Article

Crafting a Winning DAM Strategy

In today’s digital landscape, managing digital assets effectively is crucial for organizations of all sizes. A well-defined Digital Asset Management (DAM) strategy not only ensures that assets are organized and accessible but also aligns with broader organizational goals. This blog will explore the essence of DAM strategy, its components, and how to create a winning strategy that maximizes the value of your digital assets.

Understanding DAM Strategy

DAM strategy is often misunderstood. It is more than just a collection of goals or a response to problems. A successful DAM strategy is actionable, providing a clear roadmap for how to manage digital assets in a way that supports organizational objectives.

Many organizations fall into the trap of stating ambitions without a concrete plan. For instance, saying “we want to maximize the value of our digital assets” is not a strategy. It’s essential to differentiate between aspirations and actionable strategies.

The Importance of a Clear Strategy

A clear DAM strategy helps organizations avoid common pitfalls such as resource misallocation and misalignment with business objectives. Without a focused strategy, organizations may struggle to harness the full potential of their digital assets.

One of the key tools in developing a DAM strategy is the DAM Strategy Canvas, which helps organizations articulate and execute their strategies effectively. This tool guides users in identifying challenges, defining use cases, and outlining action steps to achieve their goals.

Components of a Successful DAM Strategy

To create a winning DAM strategy, organizations should focus on several key components:

• Identify the Challenge: Understand the specific problems that need to be addressed. This could range from issues with asset accessibility to challenges in user satisfaction.
• Define Use Cases: High-level use cases should be identified to understand who will use the digital assets and for what purpose. This is crucial to ensure that the strategy aligns with actual user needs.
• Prioritize Use Cases: Not all use cases can be addressed at once. Prioritize them based on the organization’s goals and the resources available.
• Outline Action Steps: Determine the actions needed to enable the prioritized use cases. This may include technology investments, process improvements, or governance enhancements.
• Define Success Metrics: Clearly articulate what success looks like for each use case. This will help track progress and adjust strategies as needed.

The Role of Stakeholders

Engaging stakeholders throughout the DAM strategy development process is vital. This includes senior leadership, technology partners, and end-users who will benefit from the DAM system. Their insights and feedback can provide valuable perspectives that shape the strategy and ensure buy-in.

For instance, senior leadership can provide guidance on organizational goals, while technology partners can offer insights on feasible solutions. Involving end-users helps ensure the strategy addresses their actual needs, increasing the likelihood of successful adoption.

Implementing the DAM Strategy

Once the strategy is defined, the next step is implementation. This involves translating the strategy into actionable plans, setting timelines, and assigning responsibilities. Regular communication with stakeholders is essential to keep everyone informed and engaged throughout the implementation process.

It’s also crucial to monitor progress and make adjustments as needed. This could involve conducting regular check-ins, gathering feedback from users, and analyzing performance metrics to ensure the DAM strategy remains aligned with organizational goals.

Evaluating Success and Continuous Improvement

After implementing the DAM strategy, organizations should continuously evaluate its effectiveness. This involves measuring success against the defined metrics and gathering feedback from users to identify areas for improvement.

Continuous improvement is key to maintaining an effective DAM strategy. Organizations should be agile, adapting their strategies as the digital landscape evolves and new challenges arise.

Conclusion

Crafting a winning DAM strategy is essential for organizations looking to maximize the value of their digital assets. By focusing on actionable plans, engaging stakeholders, and committing to continuous improvement, organizations can create a robust framework that supports their broader objectives and drives success.

For those interested in diving deeper into DAM strategy, consider leveraging the DAM Strategy Canvas as a practical tool to guide your planning and execution.

Transcript

Hello, welcome to “DAM Right, Winning at Digital Asset Management.” I’m your host, Chris Lacinak, CEO of digital asset management consulting firm, AVP. The topic of focus in today’s episode is DAM strategy. It’s almost easier to talk about what strategy is not than to talk about what it is. Strategy is not hopes and ambitions. For instance, it is not a strategy to say that we want to maximize the value of our digital assets. Strategy is not simply the opposite of a problem statement. For instance, it is not a strategy to diagnose the problem as no one being able to find the assets they need, and then to simply say that your strategy is to ensure that people will be able to find the digital assets they need. Strategy is not an observation or a statement, such as our organization will be the premier example of what effective digital asset management looks like. Strategy is not a priority. It’s not a strategy to say that user satisfaction is your main focus over the next 12 months. And strategy is not a goal or result. It’s not a strategy to say that we will have 10,000 users or 1 million assets in the DAM by such and such a date. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with any of these statements, of course. They all have a place in the process and messaging. It’s just that none of them are strategies. But statements just like these get used as strategic language all the time. And the outcome of having a bad strategy, or even no strategy, is that it leaves the organization unable to harness its power in a focused and cohesive way in order to achieve goals, dreams, and overcome challenges so that it can thrive and succeed. So what is a strategy, you might be asking? And more specifically, what is a digital asset management strategy? I’m so glad to have Kara Van Malsen with me here today to help answer that question. Kara is someone that thinks deeply about digital asset management and the organization that surrounds the practice. Kara is a thought leader, an expert practitioner, and an amazing communicator. She’s the creator of the DAM Operational Model, which we use in our work at AVP routinely, and which is available for free to anyone who wants to put it to use for themselves. And most recently, Kara has created the DAM Strategy Canvas, along with a guide on how to put it to use. This most recent piece is why I’ve invited Kara to join us today, so that we can better understand why a DAM strategy is important, what a DAM strategy is, and to help you create your own. Kara has been working in digital asset management since 2006, and is one of the leading thinkers and practitioners in this space. Of course, I’m biased, because Kara is also a partner and managing director at AVP, but that doesn’t make it any less true. You’ll hear it for yourself in this episode. Kara is driven by a passion for helping organizations build impactful DAM programs with deep expertise in systems thinking, user experience design, library science, and business analysis with extensive DAM experience. Her portfolio ranges from Fortune 500 powerhouses to esteemed cultural heritage institutions and transformative nonprofits. Beyond her consulting role, Kara frequently shares her insights at conferences and workshops around the globe. She has taught at NYU and Pratt, and has been involved as a trainer in a number of amazing global initiatives, including ICROM. Also, she’s just simply an awesome person, and I’m thrilled to have her launch the inaugural episode of DAM Right with me. Let’s jump in, and remember, DAM right, because it’s too important to get wrong. (upbeat music) Kara Van Malsen, welcome to the DAM Right podcast. I’m so excited to have you here today to talk about a topic that is near and dear to your heart, digital asset management strategy. You’ve just written a piece on this that we’re gonna dive into in depth, but one of the reasons that I’m so excited to talk to you about this today is because I think in the conference circuit, surprisingly, strategy is a topic that doesn’t get talked about much. So I think it’s really important, and I’m glad that we have someone like yourself who is a thought leader in this realm and is an expert practitioner to talk to us today. So thanks for joining me, I appreciate it.

Chris Lacinak: 04:03

Yeah, thanks, Chris. I’m excited to be here, and looking forward to talking about DAM strategy.

Kara Van Malssen: 04:07

Before we dive in, I’d love for you to just tell me a bit about yourself. What’s your background? What’s your history? How did you get into digital asset management? And to give us some insight into what your approach is today.

Chris Lacinak: 04:19

So my background is in archives and specifically moving image archives. So I have a master’s degree in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from NYU. And so my intention was to go into film and television preservation archiving. This was in the early 2000s, so this was really pre-YouTube, pre-internet video, but kind of started in the digital space early on. And so I was working in that kind of around 2005, 2006. And, you know, it’s fast forward some years that we were kind of working on, how do we get all these things into digital form? What’s gonna happen when everything’s shot digitally and file-based media? Few years later that happened. So everything was digital. And it was, you know, kind of, it was no longer the case that there was such an enormous difference between the needs of video content versus other kinds of content. It was just going into big pools and buckets of content in general. And so that all needed to be cared for in a way so that it could be leveraged by organizations to help them kind of fulfill their mission or whatever they needed to do with it. And so it just evolved from there. It was just like, well, it’s all digital now, let’s figure out what to do with this stuff. So that’s kind of how I got into it and I’m still into it today.

Kara Van Malssen: 05:42

Do you think that that background gives you a different perspective than maybe folks that have come at it from a different angle? Do you think that that gives you any particular, you know, unique insights?

Chris Lacinak: 05:54

I think there are several places that people come from that are in this field. So it could be that they have an archive or library science background like me. Some people come to it from the production side, the creative operations side, and they sort of realize, you know, this could all be done so much better if we just had a better handle on these assets. I do think those two perspectives are very different. Those of us who have library science type backgrounds are kind of standards driven. We’re very much about, you know, just making sure that the librarian side of things is all right. Whereas the other people coming from a creative background are gonna see it from the perspective of the creative team and the kind of the operations and sort of the end product of the marketing collateral that you can produce from these assets or kind of other product related collateral. So I think we come at it from different perspectives. And as you evolve into the career, you start to broaden your understanding of, you know, the perspective. So at a certain point, I don’t know, it all blends together. I think I have other interests that I bring to this space. But things like user experience design is something I’m very interested in and passionate about kind of just in strategic thinking in general, which is I think how I ended up landing on let’s do something about DAM strategy. So.

Kara Van Malssen: 07:20

Yeah, it’s interesting. Anybody that knows you knows that you are always creating and thinking and trying to improve on things that are done. And interestingly, things like operational models and user experience design and strategy are almost certainly not in film studies or archival programs or digital asset management programs. So you’ve shown that you’re bringing your interests to the table outside of your background and kind of formal studies, which is great. So let’s talk about the digital asset management strategy canvas. You’ve created this piece. It’s a kind of one page piece and it’s got an accompanying guide that explains like how to use it. So, you know, I’d like to focus on it as a way to talk about strategy at large, like what strategy looks like and how people should approach it. So could you tell us to start, could you just give us an overview of what the canvas is all about and kind of how it came to be?

Chris Lacinak: 08:24

Yeah, so the canvas is kind of, it’s a nod to those great canvas creators out there, like the folks that created the business model, the Business Model Canvas, the folks at Strategizer and things like that. So I sort of love those types of simple visual kind of thinking and idea generation tools. So I’m really drawn to that sort of thing. So that’s, first of all, where some of the inspiration came from. But in general, the idea behind the canvas is just to have a tool that’s going to guide you in thinking about your DAM strategy and kind of give you a place to jot down and kind of generate ideas about what should be in your strategy. So it’s not like the strategy is the canvas, it’s more of a thinking tool to help you plan, ideate and kind of have conversation around the creation of a strategy for digital asset management. So it’s just a way of organizing your thoughts and ideas and kind of being able to work with those in a way that’s sort of flexible and fluid in a visual sort of form. You can use it in person, if you were to kind of be in a meeting, you might have it in a larger form printout or people could have their own copies, but it’s also nice, something you can throw in a virtual whiteboard in a Zoom session and throw sticky notes on it and things like that. So that’s kind of what it is at its heart. It’s a planning tool and a thinking tool.

Kara Van Malssen: 09:55

Thinking about using it as a tool, should someone who’s putting it to use think about the steps that you lay out on the canvas as a way to arrive at a strategy itself is these individual components are not the strategy, they’re helping you arrive at your strategy. Is that the right way to think about it?

Chris Lacinak: 10:15

Yeah, I think that’s fair to say. I think what you’ll ultimately come up with and document in that canvas will amount to a strategy, but a strategy and the success of a strategy comes down to how it’s articulated, how it’s communicated, how it’s shared, how you’re kind of managing conversation around it. So I don’t think you can just say, we made a canvas, we’re done, we have a strategy, let’s go. So ultimately you’ll have to synthesize what you have there, get it in a form that’s meaningful to your stakeholders in order to generate buy-in and support and trust and things like that. So just to help everybody align, but it’s a great conversation starter. So if you’re working with stakeholders as you’re generating a strategy, it’s a way to kind of help guide that conversation. It’s really what it’s for. But the totality of the things you’ll capture in the canvas should make up the DAM strategy. These are the things you really need to think about and be concerned with making decisions on as you’re creating a DAM strategy.

Kara Van Malssen: 11:16

For people who don’t have the DAM strategy canvas in front of them, haven’t seen it yet, could you walk us through kind of what, and this might be too big of an ask, but kind of what some of the salient steps are, how someone would work their way through it, like what are the components of the canvas?

