Another DAM Blog

Blog about Digital Asset Management

Tag Archives: Metadata


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Where do you get your metadata?

In the past, I mentioned there were no ‘metadata fairies‘ that would come by and sprinkle the necessary metadata on your digital assets.

Some Digital Asset Management (DAM) vendors offer some auto-tagging or AI-assisted tagging technology for a first pass if provided the right metadata schemas, data models, and/or rules. But only a small percentage of DAM initiatives are finding that to be adequate for their needs and sufficient to how their users are searching for their said content.

Over the years I have done a fair amount of research and chose to write about how AI-assisted tagging might appear to be fast and a simple plug and play dream. However, the end results are not nearly as accurate nor as relevant to end-users as what is still achieved through the down and dirty curation by a DAM professional.

The users searching a DAM still need to find what they are looking for which still empowered by good metadata and taxonomy. To achieve this still requires heavy curation and validation by people, not machines. And AI technologies still require a lot of human assistance, train on good data models based on a company’s institutional knowledge to come close to the true metadata needs (not out of the box auto-tagging solutions which rarely help users).

So, what’s the answer for a DAM professional who has less time to devote to entering metadata? How does the DAM professional raise their heads above the amount of metadata with everything else needing to be done for ongoing success in their daily DAM day?

Think of those people who currently do the metatagging of all the digital media assets today, yet to be created and needing to be altered or updated? Where, physically, and who are those people within your company?

Being a DAM consultant and listening to many people over the years who are involved in the practice of ‘keeping the digital house in order’ with their DAM responsibilities, I have yet to find someone who loves to enter and fix metadata all DAM day. It still takes a DAM professional to enable this since relevant companies are not going to stop accumulating newly created or newly acquired digital assets. If companies were to no longer create, acquire, and use digital assets, those companies might cease to be relevant and then cease to exist altogether in the near future. And yes, the future will be more digital than we have now.

Now, let us refocus on people doing the metatagging of your digital assets. Where are those people within your company?

Is metadata still needed today? Absolutely. More than ever and this will all continue as marketers and the like are only creating more digital content.

DAM professionals have other things to do to manage your DAM operations. Why burden them with the task of doing all the metadata? Why not ask a group that does just that for your company?

Why not reach out to a group of professionals who specialize in this single and important aspect for any successful DAM.

Enter the metadata fairies.

Oh yes, there are metadata fairies that can and will do this work for you, your team, and your company. Introducing remote metadata services provided by My DAM Services.

My DAM Services features lots of metadata fairies providing you with remote metadata services.

Remote metadata services is not technology. My DAM Services does not offer DAM technology nor are we  tied to any DAM vendors. This is a service, pure and simple, using people (lots of them) whose only job is to apply, curate, plan, and take direction pertaining  to your digital assets and generate quality results in tremendous volume.

Keep in mind that My DAM Services does not replace your Digital Asset Management professionals. My DAM Services augments DAM professionals by removing the burdening task of filling in metadata so they can check it before releasing those digital assets with metadata to your DAM end-user audience.

Curious? Visit mydamservices.com for more information

Contact them at solutions@mydamservices.com


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Who wants to be a Remote Digital Asset Management Practitioner?

If you work in the field of Digital Asset Management (DAM), you are likely already working remotely because DAM systems can be and is easily managed by professionals from literally any location. Regardless of any man-made or natural disaster, there is little to no reason why DAM can not be curated, configured, implemented, managed and used from any location, at all times. We still live in a world filled with VUCA, however, remote workers adapt to changes and integrate well with others more quickly.

DAM has been filled with VUCA ever since we could remember what either acronym stands for. DAM professionals can communicate well with users in virtual meetings and can be a great compliment to change management, daily operations, implementation, testing, training, troubleshooting, and user adoption. Working remotely is not just tolerated, it is a competitive advantage now. And so is DAM, hence its popularity.

DAM is more in demand now than ever. People and systems need access to digital assets to continue regular business operations. While the technology helps, it is the DAM Practitioners that ensures the DAM continues to produce increasing value for its users (people), its workflows (process), its metadata (information) and interconnected systems (technology).

Metadata won’t produce itself by osmosis nor by the assumption that it will automagically exist for digital assets without the help of DAM Practitioners.

In January 2020, there were 1,200 unfilled Digital Asset Management professional job openings. Oddly enough, DAM talent may not want to come to their overly expensive metro area, to sit in a cubical farm to simply support a ‘company culture’ of the way it has always been done. The ‘rules’ of the working world have changed to remote which is new norm and not just during the pandemic.

