order to sell you the product. I am referring to the actual DAM documentation which supposedly explains how the DAM works like the guides, manuals, feature sets, configuration options, compendiums of data and volumes of instructions. Instructions are always so easy to read, aren’t they?

Many DAM vendors are reluctant to show us their documentation until we have signed a contract with them. Then we are often stuck trying to understand these things. After we review the tables of contents and volumes of paperwork, we quickly begin to understand why we pay annual support fees for the DAM. We pay them to read and understand their own documentation.

Personally, I have read over the DAM documentation for a few DAM solutions I have used and had the same frustration, but I decided to do something about it. Here is a solution to have up to date, easy to use, easy to navigate documentation:

First, I asked for all the latest documentation (yes, I asked for more) the vendor had for their DAM product. It would help if the vendors updated their documentation as often as they updated the product itself.

Second, I wanted to know everything that was NOT covered in their documentation, such as the new features. If I had a question on how to do something with the DAM which was not discussed in the documentation, I asked. My questions were often forwarded directly to the engineers for an answer. This sometimes exposed more features and little known facts about the functionality of the product.

Then, with the permission of the vendor, I rewrote the documentation. Yes, it was all technical writing. I also had to translate some parts from ‘engineer speak’ back into English. One of the most useful things I did was I wrote step by step directions, complimented with screen shots to illustrate these steps.

I purposely:

  • was not about to re-write the documentation into big thick paper manuals.
  • was not about to print binders full of paper for each DAM user to refer to.
  • was not about to chisel the documentation onto stone tablets.
  • was not going to issue an eraser with each binder for changes.
  • was not about to switch out endless pages per binder for changes.
  • was not about to use a PDF because a user might accidentally refer to an older version of  a PDF with different information which would not help them access immediate, up-to-date results.

This is the 21st century and we have better tools for documentation that occasionally changes, especially since we use computers anyhow.  Welcome to the Web 2.o method of documentation. What I used was an enterprise wiki on our intranet. The enterprise wiki is open to anyone working within our organization’s network at any time from anywhere. The wiki is fully searchable and is kept up to date with latest information at all times. It is updated by me or anyone I assign to edit it. Any changes can be applied to the wiki in seconds. There is full version control, even down to a single character change. Every user can get an email update alerting them of any recent changes to the documentation.

How long did it take me to create the documentation on a wiki? It took me the same amount of time to write on this wiki than it would have as a PDF or paper, but it only takes seconds to update and disseminate to all users. Try that with paper or PDF.

Who uses wikis for their own business? Plenty of businesses are using wikis as a modern dissemination tool for documentation.

Want your own wiki for your own documentation, reports, etc? Do a Google search on wiki or enterprise wiki.

My question to all the vendors is when will they begin offering their documentation as a wiki for their clients as well as their own sanity?

Posted in Digital Asset Management | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments »

Why should I limit deleting?

Posted by Henrik de Gyor on January 10, 2009

Many people may remember the Monica Lewinsky story. Few people know about what it took to find that ONE image of her hugging President Clinton, photographed by Dirck Halstead two years before the story came out. Every other photographer at that event had deleted most of their digital photographs (or thrown away the rest of their film) and simply kept the images used that day. No big deal, right? They were just recording history every day, but not realizing it. The breaking news had left them empty handed when they really needed those images. This one photograph (shot on film and later scanned digitally for publication) was used months later for the cover of a major news magazine about the story of that time. That photograph was later used as a reference point by all the television networks who found their archived video footage. Now imagine if this was today’s photographers (now almost completely shooting digital), how quickly that image could have been found if archived in a DAM with metadata which referenced the location, event and names of the subjects photographed (i.e. President Clinton). It would not  have taken days to cull through 5000 digital photographs of President Clinton, but more likely minutes or hours. Doesn’t that sound more deadline-friendly?