Chris Lacinak: 11:33

Yeah, I’ll try to do that kind of succinctly since yeah, I could go on and on, but it starts with the question of what is the challenge that we’re addressing here? So if you think about strategy in general and kind of go back to like this strategy, kind of big thinkers, strategy comes out of military originally, and then in the late 20th century, mid to late 20th century is kind of adapted to corporate strategy and business strategy. And both of those cases, the question is how do we win? So if we’re in a military context, we’re thinking like how do we win this battle, this war? In a corporate strategy, it’s like how do we win this category or how do we differentiate in this market? And so people now apply strategy kind of at different layers of an organization, but the ultimate thing is it comes down to identification of a problem that you need to overcome or a challenge or an opportunity that you’re presented with, how you’re gonna go about overcoming that, and then what are the action steps you’re gonna take? And so that is how, that is kind of the root of the Digital Asset Management Strategy C anvas is kind of thinking about it that way. So if the first thing you need to think about is what is the challenge or problem we wanna overcome? That’s the first question you would work through on the canvas and try to get alignment around what really is that problem. The next set of things that we recommend that you work on, and this is all laid out in the guide that accompanies the canvas, but I would say the next step in my suggestion would be to think about the use cases. So that’s kind of the heart of this DAM Strategy Canvas. If you think about a strategy being a response to it, a particular challenge, diagnosis of a challenge, a guiding policy, and then a set of actions, what we’re arguing with this DAM Strategy Canvas and this approach is that the guiding policy piece is the use cases you’re going to be addressing. So that’s a really critical part of it, which use cases, and this is, in this case, we’re talking about high level use cases. And that’s important. It’s like not who needs to do what with digital asset management technology. That’s not the question you should be asking. It’s more about the assets and what they need to do with them. And then the accompanying piece of that is which assets and which metadata allow them to answer the questions they need to use those assets effectively. So that’s kind of the second step is thinking about those use cases. And then we get into the prioritization of those use cases. And then finally, the next question is, is to enable those use cases, what are the actions we’re going to need to take? And so the canvas has a bunch of prompts to get you thinking about the different things you’re going to have to be thinking about in order to deliver on those use cases. So that’s like, do we need technology? Do we need in process improvement? Do we need data quality improvement? Do we need governance? See things like that. So it’s kind of guiding your thinking around which actions are going to be important to deliver on those use cases. And then the final step is what does success look like? And I think that you could do that early, but I like to think about that kind of coming at the end once you’ve gone full circle from this challenge you’re addressing to, okay, what does success look like? What does it look like if we win, if we achieve our goal? So that’s the overview of the strategy canvas in the nutshell.

Kara Van Malssen: 15:07

That’s fantastic, thank you. That’s a great description. And it strikes me as you’re talking, I wonder if you would agree with this statement or not. It seems to me that that success, what does success look like, might for many people be the only thing that their strategy is, right? We want to be able to have assets in the hands of the right people at the right time, whenever they need it with the right information, right? That’s kind of what success looks like maybe, or we want to leverage our digital assets to increase revenue, something like that. But I love that you, before you get there, you’re actually kind of laying out this process that says, how are we gonna get there, those actions and broken into categories. Does that sound right? Am I thinking about that right?

Chris Lacinak: 15:57

Absolutely, and actually, my thinking on strategy in general derives a lot from Richard Rumelt and his book, “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters.” And he criticizes a lot of what he calls a social contagion of the way strategy has been deployed in our society today, which really is just a set of ambitions. Like exactly like you said, it’s just those success things. It’s just, we want to do X. And so he, that idea of the strategy is a diagnosis of the problem, a guiding policy and a set of actions to get you to that goal. It’s a lot more concrete and tangible. It’s not just, we want to reach this goal. We have this set of ambitions. And also what can tend to happen is people get very lofty about those ambitions and the action steps to get there are lost. And they’re not part of, if they’re not part of that conversation, it becomes really hard to see what it’s gonna take to achieve those. And so forcing yourself to think through this in a more kind of diligent step-by-step way to some extent will kind of help, I think drive the success of actually reaching some of those ambitions, rather than just being kind of out there as lofty goals that we keep trying for and not somehow not hitting. I think that’s the risk.

Kara Van Malssen: 17:21

I love that it’s rooted in action. That’s fantastic. So I wonder if you could tell us why now, why did you create the DAM Strategy Canvas now? What was the need that you saw or the impetus for making it happen?

Chris Lacinak: 17:35

It comes from our experience with our clients. So on the one hand, we have certain clients who will come to us and say, “Can you help us with the digital asset management strategy?” And so that’s kind of forced my thinking around this topic. But then we also have some organizations we work with that come to us that just say, “Can you help us implement this tool?” And there’s not a lot of strategic thinking around it, a lot of prioritization that’s going into it. And so in those cases, we almost have to force the conversation around strategy. So if we, and again, we kind of come back to the core of what strategy is and what it does, it helps you scope, it helps you figure out how to use limited resources, and it kind of helps you figure out how to set priorities so that you can achieve goals. So we have to do some of that thinking with our clients, even if they’re not thinking about it. And so that just is a recurring theme in the work that we’ve been doing over the years. And so I wanted to kind of create a succinct and repeatable method that we could use in our work with our clients to help kind of guide these conversations, as well as provide that as a tool for anyone else who’d like to use it. So that’s the sort of why now is like building over time as we just continue to run into the same issues over and over again. Again, lofty set of ambitions, very short timeframes to reach them, which were quite unrealistic in many cases with some of those implementation projects that we were doing. And so we would need to start and say, well, what use cases are we solving for? And what is this end state we’re trying to reach now? And see if we can set some priorities within those parameters to help make it more tangible and achievable.

Kara Van Malssen: 19:30

Yeah, that makes sense. So again, it’s rooted in kind of your own work, very pragmatic and practical. So you’ve been putting these concepts to use for a while before creating the canvas.

Chris Lacinak: 19:42

Yeah, absolutely. I think we’ve been using some version of this for a while. So this was the codified edition of the work that we’ve been doing.

Kara Van Malssen: 19:51

When I look out at the landscape of organizations that are procuring and implementing digital asset management systems, for many of them, the implementation of that digital asset management system, they may think of as the end point, that that is the achievement of a strategy or their goal, as opposed to wrapping a strategy around the actual utilization and operation of that digital asset management program. In your work with organizations, how many do you think come to the table with a digital asset management strategy versus not having a strategy at all?

Chris Lacinak: 20:30

I mean, if we take the idea of strategy as, there’s formal strategy, like big S strategy and little S strategy. So if I’m looking at it from either perspective, I’d say a very small percentage have really thought about it in either a big way or a small way. And so what will tend to happen is, there is some problem. That’s why they decided to invest in digital asset management. And maybe it’s a problem with an existing DAM solution that needs to scale, or that needs to be expanded to, beyond one team to a larger group or to the enterprise, or we need to consolidate multiple siloed asset management system. Whenever there’s a major initiative around digital asset management, I think that’s when strategy for that work tends to become important. So it’s not like the day-to-day work needs its own strategy, it’s kind of the major initiative. So at that point, you’re investing resources, time, money, everything. You’re going to make an investment in some kind of initiative. It’s a response to a problem, but it’s not DAM for DAM sake. There’s some other kind of end state or goal you’re trying to reach. So it depends on where you are, I think in a hierarchy of DAM outcomes. So the very first level is, let’s just create a single source of truth. We need all this stuff to be in one place. It’s all over the place, it’s scattered around different file sharing systems and siloed systems and people’s personal Dropbox, and it’s on people’s desktops or videos all over hard drives. And so that’s usually the first kind of goal is let’s just get a single source of truth. So just even acknowledging like, that’s what we’re trying to do here is kind of an initial step in that strategic thinking. So it’s not just implement the DAM by X date, ’cause that doesn’t connect to the outcome. So I think making that connection is really important. And then I also want to draw the distinction between a strategy and a roadmap or a kind of a detailed implementation plan. So if your strategy is kind of guiding the decisions that are gonna drive the implementation plan, the implementation plan is like you said, it’s just get the thing launched. That is part of the plan. That’s a milestone that you need to hit in order to kind of work toward that bigger goal of single source of truth or whatever it is. But yeah, I think you need to kind of approach this as in a way that again, sequences, how you’re gonna focus on that and try not to do too much at once. I think organizations that are especially new to DAM don’t realize how much investment is gonna be, how much it’s gonna take to get to success. And I think they kind of end up getting stuck sometimes if they just go, let’s get to launch by this date, then we’ll have succeeded.

Kara Van Malssen: 23:34

Let me recap a little bit. And I’m wondering if you can expand on it a bit more, but for someone who’s listening who thinks, why do I need a DAM strategy? Some of the things I’ve heard you say so far are, it sounds like it solves a problem. That’s kind of the, it sounds like that’s where you start, right? What’s the problem we’re solving for? So it’s gonna solve some pain points. It’s gonna help you overcome some challenges. It also sounds like a part of the why would be to enable action as you’ve outlined it. It gives you some concrete steps that you can take and by you, an individual, a team, folks within an operation, DAM operation, folks outside of. What are, are there other whys that you can answer about like why should an organization implement a DAM strategy that I haven’t touched on or does that summarize it?

Chris Lacinak: 24:30

Those are, I think those are the main, those are the key points. So I think we could flip that question on its head and say what could happen if you don’t have some form of a strategy. If you’re undertaking a major initiative with regard to digital asset management, there can be a lot of, a lot can go wrong if you are not aligned with, the stakeholders aren’t aligned on what it’s supposed to solve for. And this is also change management theory 101. It’s like what problem is the change trying to solve? So that’s kind of the same core question. And then, so if you’re not kind of aligned on that, it’s easy to take on way too much. It’s easy to kind of lose time, lose money, go way off track and start to lose the buy-in and support of the stakeholders. So it’s kind of why should you do it? Well, why shouldn’t you is because there’s a lot of risk involved in this type of investment and you wanna get it right. So you’ve got to kind of get that buy-in. And the other, the end result of this is often some form of organizational change. You’re gonna ask people to change their behavior at the end of the day. Once you have this thing kind of implemented, launched or evolved to whatever state it’s gonna be. And those people need to be brought along in that process. And so that strategy is also really important for thinking about how are we gonna communicate what this is for, what’s the benefit to the organization, what’s the benefit to the individual and what should they expect when? Because that’s another thing is if you don’t have a strategy that’s guiding the prioritization and the sequencing of the work, ’cause that’s really what it comes down to, people are gonna have lofty expectations about what it means to them, when they’re gonna get some benefit from it. And if you can’t deliver on those assumptions, they’re gonna start to lose their support for it. And so this is when the tides start to turn and people kind of, they’re not gonna support the thing once it does come around, ’cause I’ve been expecting this or that and you’re not delivering that. It can generate a lot of frustration. So it helps you be clear with the organization and the stakeholders too.

Kara Van Malssen: 26:58

So it sounds like it gets people to work cohesively in alignment to overcome problems, to get return on investment, that return being probably different for each organization depending on what the value is. Thinking here about, obviously in most, if not all organizations, digital asset management is one department, one operation, one thing out of many within a larger organization, right? You might have marketing, you’ve got sales, you’ve got production or operations, other operations, you’ve got executive, an overarching company strategy. How have you seen or how do you think about a DAM strategy kind of working with, integrating with other strategies throughout a company?

Chris Lacinak: 27:48

Yeah, it’s a really good question. I think a DAM strategy has to align with the broader strategy that it sits within. So that could be that the DAM strategy aligns with just the departmental or business unit or org strategy that you’re in. So if it’s marketing, kind of the DAM strategy is aligning with the marketing strategy. But if it’s, let’s say it’s an enterprise DAM, then you are looking at the full business strategy. And what is this organization kind of trying to achieve? What’s its goals and what is it that this particular initiative around digital asset management is going to do to enable or support those goals? So there’s a strong connection between those things. So there’s some, like I said before, there’s some ambition or dream outcome for this DAM, that is what’s gonna have that connection to this broader strategy. So if it’s, so let’s take like an apparel company that is shifting to digital product creation. So they’re gonna use 3D modeling in order to kind of create, have faster time to market, reduce their carbon footprint by moving away from physical samples that are typically the way that products in that space are done, shipping them all over the world between providers in Asia, US or wherever, to kind of this 3D model. And there’s a, so that is maybe a kind of more corporate level strategy. We’re gonna shift to digital product creation in order to improve our time to market, reduce our carbon footprint, and create tailored experiences for our customers. So if you think about that bigger picture strategy, and then you step back and say, well, where does DAM fit into that? It has a huge role to play because it’s, all the files that are gonna go into that process of creating the apparel now are gonna be digital. They’re gonna need to be organized. They’re gonna need to be put into a data pipeline that allows for that information to kind of flow through the production process down to marketing and sales and kind of ultimately e-commerce and end user experience. So it’s incredibly closely connected. And I think you can take a similar type of example. Let’s take a museum. So a museum wants to, you know, their broader strategic goal is we wanna reach new audiences, engage with them in new ways, both in-person and online. So that’s like a, you know, a kind of the big picture ambition. So how does digital asset management fit into that? Again, it has a huge role to play because the museum’s digital assets are its collections, you know, images of those collections, and it’s how are we going to reach our audiences, connect with our audiences. We’re gonna need those assets in order to achieve that bigger picture goal and the data that accompanies them. And again, it’s getting these digital assets, they’re just a form of data into a data pipeline that kind of allows this bigger picture strategic vision that the broader organization has. So, and you can kind of take that down levels as well if you’re, you know, you’re the marketing department, it’s the marketing DAM, and the marketing’s overall strategy is to, you know, increase the, you know, targeting of campaigns. We need to measure the impact of our campaign and kind of hype, we need high performing, and we need more kind of feedback loops and insights and measurement as we go. So the DAM is again, a piece of data in that pipeline. It’s gonna help you with kind of getting that content out in an efficient manner. It’s gonna help with capturing data and insights about performance kind of on the other side and allow for more insightful and kind of smarter production moving forward. So there’s just a lot of ways it all connects, I think.