Unless you need to move physical objects around for work (such as hospital staff, store employees or delivery personnel), everyone else can find a way to begin working remotely. With basic remote computer skills, a laptop and a good internet connection, anyone can apply a remote working environment from anywhere in the country or the world.

If you are still looking for DAM talent, they are more accessible than ever from anywhere in the world remotely. Remote workers can participate in scheduled virtual calls, meetings, screencasts, webinars, as well as collaborate online and continue delivering results as good or even better than in a traditional onsite meeting with a whiteboard or in any offices. Of course, soft skills matter because this is still about communication.

Remote DAM Practitioners Survey

Please take a few minutes to complete this survey so we can all better understand Remote DAM Practitioners today:

Results will be shared later this Summer.

DAM Success: Remote Work Webinar

Watch the New Jersey DAM webinar on DAM Success: Remote Working hosted by Frank DeCarlo along with Henrik de Gyor, , , and , an established panel of remote #digitalassetmanagement working leaders, describe and share how alternative physical locations have and continue to support their DAM success.

Thank you and stay safe.

#workfromhome  #wfh #remotework #workingremotely

 

Looking for a Remote Digital Asset Management Consultant?

Contact Another DAM Consultancy Today


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Where is that metadata coming from?

A number of people talk about metadata. Some actually practice what they preach. When it comes to resources needed to apply/associate/embed metadata to digital assets (audio, video, text, graphics, photos) in a consistent manner, too many fall short.

We consistently hear about issues with budgets and headcount, while what is really lacking is a clear business case with a total cost of ownership per year. This must include continual executive support (year over year) to operate a successful and sustainable Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution with the necessary people, processes, technology, and information (metadata).

Implementing a DAM solution and making it operational just gets you to the starting line. Yes, that’s right, that just gets you started.  Now you can begin to manage your digital assets properly. Companies are only accumulating more digital assets at an alarming rate considering how much is born-digital nowadays. That means this is a continual DAM journey and there is no finish line (unless your company disappears).

Many companies have figured out how to store files, which is getting easier today, however, storing digital assets is not the same as managing digital assets. Part of managing these digital assets is the need for metadata which enables finite search (unless you prefer to click, scroll, not find, repeat). Part of that necessary metadata are keywords to find and potentially help monetize these digital assets.

Adding metadata to digital assets is an investment that makes the digital assets searchable, findable, reusable and potentially repurposable. In this respect, a Digital Asset Management solution is only as good as its metadata.

Because adding content-specific metadata can be such a significant investment, companies often struggle with certain choices:

Contractor or staff?

Keep in mind most companies are only accumulating more digital assets. If you work for a company that is no longer accumulating digital assets, you are either not paying attention or the company might not exist much longer. Who is going to do this work?

I have already written extensively on:

Insource or outsource? Onshore or offshore?

Keep in mind the level of communication, collaboration, institutional knowledge, and security needed for your digital assets to be accessible, searchable, manageable and deliverable promptly. Also, note your company culture as well as other cultural differences.

Human-generated and/or computer-generated metadata?

With the growing popularity of artificial intelligence (AI), we are often asked, “can a computer create this metadata for our business?”

Because we get this question about human-generated and/or machine-generated metadata quite often, we decided to look at all of the companies that offer keywording services, image recognition and/or video recognition as possible ways of outsource metadata creation. A few months ago, this list started with over 100 companies. While looking into image and video recognition companies, we noticed about one-third of these companies were acquired by large companies (some start with the letter A, F, G, I, M or V…among others) over a period of a few months. Then, there were less than 60 companies to be found. Apparently, we are not the only ones that find this interesting.

Over the past few weeks, we decided to reach out to all these existing companies globally. If they had an email address and an online presence, they likely received our request. Since we are vendor-neutral, we do not partner with nor prefer any company. Some chose to ignore our request. Some very politely declined. A few were “too busy.” Most companies were given a month to schedule a 30-minute call. Some could not make that happen.

A few hundred emails later, we were able to interview people who lead their companies from across the world in keywording services, image recognition and/or video recognition. 