To answer the question, why should I limit the deleting:

  • Delete only what is totally unusable. Archive the rest.
  • Use metadata so people can find and sort through all assets. And not just find them visually.
  • Keep it searchable and available. Don’t be the only person who can find your assets. You are not going to live forever and you probably won’t work there for the rest of your life.
  • Digital storage media is cheap. Buy more than you need and then back up all of it regularly.
  • Limit who has the right to delete from your archive or DAM.

For more on the photography aspects of this topic, take a look at Vincent Laforet’s blog.

Posted in Digital Asset Management | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Why do I need a DAM?

Posted by Henrik de Gyor on January 10, 2009

Some organizations may have considered a DAM (Digital Asset Management) system, but thought:

“We’ll do it later” or “We don’t need one of those DAM things.”

In the same breath, you might as well pick any of the following phrases below:

  1. “We don’t need to save money now.”
  2. “We will be here forever so we will be able to preserve our institutional knowledge.”
  3. “We love filing cabinets full of CDs, DVDs, tapes as well as multiple external hard drives, shared drives, folder structures on our computers and other ‘organized’ methods to store and manage our files everyday. There is no other way to do this today.”
  4. “We can’t find anything in timely manner and we’re okay with that.”
  5. “We can wait until tomorrow when the other office is open with the files we need for that presentation today.”
  6. “We will continue to wait for Joe to come back from vacation and Susan to return from sick leave to retrieve files we really needed for that public release last week.”
  7. “We love employees who hoard company assets on just their computer that are so important to our business. What could possibly ever happen to their computer or them for that matter? Our employees never go anywhere.”
  8. “We love to wait hours or days for files, don’t we all?”
  9. “We like to waste time and money and so do our managers.”
  10. “We don’t need to know what files we have. Why would anyone want to know that?”
  11. “We don’t accumulate many files each year. We trash our intellectual property every few months just to clear our limited hard drive space. It’s really no big deal.”
  12. “There is no other way we can be more efficient. We each have our very own sets of standards and procedures followed sometimes.
  13. “We love paper. It’s so cheap. We like swimming in it too. What’s a PDF anyhow?”
  14. “Why would we change how we deliver stuff? Mailing stuff is really cheap and fast nowadays. We don’t even need email today.”
  15. “We can only collaborate in person or by email nowadays. What will they think of next? Tele-commuting for office workers? We would have to trust our employees.”
  16. “We have to hold all our files very close, so no one can find our files including us.”
  17. “We love re-creating files over again because we can’t find it to use it again. In fact, we’ll do it all over again next month.”
  18. We love to think inside the box. We don’t streamline anything around here. I know because I’m an innovator. We don’t need any changes here.”
  19. “Improve workflow? Our work flows just fine around here. We do not need to upgrade any software nor hardware each decade.”
  20. “Change costs money. Technology can’t save the organization time and money. We just need more people to work harder and longer hours. That’s why they are here and they know it.”

None of these ridiculous phrases have to be true in any organization today. Everything listed in bold can be done with DAM. If you don’t believe any of these ‘unspoken ways of doing business’ actually happen in your organization, find out how all your files are really stored and managed every year. Be ready for a surprise. Aside from what was discussed in the last 20 points above:

  • Can you find every file created last month or last year?
  • What if the person looking did not create nor archive any of the files they are looking for themselves?
  • How quickly can these files be accessed?
  • How many files do you have?
  • Where are these files kept?
  • Are they archived for future use?
  • How many files are redundant (not a backup copy nor a different version)?
  • How can you be sure without opening each file?

There is a better way. With a DAM, you can know the answer to all these questions. Planning for a DAM can make any organization really audit their assets and their workflows. A properly implemented DAM can make an organization streamlined and standardized. If a DAM is applied to an organization the right way, people can efficiently and effectively store, archive, search, find, use, reuse and repurpose assets as needed. Anyone who should be able access files can securely find out what is available at anytime from anywhere with an internet connection.

Stay tuned to this blog for more on DAM and how it can help your organization.

Posted in Digital Asset Management | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 13 Comments »