Kara Van Malssen: 31:42

Thanks for painting such a great picture in different contexts there. It’s interesting as you’re talking, you know, you’re talking about kind of problems of, I mean, goals and problems of an enterprise, of different departments. And thinking about the person who sits down with the canvas and we’ve said, you know, start with the problem. What’s the problem you’re trying to solve? And from what you’ve just said, it makes me wonder, you know, the person who sits down, and you kind of pointed to this earlier ’cause you said, you know, it’s about not what can you do with the DAM, it’s what can you do with the digital assets? The DAM is like a means to an end. And the problem, I guess it makes, this is a question, I’m just thinking out loud here. The problem that the person who sits down with the strategy canvas might aim at is not the problem of the DAM operation, but rather the problem of the company vision or strategy that they can help overcome. Is that the right way to think about that? Or have I got that wrong?

Chris Lacinak: 32:48

No, I think you’re right. The problem in this case, it does relate to the digital assets. So digital asset management is a solution. It’s not the problem. I mean, maybe you’d say, oh, this DAM sucks and it’s a problem. Okay, maybe that’s true. And we can kind of go down that path. But the problem you’re trying to focus in on and identify is the one of the digital assets themselves and their use in kind of delivering on some bigger goal or success criteria. So that’s generally the starting point. And so, again, that’s why I said earlier as well, like when you’re thinking about use cases, it’s not use cases for a DAM system, it’s use cases for digital assets. Who needs them and what do they need to do with them? That’s where the thinking should kind of live because you can get stuck in thinking about, again, it’s sort of like looking inward at DAM as the problem or as the solution or as the thing. And it’s all kind of inwardly focused. But if you’re not connecting the digital asset management solution to the business needs, I don’t think you’re doing it right. And so that’s why this canvas is trying to guide the thinking around that. What problem are we really talking about here? Which use cases are we really talking about here? So that you can, again, prioritize and make sure that you’re kind of solving the right thing.

Kara Van Malssen: 34:20

Again, just thinking pragmatically about the person who goes and downloads those DAM strategy canvas to create their own strategy. What do you think they need? Let’s say it’s the DAM Manager or the Director of Creative Operations or something that goes and does this. They sit down. Who else do they need at the table for this? What other information do they want to be sure to have in order to be able to create something that’s going to be useful and meaningful? What should folks be thinking about kind of as the prerequisites or preparedness that they need to come to the table with? You might be listening to this episode and thinking this sounds awesome, but how can I do this for myself? Lucky for you, you can download AVP’s DAM Strategy Canvas for free at weareavp.com/free-resources. That’s weareavp.com/free-resources. The DAM Strategy Canvas is your roadmap to creating the perfect DAM strategy all on one page. If you’re enjoying the DAM Right podcast, please rate, like, follow, subscribe on your podcast platform of choice. And stay up to date with me and the DAM Right podcast on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/clacinak. That’s linkedin.com/in/clacinak. Again, just thinking pragmatically about the person who goes and downloads this DAM Strategy Canvas to create their own strategy. What do you think they need? Let’s say it’s the DAM Manager or the Director of Creative Operations or something that goes and does this. They sit down. Who else do they need at the table for this? What other information do they wanna be sure to have in order to be able to create something that’s gonna be useful and meaningful? What should folks be thinking about kind of as the prerequisites or preparedness that they need to come to the table with?

Chris Lacinak: 36:20

Yeah, so I think if you’re a lone DAM strategist, more power to you, but you’re gonna wanna talk to other stakeholders. At minimum, if not fully engage them in the process. But sometimes you don’t wanna go overboard with the formalities of this. Like we’re doing a DAM strategy and you’re all invited and come to my workshop. That could be great, but it may just be, you’re gonna need to talk to people, interview them, learn about them, ask the right questions to understand how they’re thinking about it. If you’re tasked with, and let’s assume that the person we’re talking about here is tasked with some kind of digital asset management initiative. They’re leading it, they’re supposed to kind of see it through. There’s some other people that are aware of that or that kind of made a decision to invest in that. So those people you need to talk to or bring them to the table. Those are kind of critical thinkers in this space. So that’s probably the sponsors of this, whoever kind of made that decision or gave the green light to do something about it. Maybe you don’t have a green light yet, but they’re the ones that are concerned with it. So somebody in the kind of more senior leadership picture at whatever level that makes sense, that’s critical ’cause you need to get their alignment and buy-in. And then also, because we’re talking about data, we’re talking about assets at large volumes, usually that have to be stored and use technology to manage them. You’re probably gonna need your technology partners in the room too. So somebody in IT, whoever your business liaison is there to your group is gonna be important. They also don’t like it when you make major investments in technology without their input. So they’re the ones that are gonna have to deal with the technical debt down the road. So please involve your technology partners. And then I think the other group to make sure you include is the stakeholders who are the beneficiaries or those impacted by the DAM initiative. So those are probably the users or the people who are gonna be creating or contributing the assets or the ones that are gonna be downstream using it. So representatives of those who this is for, they need to have a voice in kind of setting priorities, making sure we’re clearly aligned on the challenge we’re trying to solve for and what a success looks like. So I’d say those are the three main groups, senior leadership, technology, and your major kind of stakeholder partners that are gonna be affected by it.

Kara Van Malssen: 39:01

The picture you painted for us earlier makes clear that digital asset management exists in all types of forms and fashions within organizations. It can be multiple DAMs and multiple departments. It could be an enterprise DAM. It could be no DAM Manager or kind of centralized operations around the DAM. It’s a distributed team that shares ownership or it could be a DAM operations that serves as like a centralized service to the rest of the organization. Are there models that you have seen which tend to lend themselves to being more successful at creating and executing on strategy rather than less?

Chris Lacinak: 39:42

Yes, this is a fun topic that I enjoy very much. What does the DAM literal operational optimal model look like? I think that the best model has some element of a clear sponsor or sponsors or like tightly aligned if it’s more than one person, some knowledgeable experienced kind of product owner of this system. And ideally in some, maybe it’s the same person but somebody who’s creating the rules, the guidelines, the standards and all that stuff. So at some level, a central set of thinking and kind of guideline and guardrail creation for the system. That works best when it’s like a small team, at least like a minimum. And then again, it depends on the scale. But so I think hub and spoke models can work really well. So you’ve got that central DAM team who are kind of like making the major decisions around the system and its evolution and how people should use it and what’s available to them and taking input from users around feature requests. And they’re the ones that interface with the vendor, et cetera, et cetera. And then maybe there’s for, if this is a large enterprise kind of model, let’s say, there’s individual teams or business units who are sort of tenants of that system or users of it. And they probably have a point of contact that’s kind of the lead on their side. And that person is the liaison with the central team. I really liked that model for a very large organization. So at a very small level, if you’re just kind of in a working group and like the DAM is just for like a very small, creative team, I think you can get away with a shared kind of contributor model where, everyone who’s gonna be adding assets sort of collectively manages it, but that falls apart really fast. If nobody’s sort of mining the store and kind of, so if you took your like grocery store and you just let all the vendors and suppliers just put whatever they want on the shelves, however they want, and maybe they forgot to put the price tag on some stuff and like hook it up to the register, it would be chaos pretty quickly. So I don’t love it. I know it’s the reality in a lot of cases where you just need to have, nobody has the time to sort of be the oversight person and it’s just a small DAM and you’re not a very big team. I think you can get away with that for a little while. But as it grows, as it scales, and these things tend to do as we’re kind of more in the space where audio, video, image, is the predominant form of content over text, and that’s kind of what our organizations are producing as well, then we’re only gonna need to kind of increase the kind of operation around these assets. And so some kind of smart expert thinking to guide people in how to use the system I think is always gonna be critical.

Kara Van Malssen: 43:06

For folks that are in that less than ideal scenario that you painted, it sounds like mitigation of the risk that comes along with that could be in the form of thorough documentation. I mean, it points right at the heart, really your whole response points right at governance, it sounds like. Does that sound right?

Chris Lacinak: 43:25

Yeah, that’s true.

Kara Van Malssen: 43:26

For folks that are in that situation and they can’t change tomorrow, like what would be the words of wisdom that you would give to them about how to help ensure that it doesn’t lead to disastrous outcomes?

Chris Lacinak: 43:39

If they’re in that situation of sort of a shared contributor model and they’re thinking about it, that means congratulations, like you’re the one that’s gonna get stuck with the DAM problem, but that’s okay ’cause you care. So you’ve identified this isn’t gonna work. I’m talking to you like this person that you just talked about, ’cause you had that insight and you realize it’s not working and you’re kind of gonna push for some change now. Doesn’t mean you’re gonna get stuck with it forever, but you’re the one who as a user, as a beneficiary of the tool are saying, raising the flag of, hey, this isn’t working, this is not right, we need to do something different. We really need somebody who’s in charge of this thing because it’s a big mess, no one can find anything. It’s not working, it’s not fulfilling the goals we set out for this. People are still misusing assets or whatever it is. So as that kind of whistleblower, you’re gonna be the person that’s gonna have to advocate for something different, but I think you also know best what the problems are and what’s happening as a result of that not working. And it’s probably just, what’s happening is you’re ending up in the same place you were before you had the tool. People are still squirreling away their assets on their personal DropBox and then on hard drives and whatever, they’re not contributing to the DAM and they are misusing them and they’re not complying with brand guidelines and they’re not using licensed assets appropriately and they are reshooting things that you already have footage of. So yeah, I think, raise that alarm, beat the drum and try to paint the bigger picture of what’s at stake, what’s the impact. Again, if you put on that strategist hat, think about what is it we’re trying to achieve as an organization, what does success look like and how we’re not gonna get there if we leave this as a status quo. We need to do something different. So hopefully you can kind of inspire your kind of leadership, connect with what’s their concern, what are they thinking about, what’s keeping them up at night, what are their, again, that bigger picture strategy they’re trying to work toward. That’s the best way. I think if you try to, if you just kind of whine and complain, I say this to my son all the time, stop whining and complaining. It’s not effective in getting me to give you what you want, but I guess sometimes it is ’cause he does it a lot. Anyway, don’t just do, kind of complain about what’s not working, try to figure out what does, provide the kind of constructive ideas and input and what could success look like. So yeah, if you’re that person, it sounds like you’re, you got stuck with that job and you’ve got to be the one to be the loud voice for change.

Kara Van Malssen: 46:37

So whining and complaining is one tool in the toolbox, but not the most effective.

Chris Lacinak: 46:42

I don’t think so.

Kara Van Malssen: 46:43

The other thing that the focus in on governance makes me think about is you have another creation, the DAM Operational Model. And I wonder, there will be people who look at the canvas and the model, could you tell us how to think about those things as, how would you plug those together? How do they work together?

Chris Lacinak: 47:03

So the DAM Operational Model is kind of what we came up with that it’s all the things that you need to have a successful DAM operation. So it covers technology, of course, but also you have people, which people, stakeholders do you need, which are important, which processes or governance, of course, around things like decision-making, standard setting, policy creation, processes, I think I said, measurement, and of course, like goal setting and tracking in general. So, and then there’s the centerpiece, which is like the why of all this, that’s where the strategy lives. So the DAM strategy kind of sits in the, in our model it’s a circle with these seven competencies and like there’s one right in the middle. And that’s the strategy, ’cause it’s, the operational model can be used at any kind of stage of development or maturity. So you can use it one way, if you’re just starting out, you can use it another way, if you’re kind of on a business as usual path, you can use it another way if you’re on a scaling path. So, but the center part of that is always going to orient where your focus is, where your prioritization is, and sort of in that goal setting category, which guides everything, it all leads it from the strategy. So once we’ve decided our strategy, we can then create a roadmap, we can track toward it, we can measure against it, we can report on it, and we can enable and optimize all the other things around, you know, the people, the processes, the governance, the technology to deliver on that strategy. So they fit together, I guess I would say that. Strategy is the center of the entire thing that guides all of the rest.

Kara Van Malssen: 48:56

So I imagine that some people might take the DAM Operational Model, and there’s like a self-assessment or a DAM health score sheet that we have, and they might score their health on it and say, “Okay, I’m not doing so great on governance “and technology and processes.” I could imagine that someone might take that then and say, “Well, where do I need to improve in those areas? “How do I need to improve?” And think that that is my strategy. That’s, you know, if I can answer those questions, how do I do better at governance? How do I do better at technology and the areas that I’m not strong in in the DAM Operational Model? That that would be my action items towards achieving my outcomes. Is that, what would you say to that? Does, what would you say to that being, you know, how does that play off those action items in the DAM Operational Model to improve your health play off of the action items in the strategy?