To further efforts in the remaining vendor-neutral, all the interviews recorded to date are being released in one day (we learned this from another content provider who releases an entirely original series in one day). Every interview was conducted independently of each other. No one interviewed was told who else was interviewed. While most of the questions were the same, most of the answers were quite different. Most of these interviews are more practical than technical, and some go more depth. After the interviews, the audio was edited, reviewed and transcribed. All of these audio interviews are now free to listen, share and enrich your knowledge at Tagging.tech. You can find the transcriptions at http://keywordingnow.com

Tagging.tech

Due to the popularity of Another DAM Blog and Another DAM Podcast, we are happy to announce a new audio podcast series called Tagging.tech.

http://tagging.tech is focused on A) keywording services, B) image recognition, C) video recognition and where these intersect. The intended audiences are all who are curious, anyone who is unaware of these services, those with preconceived notions about this, anyone interested in looking and/or companies who presently use any of these businesses.

The first set of interviews will serve as a snapshot in time (as of March 2016) as these markets change exponentially. Take a look to find out how and why.

As a vendor neutral Consultancy specializing in Digital Asset Management (DAM), we inform clients by educating them, helping them become more self-aware, finding the hidden value they did not even think about as well as answering the more obvious questions that come to mind for their business. Have questions? Let us know.

We are also looking to interview more people for this series, so if you currently use keywording services, image recognition and/or video recognition, we would like to hear from you.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Questions?


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Where can I find a list of Digital Asset Management Integrators and Implementers?

After listening to a recent webinar, I recall a few people asking me where they could find some Digital Asset Management (DAM) Integrators and implementers. You can find a few lists for DAM vendors (175+), including ratings, functionalities and other various offerings. However, when it comes to finding a matrix of all DAM vendors match up with X number of implementers and Y number of Integrators who can work well together, the search results happen to be ZERO (at least at the time this blog post was written). This could be be a dynamic matrix available online since there are so many choices to mix and match. To some organizations, this may be like pairing apples, berries and oranges depending partly on technologies, but in the end you still want a good fruit salad (a bunch of systems working well together as prescribed).

There are often a bunch of choices, but not clearly nor easily found. Some organizations limit those choices based on location (close proximity) or culture (part of that fit) rather than simply budget alone. Creating such as a list or matrix would require a fair amount of collaboration and transparency across vendors, both large and small. While some in the DAM space are interested in their users ability to collaborate on projects within systems, it would great to see them work together in a more transparent manner. Time will tell if that will happen, just like the call for a comprehensive DAM Glossary across the DAM market. It will likely start as another list of players (vendors, implementers and integrators) who are paid to be listed as they are sometimes are (this is called “pay to play”).

Maybe someone will make this list/matrix freely available to everyone to help the DAM community connect more easily and help the DAM market grow faster than 30% a year.

Until such a comprehensive list or matrix exists, you will still need to prioritize what will happen in each phase of your DAM solution without restricting next functions/requests/uses in future phases:

Many times, your best move is:

1. Pick the DAM vendor from a short list of DAM vendors which have systems that fit your organization’s business, creative and technical needs. Ask to speak to each of their current DAM customers. Keep in mind your:

  • People: buy-in from potential users, if you actually want user adoption. It is not just about the business or technical perspective.
  • Processes: workflows today and future theoretical workflows in writing (part of an organization’s internal research that should happen first)
  • Technology: basic (which often starts as folder structures and file naming conventions) to overcomplicated technology (which are rarely adaptable, functional, interoperable, scalable and user friendly, all at the same time. These could involve sets of not-so-stable, merged legacy systems and/or complete silos).
  • Information: most forgotten part of the DAM which enables search. Your DAM is only as good as its metadata. Does your metadata enable the needed search results?

2. Implementation: Ask those short listed vendors for recommended implementers (some vendors can implement their own systems while others do not, by choice). Be sure they can meet your needs, timeline and budget. Vet them as well and ask to speak with a few of their existing or previous clients.

3. Integration: Figure what other systems are going to be integrating with the DAM. Be sure the API or Web services for integration is both available and clearly documented by the vendors in question with an SDK. If documentation is not readily available (or outdated), expect delays on figuring out what is specifically needed, measurable, acceptable, actionable, realistic, time-based and thoroughly tested. If you do not vet your integrator, you could be the guinea pig client. Ask to speak with a few of their existing or previous clients.

If you need help with this, ask a vendor neutral DAM consultant. This way, you will get unbiased advice and they will not try to fit your square pegs (your existing needs) in round holes (sometimes called “preferred“ vendors).

Where is your list of Digital Asset Management Integrators and implementers?

Let us know when you are ready for some vendor neutral consulting on Digital Asset Management.