I am often asked “What is metadata?” and explaining this was one of the reasons I started this blog. There are several other blogs and websites which explain the DAM basics. I have listed some them on the right column of this blog under “Blogroll.”
The question reminds me of when I was a college professor. When teaching, it is important to make sure the audience has the basic foundations to understand what will be discussed before diving into the complexities. DAM can be quite complex. As discussed in a earlier blog post, some DAM solutions are very limited in what they can do while others are highly configurable and customizable. Most of my blog posts refer to the highly configurable and customizable DAM solutions for business purposes, but the principles are the same because you still need metadata. Why do you need metadata?
Most businesses in the 21st century have many digital assets whether they are audio, graphics, photographs, text and/or video. The number of digital assets will grow in the coming years, according to Gartner. A DAM can not only archive these assets, but also make them searchable and ease the workflow around using them.
A common misconception is to run out, get a DAM and expect it to automagically:
Help them find any asset they dump into the DAM without metadata
Sort the junk from the valued assets for them without metadata
Make them money by allowing people to somehow find what they are looking for without metadata
Many people need to realize that metadata is a key driver of a DAM. Metadata can be a double-edged sword if it is:
Not properly applied to the asset (If the metadata is not readable by the DAM or a user)
Not particularly relevant to the asset (Who is going to refer to this information? What purpose of the metadata aside from finding it?)
Not applied as soon as the asset is available in the DAM (Don’t paint yourself any illusions that the metadata fairy will come visit your assets in the DAM and add the metadata for you weeks/months later.)
Metadata is any information about the asset and its content. Metadata can make assets searchable because that is what you are often using to search beyond the file name. The most common error in digital asset management is applying little or no metadata to assets! A DAM is only as good as the metadata associated to the assets, its ability to facilitate the searching and move assets into a workflow. Without metadata, a DAM has very limited search capabilities and the problem will only get worse as more assets get added over time.
Consider this: If you had to find one asset out of a million assets in one minute, which of these options would you pick? Google ain’t there to save you.
Search using metadata
Visually search for that one asset
Most people would pick the metadata option as long as:
They are aware of metadata and what it can do for them
They know how to use metadata
Proper metadata is applied to assets
I discussed in an earlier blog post that most people don’t like to create metadata and there are some ways around doing it yourself in some cases.
Like with many investments, you get what you put into it and with some effort, you can get significant gains from this too. Those gains are often seen as time savings in searching and workflow as well as the ability to find, use, reuse and re-purpose assets you already have in the DAM.
Sadly, many organizations don’t consider reusing or re-purposing assets they already have created because they simply don’t even know what they have created over the past years. As soon as an asset is created and reviewed by one or more employees, it should be archived in order for a wider audience within the organization will know about it for the future. How will they find it? Add metadata when adding (import/upload) the asset to the DAM so they may find it in the future. Metadata is not simply meant to be used by the creator of the asset, but for others to find it and know something about the asset too.
There are many types of metadata and it often depends on the file type of the asset. Some metadata may embedded into the asset and/or some may be associated to the asset in the DAM. In a future blog post, I will discuss the various types of metadata, their advantages, disadvantages and how metadata can be applied to assets.
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:
Hire/assign people to scan part/full time at a workstation.
Outsource it to an outside vendor.
What about the metadata and keywording?
Hire/assign people to collect specific information about the assets and turn that information into metadata within your metadata schema.
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 scanningfor 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.
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.
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 
Another DAM Blog 