Chris Lacinak: 49:51

Yeah, I mean, it’s not wrong, and there’s action items and then there’s action items. I think when I think of the strategy, it’s not action items like this task, this task, this task. I think that’s the, again, the implementation roadmap. And if you’re identifying problems with, you know, the process or the governance, and you want to fine tune them, that goes in the roadmap. And, but the initiative or in the investment in those areas is what’s going to show up in the strategy. So in the canvas, we call them key initiatives and actions. So it’s not necessarily an action item list, but it’s a set of key actions that like, or initiatives that are going to be, they’re going to enable the strategy to work. So again, it’s at a different level of granularity. So if you want to, if you’re fine tuning, what’s already there, I think that’s, again, it’s important. You want to optimize, you want to continue to, you know, continuously do that. And that’s why in the operational model, we kind of call one of those areas continuous improvement. And that’s sort of our ongoing optimization. That should be in your roadmap, but you probably have a bigger picture thing in your strategy that’s all of those fine tuning actions are working towards. So it’s just kind of, again, like it’s a different level of granularity and thinking. So the strategy itself doesn’t have, you know, individual dates necessarily for each action. It’s more like we want to achieve X and we’re going to invest in Y to do that. And so that’s really what that looks like.

Kara Van Malssen: 51:33

The analogy that comes to mind for me as you’re talking about the DAM Operational Model versus the canvas is if we think about like a car, your car running and how well it runs, who’s like, it might be the DAM Operational Model, you know, is the engine running well? Has the oil been changed? Is your windshield wiper is good? And the strategy is more about, do you know where you’re going? Can you get to your destination? Does the, you know, are you steering the vehicle in the right direction? Is that a way to think about it that works?

Chris Lacinak: 52:05

Yeah, I think so. I mean, yeah, I think I had not thought of that analogy, but yeah, totally makes sense. Yeah, the car and it’s kind of inner workings is one thing. It’s trying to get you somewhere, but yeah, the strategy is more like, where are you trying to go? And what are the steps you’re going to need to take to get there? Like, we’re going to have to get on the interstate and we’re going to have to, you know, take a left here and this and that kind of thing. So I think that works. Yeah, I like that analogy actually.

Kara Van Malssen: 52:32

I wanted to touch on one thing that’s in the, what I’ll call the guide that accompanies the strategy canvas. You use a statistic in there that comes from brand folder and demand metric that says, “77% of study participants were satisfied with their digital asset management solution when deployment was completed quickly.” And there’s other stats in there that say about how many people were basically dissatisfied when it took longer than six months. I’m wondering, why do you think that is? What’s going on there? Why do you think deployment time is such a strong determining factor of success and user satisfaction?

Chris Lacinak: 53:13

Well, I think it kind of goes back to something we were saying earlier around managing expectations and kind of getting that goodwill and support and buy-in. And when it takes too long, there’s probably multiple things at play. One is, well, you probably didn’t have really a well thought out strategy, the scope wasn’t clear, the action items weren’t clear, and most likely you took on too much. So the time to value is way too long. And I think that’s the key with something like this is when the success hinges on adoption, time to value is absolutely critical because you need those people to adopt it, to buy into it, and have to kind of be in sync with what it’s for, what’s expected of them, and by when. And if you keep kind of pushing that can down the road and kind of muddling that communication and expectation, I think people just start to get fed up and lose trust in the whole initiative. I think that’s my guess as to what’s going on. So you’re kind of poorly communicating, the execution’s kind of getting all over the place, you’re trying to do too much, you’re not having any, the short-term wins aren’t there, like the transformation that was proposed is not coming through. I think people just kind of get fed up and they just lose their faith in the entire thing and its ability to deliver on what it was supposed to. And I think that can have pretty severe long-term implications to the success. It’s hard to right that ship once you’ve gone in that direction.

Kara Van Malssen: 55:10

So time is important as a factor, but I’m also reading into what you just said that the duration when it lags or it takes an exceptionally long time could also be a symptom of a larger problem, it sounds like.

Chris Lacinak: 55:25

– Yeah, I think it is a symptom of a larger problem. The problem is you didn’t have a strategy.

Kara Van Malssen: 55:30

Right.

Chris Lacinak: 55:31

So you didn’t have kind of a clear point of focus, clear use cases you’re prioritizing, ’cause that’s the key point is, what use cases are you gonna solve for in what order? It doesn’t mean solve for all of them at once. If we have five main use cases, and these are pretty high level, they can be pretty big, doesn’t mean do them all at once. It means they’re sequenced in a way. So you start to deliver benefits and value to those use cases in a sequence, in an order, and they should be sequenced in such a way that each one lays a foundation for the next. So each subsequent one you solve for isn’t like starting from zero. You’ve already got with the first use case, you’ve created a layer. And by the time you get to the end of all those use cases, you’ve solved for 80% of the needs that that particular strategy is solving for. What tends to happen in cases where it takes way too long, some cases, they just really don’t know what goes into setting up, implementing, and making decisions around the DAM. And so that can just stall things. But even if you are more aware and you kind of do understand what’s gonna go into that, that’s the case where I just see people taking on way too much.

Kara Van Malssen: 56:49

Well, Kara, I wanna thank you so much for joining me today. I think I’m really excited about people hearing this and putting the canvas to use. I wanna end with one final question that I ask all of the guests on the DAM Right podcast. And it’s totally different than having to do with the strategy conversation. And that is, what is the last song that you added to your favorites playlist or liked?

Chris Lacinak: 57:17

Well, I’m gonna have to say that there is a difference between my like songs and my favorites because my son who’s eight years old rules the like songs playlist. That is his playlist. So I won’t tell you what the last song that was added to that. My personal playlist of favorites, well, it’s been a little while since I added a song, but kind of maybe earlier, a little mid to last year was the last time I put a song onto it, sadly. But it was “Kandy” by Fever Ray. And they’re a Swedish pop electro artist that used to be part of the duo, The Knife, in the earlier 2000s. And this is their solo act as Fever Ray. And the song “Kandy”, that was like the last song that really kind of got under my skin and I couldn’t stop listening to. So that’s the last one on the playlist.

Kara Van Malssen: 58:14

All right, so listeners go find it and pump it up while you start working on your DAM Strategy Canvas. It’ll be a good soundtrack to it.

Chris Lacinak: 58:23

No, don’t think that’s the right sound.

Kara Van Malssen: 58:25

Okay, well, what, all right.

Chris Lacinak: 58:27

If it works for you, don’t worry.

Kara Van Malssen: 58:28

Here’s a question. Give us a soundtrack, a song that would be good for filling out the DAM Strategy Canvas.

Chris Lacinak: 58:35

All right, good question. When I was making it, I was listening to a lot of The Isley Brothers and things like that. So maybe give you some good energy, good vibes.

Kara Van Malssen: 58:48

All right, interesting. Sounds good. Awesome, well, thank you so much for joining me today, Kara. It’s been super fun and I’m really excited about folks being able to hear this. Thank you so much, really appreciate it.

Chris Lacinak: 58:59

Yeah, thanks for having me. And if folks have any questions or feedback about the DAM Strategy Canvas, then reach out, let us know.

Kara Van Malssen: 59:06

Great, I’ll put that contact info in the show notes. All right, talk to you soon, bye-bye.

Chris Lacinak: 59:12

Okay.

Kara Van Malssen: 59:15

You might be listening to this episode and thinking this sounds awesome, but how can I do this for myself? Lucky for you, you can download AVP’s DAM Strategy Canvas for free at weareavp.com/free-resources. That’s weareavp.com/free-resources. The DAM Strategy Canvas is your roadmap to creating the perfect DAM strategy all on one page. If you’re enjoying the DAM Right podcast, please rate, like, follow, subscribe on your podcast platform of choice. And stay up to date with me and the DAM Right podcast on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/clacinak. That’s linkedin.com/in/clacinak. (upbeat music) [ Silence ]

Your DAM use cases are only as good as the humans involved

Building a digital asset management (DAM) program involves many decisions—from selecting a system and configuring interfaces, to architecting workflows. To set your DAM up for success, it is critical to involve your users from the beginning so you can develop and crystalize DAM use cases that will guide decision-making and ease change management.

A common mistake is to neglect taking the time to truly learn about the users, what they need from a system, and what motivates them. Without involving users, you may arrive at a seemingly logical and technically correct solution, but users may not see its relevance.

This risks the DAM program’s future viability. Users are likely to abandon a system that introduces stumbling blocks. Without involving users, you also risk focusing on the wrong problem or building solutions that don’t address their needs.

Invite your users to help you determine the right problem to solve and what adds value to their work. Put humans at the center of your DAM use cases.

From Trail System to Information System

On a recent sunny Saturday, I stood at a fork on a hiking trail staring at a map mounted on a prominent bulletin board. What stood out first to me were the broad lines in purple and green. But they were not the footpaths I was looking for. On a closer look, I saw the trails were marked in skinny, black dotted lines in a much smaller section of the map. The highlighted lines were in fact official borders of the wilderness area.

It occurred to me that this map was made from the perspective of the Forest Service. Standing at this juncture under the hot sun, where I had the dirt paths, tree groves, and running creek in front of me, I did not care where the watershed boundary ended or where the research area began. I was looking only for where the trail splits on the map so I could know whether to go left or right.

Now, I am not fit to argue how the National Forest Service should display its trail maps—I am no cartographer (maybe in an alternative life I dream about!)—but I am a user of trails. This gives me a perspective on what information is useful to communicate to an average trail user. When it comes to the design of the system’s interactions with users, this perspective becomes relevant.

Just as hikers are not the Forest Service, your users are not you: while you have a view of a whole system, users interact with a specific slice of it. And they have a keen awareness of what makes it work well for them.

An information system, such as a digital asset management system, is like a trail system.

If you are managing an enterprise-wide information system, you have a design problem to solve. At the center of a design problem are humans—groups of users and stakeholders.

Their work, their needs, and their minds are inconsistent, ever-changing, hardly linear, and sometimes contradictory. The system is meant to help various teams to do their work, in a way that not only helps the individuals but the collective as a whole. Involve them in the process of developing DAM use cases; learn their perspectives and programmatically incorporate their feedback. Don’t rely on your own assumptions. Don’t create your system implementation in a vacuum. 

What is human-centered design?

In the day-to-day work of managing a complex program and suite of technology, some problems grow amorphous. Things can feel messy. You are simultaneously supporting the teams who create content, those who contribute digital assets to the system, and those who need to quickly search and find items and the right information about them. There are stakeholders who want the system to save time, grow programs, provide accurate data, and apply governance and security policies.

Facing the enormity of these problems in a DAM program, human-centered design (HCD) provides a helpful framework. It is a concept increasingly applied in the design of intangible aspects of our world—digital spaces, services, interactions, and organizations.

Yet for systems like DAM—often used by staff internal to an organization—the practice is less commonly adopted. “Human-centered design” might sound like just a catchphrase, but it is defined by an ISO standard (ISO 9241-210:2019)! Officially, HCD is an “approach to systems design and development that aims to make interactive systems more usable by focusing on the use of the system and applying human factors/ergonomics and usability knowledge and techniques.” 

In simple terms, it is about involving humans in both the process and the outcomes of the designing of solutions, using their specific needs relevant to the defined problem to guide the solution-seeking.

Let’s look at how the concept of human-centered design can be applied in a digital asset management program. (Or, really, any program managing an information system.)

But first, why does human-centered design matter? 

Why engage users?

1. To validate the solution design

User feedback allows you to validate whether the enterprise technology meets the actual needs of its intended users.

2. To identify usability issues

User testing helps surface usability issues, bottlenecks, and pain points that might not be apparent during internal development and testing.

3. To reduce risk

Testing with actual users and gathering user feedback along the way allows for iterative improvement. This helps reduce the likelihood of costly setbacks after implementation and lack of trust among users.

4. To enable change management and improve user adoption

When users feel their feedback is valued and incorporated into the technology, they are more likely to adopt it enthusiastically and become advocates for its widespread use within the organization.

5. To facilitate continuous improvement and scalability

Regularly seeking user input allows the enterprise technology to stay relevant to evolving user needs and changing business requirements.

Applying human-centered design to solve common digital asset management problems

Here are some common problems organizations encounter with their digital asset management strategies, and how developing DAM use cases with human-centered design can help solve them: 

No central repository

Collection items, files, or content are in disparate places, organized in a way that makes sense to only a select few, and are artifacts of an evolving team.

To start, learn about the user’s scope of content and their mental model for organizing and searching digital assets. Determine whether a DAM or central repository is needed and viable for the organization. Further define what constitutes digital assets and who the users are in this context. Define the requirements of such a system in the form of user stories from the human’s perspective prior to shopping for technology products and making a selection decision.

“Where is that photo I’ve seen before?”

Users frequently cannot find the digital assets (or do so quickly) or have trouble navigating the site. 

To start, investigate what the root problem might be and what problem you want to solve. Learn from the users—through interviews, observations, and testing—what they are struggling with. Is this an issue with the layout of the interface? Or is this an issue with the metadata of the digital assets? 

Misuse or confusion on sharable content

The collection needs guardrails and governance to help users avoid mistakenly sharing or misusing content.

To start, define the problem to tackle. Gather information on current constraints such as workflow schedules. If the problem is preventative, programmatically plan out the appropriate access and labeling of content. Configure business logics that conform to user needs and DAM use cases. If the problem has to do with users’ understanding of the content, conduct user research to learn characteristics of the metadata attributes important to the users whose problem you aim to address.

Onboard more teams

The DAM system was originally launched with one team based on how they organize digital assets and campaigns; now it is time to onboard yet another team that creates a new type of assets. Each team has its unique ways of accessing and organizing assets and its own metadata requirements that govern its workflows.

To start, learn about the differences between various teams, how they organize their content, and the workflows they have for creation, ingest, and/or publishing. Extract user stories and generalize representative functional requirements. Use the requirements as benchmarks, not a checklist, for satisfying various user needs. 

Tips on considering users in DAM use cases

There are different ways to think about users in a DAM program. When you sit alongside users to learn about their day-to-day workflows and their stumbling blocks, you are zoomed in. You are borrowing your users’ lenses and viewing the problem through their perspectives. When you return to your desk and consider how a need can be met by the system’s capabilities, you take on a broad perspective. It is then important to make design decisions that are relevant to multiple groups, consistent across the system, and maintainable over time. 

Tip #1 You are not your users and stakeholders

Without building DAM use cases and user stories based on real humans, you run the risk of imagining solutions based on your and your team’s own assumptions and preferences. You end up designing a solution that makes sense according to your own (and let’s be honest, biased) perspective. What flows logically to you might become an obstacle to a different group. And you are left scratching your head wondering why users get so confused by a certain step.

Tip #2 Zoom out, and bring the alignment

Your solutions should be programmatically applied and create consistency. The idea is not to make a one-to-one replication of what one user or one group may say they want. Rather, focus on what they need to accomplish. If they want a button because they need to quickly press it every time to complete a repeating task, why not design a solution that batches the step and eliminates the repeating step?

A lot of times, users are too close to the system. For user testing and research to be effective, it is important to ask the right questions. Then, it is up to the researcher and the manager of a DAM program to bring the elements together in the full picture.

Tip #3 Investigate the problem

It is important to begin learning about the problem space by asking questions. Investigate the original problem that initiated this project. Almost always, you would need to investigate and redefine the problem.

Talking to users, you might learn that users are frustrated with the workflow, that the content team thinks of their work in categories contradictory to how they are arranged in the DAM, or that there is a technical flaw that causes access barriers. The first is a finding on someone’s attitude, the second a functional requirement, and the third a system oversight or bug. All of these factors contribute to the problem you are trying to solve.

Some of these ideas require further user research; some may not be true solutions but rather bandaids; some may take a much longer timeline or a bigger budget. There are constraints that every design must work within.

Carefully defined DAM use cases and user needs help determine which solution to pursue. Without taking the time to learn about the content team, how they interact with the digital asset management system, and how other teams search for the content they contributed, it won’t be clear what solution gets to the root of the problem.

Summary

A human-centered approach to managing your digital asset management program helps you ensure you are focusing on the right problem. It helps you build the DAM use cases, distilling the needs you aim to satisfy.

It helps reduce risks by involving users in an iterative process, gathering information, and creating a feedback loop. Involving users in your process also helps to build trust with stakeholders. Prepare users for the transition in DAM as the program grows, introduces new technologies, or onboard new teams. Finally, be sensitive to the human context. Exercise humility, and check your biases and assumptions.

Human-centered design at AVP

At AVP, we apply human-centered design to help solve a variety of information problems. Some examples:

• To guide how collections of massive textual data may implement AI-powered metadata enrichment processes in ways that are useful and ethical, AVP provided a prototype for structuring annotation crowdsourcing and involving various types of users in the process.
• To help program managers determine how technologies should be supported and prioritized, AVP conducted user research and delivered quantitative and qualitative data showing how successfully team members were using the myriad tools.
• An organization needed evidence to support a decision on the future development of a software application. AVP combined technical analysis with qualitative user research that considered human factors—such as technical proficiency and individual motivations—to bolster the recommended decision.

Creating a successful Digital Asset Management RFP

In the world of digital asset management (DAM) system selection, requests for proposals (RFP) are ubiquitous. This is for good reason. A strong RFP includes a user-centered approach outlining priorities, usage scenarios, and requirements. It also provides vendors with an explanation of and context for technology needs, and clear instructions for their proposals. The RFP brings all of the details together in a way for organizations to perform apples-to-apples comparisons of vendor proposals. 

In this post, we provide everything you need to get started on your RFP journey. You’ll learn what is unique about DAM RFPs, how to structure your RFP, and questions to ask vendors. Follow along on our downloadable DAM RFP checklist.

What is an RFP?

A Request for Proposal (RFP) is a business document, sometimes managed by a procurement or purchasing office (and sometimes not). RFPs announce an organization’s need for a new technology, detail the requirements for that technology, define its purpose, and solicit bids for the financial commitment for purchase.

RFPs allow qualified vendors to showcase their technology solutions and demonstrate how they align with those requirements. They act as a gateway for vendors to promote their expertise, capabilities, and innovative technologies to meet the needs of the organization. 

It is important to note that RFPs are not mandatory in all contexts. However, they are commonly used in government settings to counteract favoritism, prejudice, and nepotism. RFPs level the playing field. They ensure that vendors are evaluated solely based on the quality of their proposals and the cost of investment. This approach promotes fairness and impartiality, allowing all vendors to compete on an equal footing. By eliminating biases and providing a transparent evaluation process, RFPs enable organizations to make informed decisions that prioritize the best interests of their stakeholders.

How do I create an RFP?

The good news is there are lots of examples of RFPs on the web. And, if you have a procurement office, you can always reach out to get examples of how your organization creates them.

That said, the examples you’ll find online are often generic, not specific to DAM selection. While generic RFP templates can be helpful starting points, they do not always provide insights into how to gather the information to complete the RFP, including business objectives, functional, technical, and format requirements, usage scenarios, and user profiles. All of these are necessary to provide vendors with a comprehensive understanding of your organization’s needs for new DAM technology. 

What is unique about DAM RFPs?

Before we jump into the checklists, let’s take a moment to review what makes a DAM RFP unique. First, DAM selection projects will have many internal and external stakeholders. From marketing to creatives and archivists and their constituents, there are many perspectives to represent. It is key, then, that time is spent understanding their broad set of needs, through interviews, surveys, and focus groups.

The digital asset management market offers a multitude of options, with numerous systems available at varying price points and complexities. For organizations unfamiliar with the wide range of choices, sifting through these options can be a challenging endeavor, especially given the intricate nature of DAM systems. These systems often share common functionalities but also possess distinctive features that set them apart.

An RFP can provide your organization with a side-by-side comparison of the vendor proposals. This includes a qualitative comparison, but if done correctly, can offer a quantitative assessment, as well.

Factors to consider in DAM procurement

• Content-centric approach: DAMs focus on the challenges of organizing, managing, and distributing digital assets. By focusing on the content itself, DAM systems enhance the accessibility, searchability, and utilization of digital assets. DAMs make it easier for users to find and work with the specific content they need.
• Emphasis on metadata and taxonomy: A successful DAM will enable effective search, discovery, and retrieval of digital assets. It will categorize and describe assets with rich metadata and a structured taxonomy. This ensures users can quickly locate and make sense of their content. 
• Integration: DAMs are rarely standalone systems. They often integrate with content management systems (CMS), creative software (think Adobe products), e-commerce platforms, rights management systems, or workflow applications.
• UX and collaboration: Digital Asset Management systems (DAMs) play a pivotal role in facilitating the collaborative efforts of diverse teams and stakeholders both within and outside an organization. This includes enterprise-level DAMs, which may extend across international borders, necessitating support for multiple languages. As such, these systems should offer user-friendly interfaces and accessibility to accommodate the varied needs of their users.
• Permissions and security: Digital assets often have distinct rights that require strict security measures to regulate access and downloads. A robust DAM system safeguards digital content, ensuring that user permissions are securely managed to maintain data integrity and privacy. 
• Scalability and performance: When dealing with quickly growing digital collections, the efficiency of your DAM system becomes crucial. It needs to handle growth in the volume of files and accommodate the evolving needs of users without compromising speed and responsiveness. The choice of storage providers and methodologies significantly influences the system’s scalability, ensuring it can seamlessly adapt to increasing demands.
• Vendor expertise and support: Considering a vendor’s track record is an important component of the decision-making process. Hearing from current clients, and investigating reputation, customer support options (often defined in a Service Level Agreement, or SLA), training offerings, and ongoing product development are critical in identifying if their DAM solution is the right one for your organization.

Preparation

Before diving into RFP drafting, first take a step back and think about the complete RFP process. Start by gathering comprehensive requirements to clarify and document your organization’s needs. Establish a clear timeline, complete with milestones and deadlines that include the drafting phase. Finally, begin identifying and researching potential vendors — you might want to adjust your RFP based on what you find.

Administrative Tasks

To simplify your RFP process, begin by checking if your organization already has an appropriate digital asset management system in place or conduct a discovery process (as detailed in the section below). Secure written approval, establish a budget, put together a timeline, and consult with your procurement department to review RFPs and purchasing regulations. 

The timeline should cover all essential phases, including RFP creation, distribution, vendor demonstrations, evaluation, and the often-lengthy procurement phase. Practical considerations such as staff vacations and holidays should also be accounted for to mitigate potential disruptions. By addressing these elements, the timeline becomes a comprehensive and practical plan for the entire RFP and DAM selection process, reducing the risk of unforeseen delays.

Finally, consider hiring an experienced DAM sourcing consultant who can leverage their expertise and knowledge of the marketplace to match your organization with the most suitable system for your users.

Discovery

In the process of DAM selection, the discovery phase involves a comprehensive investigation of the organization’s digital asset management needs. This typically starts with in-depth discussions with stakeholders and decision-makers. These conversations help identify specific requirements, challenges, and objectives to manage digital assets.

The discovery process often includes a thorough examination of the organization’s current workflows, analysis of the volume and types of digital assets, and an evaluation of the existing systems and technology infrastructure. Data collection methods such as surveys and data analysis may also gather information on user expectations, content lifecycle, access requirements, metadata needs, user permissions, integration considerations, and long-term preservation strategies.

The active engagement of key stakeholders and thorough review of pertinent in-house documentation are pivotal aspects of the discovery process.

Following the completion of the discovery phase, you should be able to fine-tune the problem statement, establish measurable objectives, and rank your functional and non-functional requirements. At this stage, broaden your vendor research efforts by attending industry events such as Henry Stewart DAM, and by exploring resources like online vendor directories and seeking recommendations from peers and professional networks. 

Once you have a feel for vendors, try to narrow down your vendor list to just a handful for the most effective evaluation. A shorter list makes managing internal resources easier, allowing for a meaningful comparison of proposals and identification of strengths and weaknesses. With well-structured discovery and vendor selection processes, your DAM journey is off to a promising start!

RFP Structure

If you have a procurement department, it is likely they have an RFP format you must follow. In that case, consider how you can fit the following information into the existing structure. For those organizations that do not have an internal RFP format, use the following structure:

Overview

This is the initial point of contact and sets the tone for the entire RFP. Start with a concise introduction to your organization, capturing its essence in just a few sentences. Next, provide a brief background on the DAM selection project, highlighting the driving factors and context behind the need for a DAM solution.

A well-crafted problem statement is vital to ensure that vendors understand the challenges you face and the specific pain points you aim to address. Clearly articulate your business objectives, outlining the goals and outcomes you hope to achieve through the implementation of the DAM. 

The overview document should include key details such as the current number of digital assets, their size in terabytes (or gigabytes or petabytes), and the primary formats you work with. If possible, provide a growth estimate in percentages, e.g., year-by-year growth of 10%. These specifics will help vendors tailor their solutions to meet your unique needs.

The overview also serves as a guide to vendors on how to navigate the RFP process. Include a timeline with key dates such as the RFP issue date, the deadline for vendor questions, when your organization will respond to questions, when vendors are required to confirm their intent to submit proposals, and the proposal submission deadline. Also, mention the subsequent steps, such as the notification of selected offerors for potential demonstrations and presentations, and the final selection process.

Make sure to specify the preferred delivery format and method for proposals and the required deliverables. Additionally, provide an overview of the evaluation criteria and scoring process that will be used to assess the proposals.

Include relevant contact information for any inquiries, and consider including a glossary of terms specific to DAM and the RFP. Clarify aspects like incurred costs to vendors, retention of submitted documentation, external partnerships, market references, and the importance of confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements (NDA).

Requirements Spreadsheet

In the process of crafting your DAM RFP, it is essential to establish a well-organized structure for your requirements. To begin, let’s define some key terms. 

Functional requirements refer to specific capabilities or features that the digital asset management system must possess to meet your organization’s needs. These requirements can be structured as user stories, framing them in the context of “As an X, I need to Y, so that Z,” to clearly define who needs the functionality, what they need, and why. These functional requirements are essentially the building blocks that shape how the DAM system will operate, focusing on the user experience and the desired outcomes.

On the other hand, nonfunctional or technical requirements relate to the broader technical aspects that the DAM system should meet. These may include performance, security, scalability, and other technical considerations that are essential for the system’s effective operation. Additionally, format requirements specify the primary file formats and expectations for managing digital assets within the DAM. These include image formats (.jpg), videos (.mp4), documents (.pdf), and other file formats (e.g., Adobe and Microsoft file formats). They outline how the digital asset management system should handle and support these formats.

For further clarity, identify stakeholders and categorize them into three main types: DAM Administrators, Content Creators, and End Users. Defining their roles and capabilities, and noting the number of each, is particularly valuable for vendors, especially those who charge based on the number of user seats. 

This structured approach not only helps DAM vendors understand your needs, it enables them to provide comprehensive and customized responses to your RFP. A helpful tool for organizing this content is a simple spreadsheet with distinct tabs for each requirement category. This provides a clear distinction between functional, nonfunctional/technical, and format requirements. 

Usage Scenarios

Usage scenarios are your secret weapon! They prioritize the user and bring your requirements to life.

A usage scenario, sometimes referred to as a “use case,” is a detailed narrative describing how a system or product is used in a specific real-world context. These scenarios provide a human-readable representation of functional requirements, offering a comprehensive view of how the system behaves and responds within different situations. Use cases help stakeholders and vendors, including both technical and non-technical individuals, to grasp how the system’s features and functionalities align with practical user needs and operational processes.

We highly recommend including three to seven usage scenarios in your RFP. If you have more, consider combining and prioritizing them. Each usage scenario should have a brief title, an objective that explains its purpose, and actors identified from your User Descriptions in the Requirements Spreadsheet. Provide background context and describe the main steps or interactions that actors will perform in the future system. Remember to allow flexibility for different solutions to the same problem. Usage scenarios are the heart of your RFP, so craft them to effectively convey your requirements.

Vendor Questionnaire

As you delve deeper into crafting your RFP, don’t overlook the significance of your vendor questionnaire. The vendor questionnaire is a comprehensive list of questions that go beyond requirements and use cases, focusing on higher-level aspects of the DAM vendor company, their implementation and support procedures, and proposal costs, providing valuable insights into their capabilities and suitability for the project. 

The questionnaire serves as a vital component of your DAM RFP. It gathers in-depth information essential for the side-by-side evaluation of different systems. Number the questionnaire so that vendors can easily refer directly to the questions in their proposal.

A vendor questionnaire should cover general company information, product details, technical support, and references from comparable organizations. It should also include specific questions about the costs associated with the system, including license fees, implementation costs, and support expenses.

Conclusion

The Request for Proposal is a key component of the DAMS procurement process. RFPs provide structured and transparent frameworks for evaluating and selecting a new DAM system. They enable a fair and consistent evaluation process by clearly defining requirements and usage scenarios, evaluation criteria, and submission guidelines. This allows organizations to compare proposals from multiple DAM vendors objectively, ensuring that the selected vendor best aligns with their needs and objectives. RFPs help mitigate risks by providing a systematic approach to DAM vendor selection, fostering accountability, and minimizing subjective decision-making.

Are you ready to embark on your own DAM RFP process? We’ve got you covered! [Click here] to download our comprehensive DAM RFP checklists. 

These valuable resources will guide you through planning, development, and distribution of your RFP, ensuring you achieve the best possible outcome. Don’t miss out on this essential tool to streamline your RFP journey.

Next Article:

Managing DAM Software Demos and Trials

Getting Started with AI for Digital Asset Management & Digital Collections

Talk of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and large language models (LLMs) is everywhere these days. With the increasing availability and decreasing cost of high-performance AI technologies, you may be wondering how you could apply AI to your digital assets or digital collections to help enhance their discoverability and utility.

Maybe you work in a library and wonder whether AI could help catalog collections. Or you manage a large marketing DAM and wonder how AI could help tag your stock images for better discovery. Maybe you have started to dabble with AI tools, but aren’t sure how to evaluate their performance.

Or maybe you have no idea where to even begin.

In this post, we discuss what artificial intelligence can do for libraries, museums, archives, company DAMs, or any other organization with digital assets to manage, and how to assess and select tools that will meet your needs.

Examples of AI in Libraries and Digital Asset Management

Wherever you are in the process of learning about AI tools, you’re not alone. We’ve seen many organizations beginning to experiment with AI and machine learning to enrich their digital asset collections. We helped the Library of Congress explore ways of combining AI with crowdsourcing to extract structured data from the content of digitized historical documents. We also worked with Indiana University to develop an extensible platform for applying AI tools, like speech-to-text transcription, to audiovisual materials in order to improve discoverability. 

What kinds of tasks can AI do with my digital assets?

Which AI methods work for digital assets or collections depends largely on the type of asset. Text-based, still image, audio, and video assets all have different techniques available to them. This section highlights the most popular machine learning-based methods for working with different types of digital material. This will help you determine which artificial intelligence tasks are relevant to your collections before diving deep into specific tools.

AI for processing text – Natural Language Processing

Most AI tools that work with text fall under the umbrella of Natural Language Processing (NLP). NLP encompasses many different tasks, including:

• Named-Entity Recognition (NER) – NER is the process of identifying significant categories of things (“entities”) named in text. Usually these categories include people, places, organizations, and dates, but might also include nationalities, monetary values, times, or other concepts. Libraries or digital asset management systems can use named-entity recognition to aid cataloging and search.
• Sentiment analysis – Sentiment analysis is the automatic determination of the emotional valence (“sentiment”) of text. For example, determining whether a product review is positive, negative, or neutral.
• Topic modeling – Topic modeling is a way of determining what general topic(s) the text is discussing. The primary topics are determined by clustering words related to the same subjects and observing their relative frequencies. Topic modeling can be used in DAM systems to determine tags for assets. It could also be used in library catalogs to determine subject headings.
• Machine translation – Machine translation is the automated translation of text from one language to another–think Google Translate!
• Language detection – Language detection is about determining what language or languages are present in a text. 

AI for processing images and video – Computer Vision

Using AI for images and videos involves a subfield of artificial intelligence called Computer Vision. Many more tools are available for working with still images than with video. However, the methods used for images can often be adapted to work with video as well. AI tasks that are most useful for managing collections of digital image and video assets include:

• Image classification – Image classification applies labels to images based on their contents. For example, image classification tools will label a picture of a dog with “dog.”
• Object detection – Object detection goes one step further than image classification. It both locates and labels particular objects in an image. For example, a model trained to detect dogs could locate a dog in a photo full of other animals. Object detection is also sometimes referred to as image recognition.
• Face detection/face recognition – Face detection models can tell whether a human face is present in an image or not. Face recognition goes a step further and identifies whether the face is someone it knows.
• Optical Character Recognition (OCR) – OCR is the process of extracting machine-readable text from an image. Imagine the difference between having a Word document and a picture of a printed document–in the latter, you can’t copy/paste or edit the text. OCR turns pictures of text into digital text.

AI for processing audio – Machine Listening

AI tools for working with audio are much fewer and farther between. The time-based nature of audio, as opposed to more static images and text, makes working with audio a bit more difficult. But there are still methods available!

• Speech-to-text (STT) – Speech-to-text, also called automatic speech recognition, transcribes speech into text. STT is used in applications like automatic caption generation and dictation. Transcripts created with speech-to-text can be sent through text-based processing workflows (like sentiment analysis) for further enrichment.
• Music/speech detection – Speech, music, silence, applause, and other kinds of content detection can tell you which sounds occur at which timestamps in an audio clip. 
• Speaker identification / diarization – Speaker identification or diarization is the process of identifying the unique speakers in a piece of audio. For example, in a clip of an interview, speaker diarization tools would identify the interviewer and the interviewee as speakers. It would also tell you where in the audio each speaks.

What is AI training, and do I need to do it?

Training is the process of “teaching” an algorithm how to perform its task. 

Creating a trained machine learning model involves developing a set of training data, putting that data through a learning algorithm, and tweaking parameters until it produces desirable results.

You can think of training data as the “answer key” to a test you want the computer to take. 

For example, if the task you want to perform is image classification–dividing images into different categories based on their contents–the training data will consist of images labeled with their appropriate category. During the training process, the computer examines that training data to determine what features are likely to be found in which categories, and subsequently uses that information to make guesses about the appropriate label for images it’s never seen before.

In addition to the labeled data given to the algorithm for learning, some data has to be held back to evaluate the performance of the model. This is sometimes called “ground truth” testing, which we’ll discuss more below.

Developing training and testing data is often the most time-consuming and labor-intensive part of working with machine learning tools. Getting accurate results often requires thousands of sample inputs, which may (depending on the starting state of your data) need to be manually processed by humans before they can be used for training. 

Training AI tools sounds costly, is it always necessary?

Custom training may not be required in all cases. Many tools come with “pre-trained” models you can use. Before investing loads of resources into custom training, determine whether these out-of-the-box options meet your quality standards. 

Keep in mind that all machine learning models are trained on some particular set of data. 

The data used for training will impact which types of data the model is well-suited for—for example, a speech-to-text model trained on American English may struggle to accurately transcribe British English, and will be completely useless at transcribing French. 

Researching the data used to train out-of-the-box models, and determining its similarity to your data can help set your expectations for the tool’s performance.

Choose the right AI tool for your use case

Before you embark on any AI project, it’s important to articulate the problem you want to solve and consider the users that this AI solution will serve. Clearly defining your purpose will help you assess the risks involved with the AI, help you measure the success of the tools you use, and help you determine the best way to present or make use of the results for your users in your access system. 

All AI tools are trained on a limited set of content for a specific use case, which may or may not match your own. Even “general purpose” AI tools may not produce results at the right level of specificity for your purpose. Be cautious of accuracy benchmarks provided by AI services, especially if there is little information on the testing process.

The best way to determine if an AI tool will be a good fit for your use case is to test it yourself on your own digital collections.

How to evaluate AI tools

Ground truth testing is a standard method for testing AI tools. In ground truth testing, you create examples of the ideal AI output (ground truth) for samples of your content and check them against the actual output of the AI to measure the tool’s accuracy. 

For instance, comparing the results of an object recognition tool against the list of objects you expect the tool to recognize in a sample of images in your digital asset management system can show you the strengths of the AI in correctly identifying objects in your assets (true positives) and its weaknesses in either not detecting objects it should have (false negatives) or misidentifying objects (false positives). 

Common quantitative measures for ground truth testing include precision and recall, which can help you better calculate these risks of omission and misidentification. You can also examine these errors qualitatively to better understand the nature of the mistakes an AI tool might make with your content, so you can make informed decisions about what kind of quality control you may need to apply or if you want to use the tool at all.

Ground truth testing, however, can be costly to implement.

Creating ground truth samples is time-consuming, and the process of calculating comparison metrics requires specialized knowledge. It’s also important to keep in mind that ground truth can be subjective, depending on the type of tool—the results you’d expect to see may differ in granularity or terminology from the outputs the AI was trained to produce. 

In the absence of ground truth, you can visually scan results for false positives and false negatives to get a sense of what kinds of errors an AI might make on your content and how they might impact your users. 

Is it important that the AI finds all of the correct results? How dangerous are false positives to the user experience?

Seeing how AI results align with your answers to questions like these can help to quickly decide whether an AI tool is worth pursuing more seriously. 

In addition to the quality of results, it is also important to consider other criteria when evaluating AI tools. What are the costs of the tool, both paid services and staff time needed to implement the tool and review or correct results? Will you need to train or fine-tune the AI to meet the needs of your use case? How will the AI integrate with your existing technical infrastructure? 

To learn more about how you can evaluate AI tools for your digital assets with users in mind, check out AVP’s Human-Centered Evaluation Framework webinar, which includes a quick reference guide to these and many other questions to ask vendors or your implementation team.

When not to use artificial intelligence

With all of the potential for error, how can you decide if AI is really worth it? Articulating your goals and expectations for AI at the start of your explorations can help you assess the value of the AI tools you test. 

Do you want AI to replace the work of humans or to enhance it by adding value that humans cannot or do not have the time to do? What is your threshold for error? Will a hybrid human and AI process be more efficient or help relieve the tedium for human workers? What are the costs of integrating AI into your existing workflows and are they outweighed by the benefits the AI will bring?

If your ground truth tests show that commercial AI tools are not quite accurate enough to be worth the trouble, consider testing again with the same data in 6 months or a year to see if the tools have improved. It’s also important to consider that tools may change in a way that erodes accuracy for your use case. For that reason, it’s a good idea to regularly test commercial AI tools against your baseline ground truth test scores to ensure that AI outputs continue to meet your standards. 

Now what?

The topics we’ve covered in this post are only the beginning! Now that you’ve upped your AI literacy and have a basic handle on how AI might be useful for enhancing your digital assets or collections, start putting these ideas into action. 

Learn how AVP can help with your AI selection or evaluation project

Preserving Digital Assets: A Gap in the DAM Marketplace

Cultural heritage organizations increasingly seek out a digital asset management system (DAM) that integrates robust digital preservation capabilities for preserving digital assets. They often recognize the importance of investing in digital preservation but struggle with the challenge of maintaining separate DAM and digital preservation systems due to limited resources.

While DAM systems typically prioritize security, permissions, and utilize cloud storage—all found in digital preservation systems as well—they still lack the comprehensive functionality that cultural heritage organizations and others consistently seek to help with preserving digital assets.

Despite the maturity of the DAM market, there remains a persistent gap between the preservation functionality that cultural heritage organizations desire and the systems currently available. 

At AVP, we have witnessed this shift in what organizations are seeking first-hand through our work assisting organizations in finding the perfect technology solutions to meet their unique requirements, from digital asset management and media asset management (MAM) to digital preservation systems and records management systems. 

In light of this issue, I would like to delve into the reasons behind this disparity and share AVP’s recommendations on how organizations can navigate the technical landscape for preserving digital assets effectively. Let’s explore the evolving needs of organizations and uncover strategies for achieving their goals within the realm of digital asset management and digital preservation.

Why can’t Digital Asset Management just “do Digital Preservation”?

It is crucial to grasp the fundamental differences between these two types of systems and their respective functionalities.

According to IBM, a DAM is “a comprehensive solution that streamlines the storage, organization, management, retrieval, and distribution of an organization’s digital assets.”

The lending library

To paint a visual picture, envision a DAM as a lending library.

Just like books neatly arranged on shelves, digital assets are meticulously organized, described, and managed within the DAM. Library users can navigate the catalog using various criteria such as subject, author, or date to locate specific assets, just as they can in the DAM. And, similar to needing a library card to borrow books, access to the DAM requires registered users to have appropriate permissions to access and utilize the digital assets.

Essentially, a well-managed DAM ensures that your digital assets are securely stored, easily searchable, and readily accessible. It functions as a virtual library, providing efficient organization and control over your organization’s valuable digital resources. 

The offsite storage

Building upon the library analogy, let’s delve into the unique characteristics of a digital preservation system.

Imagine the library books that are not frequently accessed. Instead of occupying valuable space on the main shelves, they are often relocated to a secure, climate-controlled warehouse. These books are packed in containers on tall shelving units, accessible to only a select few individuals. Browsing becomes nearly impossible, searching becomes challenging, and obtaining one of these books typically requires assistance from a librarian.

In the digital realm, a digital preservation system serves as the digital counterpart to this offsite storage. It replaces physical locked warehouses with secure user permissions, ensures file verification and fixity testing to maintain data integrity, employs packaging mechanisms called “bags,” and utilizes cold data storage for long-term preservation.

While a digital preservation system focuses primarily on safeguarding and preserving digital assets, it also prioritizes security and protection over immediate accessibility.

Same-same but different?

From these descriptions, it is evident that the fundamental purposes of DAM and digital preservation systems are significantly different, although there are areas of overlap. For instance, both the library and warehouse prioritize secure storage of their respective materials. (Ever walked out of a library without checking out your book only to set the alarm off?) 

Likewise, both DAM and digital preservation systems maintain strong user permissions to ensure security. Similarly, while libraries may employ climate control measures — albeit less stringent than those governing the warehouse’s temperature and humidity levels — some DAMs may also implement “lightweight” functionality for preserving digital assets, such as fixity testing upon upload.

This distinction emphasizes the intrinsically divergent purposes of DAM and digital preservation system. 

DAMs primarily excel in efficient asset management and user accessibility, allowing organizations to easily organize, retrieve, and distribute their digital assets. On the other hand, digital preservation system places paramount importance on long-term preservation and data integrity, safeguarding valuable assets for future generations. 

How can I use a DAM system for preserving digital assets today?

Increasingly, DAM vendors are adding digital preservation functionality to their systems. At a minimum, most DAM systems perform:

• Checksum hash values (e.g., MD5) creation on ingest
• Event logging (whenever an action is taken on a file)

Some DAM systems can also do the following:

• Virus checking on ingest
• Hybrid (tiered) storage (a combination of hot and cold storage or online, nearline, and offline storage)

Only a very small number of DAM systems may also:

• Make checksum values visible to users
• Test existing checksum values on ingest
• Enable manual and/or regular fixity testing
• Run reports on or export event logs

And at the time of writing, no DAM performs automated obsolescence monitoring of file formats (to our knowledge).

With this in mind, the question to consider is: what’s good enough when it comes to digital preservation functionality in DAMS?

“Good enough” digital preservation

The concept of “Good enough” digital preservation has been circulating since at least 2014, thanks to groups like Digital POWRR. Essentially, it recognizes that not everyone can achieve or maintain the highest levels of digital preservation, such those defined by level four of the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation or full conformance with ISO 16363 (Audit and certification of trustworthy digital repositories), for all digital assets (for all eternity).

For many, these guidelines can feel overwhelming and unattainable. When organizations search for a DAM solution, they often have an expectation that it will solve all digital preservation planning challenges and result in a perfect A+ in digital preservation. However, as we have come to realize, this expectation is not in line with reality.

So, what should you do?

Let’s dive into some ideas on how we can tackle these issues.

Understand the difference between DAM system and Digital Preservation system functionality

First and foremost, organizations should focus on developing a clear understanding of the distinctions between a DAM and a digital preservation system. This knowledge forms the foundation for informed decision-making and empowers organizations to choose the right path.

Clarify your appetite for risk

Next, organizations need to assess their risk comfort levels. What functionalities are essential for their peace of mind? Are there specific data management or digital preservation regulations they must comply with? Can a DAM system meet these requirements effectively? If not, organizations must determine the functionalities that take precedence and decide whether a DAM or digital preservation system is more suitable for their needs.

DAM vendors play a crucial role in this process. It is essential for them to familiarize themselves with basic digital preservation software functionality. This understanding enables them to respond effectively to client requirements and deliver solutions that align with their specific needs.

Request standards compliance

DAM vendors should actively consider aligning with some guidelines from the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation, for example. By doing so, vendors not only benefit clients with a need for digital preservation but also contribute to the long-term accessibility of assets within the DAM for all users. This alignment has the potential to promote industry-wide best practices and ensures the preservation and availability of digital assets beyond individual client needs.

However, it is essential to recognize that not all DAM systems need to encompass complete digital preservation functionality.

 The reality is, some organizations heavily invested in digital preservation may have a particularly low risk tolerance for loss and, despite DAM’s other capabilities, may choose not to depend on it alone to achieve their preservation objectives.

Choosing a solution for preserving digital assets

In light of these considerations, it is crucial for organizations to engage in internal discussions to determine their specific needs and priorities. These conversations should address risk levels and the functionalities that are essential for their peace of mind and compliance with their data management requirements. 

By having these dialogues, organizations can collectively define an acceptable level of preservation within the realm of DAM. Although reaching a consensus may present challenges, the goal is to find a comfortable middle ground that satisfies the needs of everyone in the organization. This process not only addresses their requirements effectively but also has the potential to drive innovation within the DAM industry as a whole.

If you are considering acquiring a DAM in the near future and have digital preservation requirements, we are excited to discuss the possibilities with you. AVP is here to assist you in exploring your options and finding the ideal system for your organization. We eagerly await the opportunity to assist you on this journey.

The Importance of Choosing the Right Digital Asset Management System 

As organizations grow and their workflows evolve, so does their need for the right technology. But identifying which tools will meet your needs now — and as your business scales — can be a major undertaking. 

Investing in a digital asset management (DAM) solution is no different. While DAM systems are designed to simplify how digital content is organized and managed, selecting the right solution can actually be really complicated. After all, there are dozens of vendors to choose from, all with a unique combination of functionality, features, and services. On the flip side, being able to identify and prioritize your business requirements requires a lot of due diligence.

And unfortunately, if you select a solution that doesn’t meet your needs there are a range of significant consequences. Let’s take a look at the risks entailed in making the wrong- DAM software investment — and how to avoid them.

The Risks of Getting it Wrong

Unwanted Expenses

By the time you realize that you’ve selected a a digital asset management solution or system that won’t support your use cases as expected, you will likely be deep into software implementation. This includes configuration, content migration, piloting, and possibly even the beginning of system launch. Many stakeholders will have committed significant time to this initiative.

At this point, it is pretty hard to cut your losses and change course. Not only will there be the hard costs of ending the current contract — but there will be further hefty staffing expenses. Scrapping plan A means starting from scratch with another procurement process and then spending months configuring, migrating, and preparing for roll out — a second time. We all know that time means money, and this redundant work will be costly.

It is not easy to let go of those sunk costs, so most likely, you will continue to persevere. You may not be able to tell the difference between poor implementation, and the wrong system. Either way the challenges will continue to grow in significance and complexity.

Broken Trust

While the technical part of a software launch can be complicated, with numerous timelines and milestones, getting people to embrace the new system can be even more challenging. After all, change is hard — even when it’s for the better. And when the solution doesn’t meet expectations, you risk damaging the trust between you and your stakeholders. 

And once this trust is broken, it is difficult to repair. Stakeholders that feel burned or frustrated may not be interested in engaging in the process again, which can have a chilling effect on system adoption and even create a self-fulfilling prophecy that the project is doomed to failure. 

Lost Opportunity

In addition to unwanted staffing expenses and damaged trust, investing in the wrong digital asset management system will delay your time to value. In other words, it extends the time needed to realize all of the gains that you were hoping for when you invested in a digital asset management system.

While delays and pivots play out, all of the original challenges that were drivers for making this technology investment continue to grow, such as workflow efficiencies, poor user experience, brand inconsistencies, and general content chaos. For organizations that manage archival assets, every month can bring the permanent loss of materials due to decay or obsolescence.

Not choosing the right DAM system means that these challenges continue to balloon — greatly prolonging the time until you realize DAM ROI.

Project Viability

A final risk inherent in choosing the wrong digital asset management system is the possibility that it sinks the project entirely. The decision to implement a new DAM system is often part of a larger technology strategy endorsed by executive leadership. And if the initial selection is a failure, it can create waves that cast doubt on the value of the investment. 

This loss of confidence can threaten the existence of the entire DAM project — putting careers at risk and leaving a legacy that is difficult to overcome.

How to Choose the Right Digital Asset Management System, the First Time

Clearly, with any major technology investment the stakes are high. And righting the ship after a wrong decision entails considerable work and expense.

That’s why many organizations wondering how to choose a digital asset management system turn to a DAM consultant to guide their selection process. Including a consultant on your team can add clarity and efficiency at every stage of the process and sets the project up for success: from identifying specification requirements and drafting a request for proposal (RFP) all the way through vendor evaluation. 

In addition to avoiding the risks outlined above, the benefits of working with a top digital asset management systems consultant include:

• Confidence that you’ve uncovered, defined, and prioritized all of your content workflow and business needs
• The ability to articulate these needs to avoid disconnects or miscommunications with your vendor, down the road
• Access to a data-driven, systematic approach that allows for informed and clear decisions, based on the right criteria

In many ways, working with a digital asset management consultant is like an insurance policy against going down the wrong path — allowing you to minimize your risk and maximize your reward. 

AVP’s Approach to DAM Selection

At AVP, we offer DAM selection services that can be tailored to the needs of every organization. DAM is anything but a one-size-fits all investment, and our people-first approach allows us to provide the right level of support, every time. 

AVP Select services are organized into two options:

• Full Service Technology Consulting (aka Managed Select): We offer three bundles of consulting services that all begin with a stakeholder alignment workshop. From there, you can decide how long you’d like us to lead the process.
• Technology Selection Training (aka Self Select): Our training option often appeals to customers who have the right team assembled but could benefit from step-by-step guidance on how to choose a digital asset management system.

All of our DAM consulting services are rooted in a proven technology selection process that has helped our customers make the correct DAM investment, with confidence. 

Make the Best DAM Decision, with AVP

With support from AVP’s digital asset management consultants, you can begin your DAM journey on the path to success.

We’d love to learn about your unique content workflows and technology needs. Contact us to learn more about AVP Select — and how we can work together to achieve your DAM goals, faster.

Community-centered design for the development of effective cultural heritage training programs

by Pamela Vizner and Kara Van Malssen

Continuing education and career-long professional development is critical in any field. As professionals dedicated to the stewardship and impactful accessibility of content—archiving, digital preservation, and digital asset management—we know well how important it is to continue to grow and learn as technologies change, user and stakeholder expectations evolve, and as we individually advance in our careers.

Both of us have also been privileged to share our knowledge with others around the world. Over the years, we have participated in dozens of local and international training programs as curriculum designers, trainers, organizers, mentors, and supporters; both as individuals and also as part of AVP’s ongoing efforts to support continuing education in formal and informal settings. These programs have been organized by a variety of professional associations, higher education institutions, and international training organizations. In the past, these were primarily in person—a few days or a week of learning with a handful of practitioners, either from the local area where the training was being conducted, or mixed groups from very different regions of the world. More recently, COVID-related restrictions have forced organizations to restructure training programs to accommodate fully remote or hybrid options, and we have participated in these efforts as well.

Throughout the years we have seen, applied, and analyzed multiple educational and training methodologies. We have seen many successes and have also identified areas of improvement, in other programs and also in our own training practices. 

Recently, we have reflected on shortcomings and opportunities to deliver more value to the participants of these trainings. This was in part motivated by our 2021 engagement with the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) to help conduct a study on professional development needs for Sustaining Digital Heritage, with the aim of developing a new programme for this topic. Project researchers interviewed over thirty, primarily mid-career, heritage professionals from around the world, and analyzed existing professional development offerings on this topic. The results, and a proposed model for the programme, were published in a report available here. Through this research, we observed that:

• Interviewees were frustrated by the lack of training opportunities for mid- and advanced-career professionals. Most trainings focus on introductory content.
• Perhaps because they are introductory, many trainings largely focus on sharing the expertise of the trainers, which doesn’t always connect to or translate to the participants’ context, background, resources, needs, and goals. 
• Remote trainings largely repurpose the onsite model—bringing people together for a few consecutive days of shared learning with experts brought into present live—but without the critical networking component.
• In many training settings, there is a lack of opportunity for trainees to practice applying what they are learning to their own context and push solutions forward.

As the professional development landscape adapts to the new realities and opportunities introduced during the pandemic, now seems like a fortuitous time for the professional communities we work with to find ways to innovate and improve the value of professional development offerings, particularly for the international community. Significant investment goes into the development and delivery of all professional development—designing and optimizing for impact is a shared goal by all stakeholders. 

In this reflection, we want to offer some thoughts and ideas that we think could improve these training offerings to precisely maximize their impact while taking advantage of the new technologies and sharing opportunities available to us.

Our recommendations are rooted in human-centered design, a problem solving method that focuses on understanding and empathizing with people in order to develop beneficial solutions. It is worth noting that our recommendations here focus only on professional training programs that are not part of formal educational opportunities offered through universities or similar institutions (e.g. undergraduate programs, master programs, or certificate programs).

The key question we want to explore is: How can we ensure the resources invested in professional development offerings—on the part of organizers, trainers, participants, and funders—delivers the most impact? Our recommendation on how to achieve this can be summarized as:

1. Discover – Take time to understand participants contexts, background, resources, needs, and goals first
2. Design – Design training programs that provide ample opportunity to blend theory and practice. 
3. Deliver – Take advantage of the different opportunities afforded by asynchronous and synchronous learning to maximize shared time. When possible, reuse existing content.
4. Measure – Take the time to evaluate the results of the program, build in this practice for every iteration of the program to gather feedback to use as a tool to improve it.

DISCOVER

In our role as consultants at AVP, our approach with clients focuses on identifying the problem before proposing any solutions: we ask, we listen, we analyze, we engage in dialogue. Then, we find answers together. In other words, we diagnose before we prescribe. We have found this is the only way to find realistic solutions for a problem as each context is unique. 

One area of concern that we have identified is the lack of understanding of local contexts in the design and implementation of professional development programs. A common assumption seems to be that one single solution can be applied in multiple contexts with success.

We have seen many programs lack a clear “discovery” process. In the context of international education, this means that curriculum designers do not take the time to get to know their audience. Moreover, trainers often come from regions where availability of resources is different and where the problems they are trying to solve are of a different nature. As a result of this, programs can not only be ineffective but also run the risk of being perceived as colonizing. These exact solutions will very likely not translate well in a different context. Furthermore, many training programs in our field emphasize technical skills, and in some cases we have seen that the most pressing needs for a community might not even be of a technical nature. Very few programs include topics such as project management or fundraising, for example, which are fundamental in archives management. 

Taking the time to understand trainees’ needs and pain points is key for the design of an impactful program. This can be done through surveys, interviews, or site visits, if possible.

DESIGN

When there isn’t an understanding of the participants’ needs, the design of a program is destined to be built without a foundation. The selection of content, topics, tools, and training methods are left to the assumptions of the organizers, who might have a limited understanding of the needs of the audience they are trying to reach and without a clear set of articulated goals they want to achieve.

The first problem we see is that this often leads to the design of programs that are mostly expository and do not include opportunities for facilitated dialogue, which in many cases helps with absorption and retention. We are not saying that lectures and presentations don’t have any value but not including facilitated dialogue can leave participants without a firm understanding of how to translate what they are learning to their context. 

In addition to this, trainers are often subject matter experts, in some cases renowned professionals with many years of experience, but they are not trained to be facilitators to engage in active problem-solving with participants. Often, there’s no space for collective problem-solving. This one-sided modality has gotten more and more popular with remote options as sometimes it is very difficult to moderate discussions online with large groups. Again, that is not to say there aren’t benefits to applying remote learning, but we are sure at this point we have all experienced the challenges of open communication within remote platforms in educational contexts!

Moreover, because no discovery has been conducted, when hands-on training is included the tools that are presented are very specific and not necessarily can be applied in every single situation. This means that by the end of the program attendees are left with a large set of tools to apply without really knowing how to use them or if they even apply to their own context. For example, open source tools are often presented as the right solution for under-resourced organizations, however, in the selection of a tool there are many more aspects to consider than just availability of financial resources (and open source does not equal free, a point often under communicated).

We believe that in order for current programs to be effective and have a long-term impact a major perspective switch is required: developing curriculums with a problem-solving approach and trainee-centered learning. We think that learning the theory alone does not provide the tools to equip archivists and technicians to find the right solutions for the problems they face, which can vary greatly from organization to organization. Each organization is a different world and their problems and possible solutions are unique. After doing a good discovery, the design of a trainee-centered program not only makes a lot of sense, it also comes together more clearly.

A trainee-centered approach to teaching and learning may inspire different program designs than the typical default approaches.

DELIVER

We believe in taking advantage of the technologies and resources we have at our disposal. Program designers can be creative as long as they keep in mind the goals and needs identified during their discovery and while maintaining a trainee-centered approach. A combination of synchronous and asynchronous learning could be a good solution to maximize time and resources while keeping the program effective and successful. Asynchronous sessions could be followed by group working sessions—in-person or online—where participants have the opportunity to ask questions, apply the newly-acquired knowledge in practical exercises, and discuss the topics presented in the asynchronous sessions. They can learn from each other, and come up with creative solutions together. Allowing participants to review concepts ahead of time would not only provide space for reflection and reinforcement, but also maximize the time participants and trainers spend together. 

In this context, the role of the trainer, rather than being a lecturer, switches to a facilitator who guides participants through their own process of discovery as they try to marry theory with their own challenges. This implies that the trainers’ skills are different: this person should be a subject matter expert but also someone who is capable of guiding a conversation, challenging participants, and facilitating team work. This also means that the trainer needs to spend some time learning about the participants’ needs so they can offer effective guidance and help them find the right solutions. They need to do their own “discovery” process, know how to listen, be open, come in without preconceived notions of what the participant’s context is about, what they know and what they don’t, what their roles are within their organization, and what their expectations might be. On the other hand, participants should come prepared to share examples of current challenges for discussion and engage in collaborative problem-solving. Clear guidelines on expectations of participants and how to come prepared would be helpful in aligning all parties for productive time together.

Another advantage of this two-phased approach is that evergreen content can be created ahead of time. This can be reused, shared, translated, etc. If during discovery you have identified needs in broader areas, such as project management, then there’s an opportunity to reuse content from other sources. Obviously, there are many programs and content out there that can be used in tandem with domain-specific content. Partnerships with other educating organizations could cover the basics of general topics to facilitate access to already-existing content.

MEASURE

Determining the impact of the program must go beyond simply a feedback form delivered immediately after a training session. Instead, during the design stage, articulate a goal (or goals) of what you want the training to achieve, then determine what key performance indicators would be useful to measure to understand if you have achieved those goals. Next, determine how this information would be gathered.

For example, maybe one of your goals is to increase collaboration amongst participants in a regional training event. In order to determine if this goal has been met, you may want to track engagement on certain platforms, or whether or not they have organized follow up events. If one of your goals is for participants to be able to test a certain tool for their workflow, you may need to send participants home with clear instructions for testing. Later, follow up to with questions asking whether they completed the test, how easy was it to complete the test, how likely they are to adopt the tool.

We believe the end of the training cycle is not when the last session is over. Learning from past experiences is invaluable and will help build a better, more sustainable, more effective program. Asking participants, trainers, and other parties involved what they think, at the right moments, will give you information to continue to improve and better allocate resources in the future. Besides feedback forms, finding other ways to measure impact can be beneficial in planning future sessions. You can also design evaluation tools that are reusable so you can use this historical information to measure progress over time.

APEX: A CASE STUDY

The Audiovisual Preservation Exchange (APEX) is an international program that encourages dialogue and non-hierarchical exchange between practitioners, students, and the general public around the management and use of audiovisual collections (physical and digital). Organized by the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program (MIAP) at New York University (NYU) and created by Mona Jimenez, APEX has collaborated for the past 14 years with different types of organizations—including national archives, libraries, documentation centers, and community archives—to foster dialogue and mutual learning through direct work with collections. APEX is organized once a year in a different location, and previous versions have been held in Ghana, Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay, Chile, Spain, Brazil, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. AVP has been a long-time collaborator of APEX since its creation in 2008 through the participation of staff members in a variety of activities —including training— and as a current program sponsor.

APEX is not a traditional training program—everyone is a contributor and participants all learn from each other’s experiences navigating and responding to diverse administrative infrastructures and availability of resources. Its open-ended methodology embodies the approach we have described here, in a flexible and collaborative way.  

APEX starts with dialog (akin to the discovery stage described above), followed by a collaborative design process between partners. Then content delivered is based on identified needs and according to the resources available. Outcomes are measured and the process iterated on each year.

Different from many international archival programs, APEX has a community-centered approach: each year, APEX organizers and local partners define the specific activities based on the communities’ needs. In some cases, most of the effort is focused on working on specific collections to find solutions to specific problems. In some other cases, the program includes hands-on workshops with the broader community to raise awareness around care and management of their own collections. To make this possible, APEX organizers work hand-in-hand with local partners to design the most impactful program possible.

Over the years, we have learned that the discovery process is key to a successful program and we have incorporated that as a fundamental part of the initial planning. This process starts with meetings with partners, followed by surveys, and in some cases site visits which are incredibly helpful to understand contextual information that might not be mentioned in conversations or surveys. Having the opportunity to see the spaces available, the collections, and the equipment; understanding any cultural differences or barriers; and having the opportunity to engage in person with partners has been useful information to prepare a program that is achievable, makes sense for all the people involved, and that focuses on the right topics. 

The design of the program is a long, collaborative process that can take several months. Based on the information gathered, activities are proposed to partners. These are discussed, refined, then discussed again. Every attempt is made to maximize the resources available (equipment, lodging, transportation, working spaces, technologies, existing documentation, etc.) and use collective networks to find additional resources and required skills to align with the needs identified (e.g. equipment donations, reaching out to a colleague who can collaborate with information on a certain topic, etc.).

Delivery always varies. APEX is an in-person program, although in 2021 we were forced to organize a virtual version. In some cases we can organize online sessions with a colleague over video call to explain or discuss a given topic. There is only one thing that remains the same for each version: we ALWAYS engage in dialogue and learn from each other. The hands-on work with collections is the catalyst to discuss broader topics: as we work together to inventory video tapes we discuss approaches to digitization, and inevitably questions about digital preservation come up. Local organizations learn from each other as they uncover ways to collaborate or to learn about local resources they didn’t know existed. Every single version of APEX is not just a learning experience, it is a human experience that strengthens our networks at every level, from professional to personal, from local to international. This impact enables the creation of long-lasting connections and collaborations that live well beyond the duration of the program.

Finally, measurement of success is often done internally. Every single version of the program has resulted in learnings that are incorporated into the planning of the next version. However, there is still some work to be done in this area. APEX has recently created an advisory board that hopefully help formalize processes even more, and open it up to broader communities who can take advantage of this model in other locations.

To Build a Successful DAM Program, Adopt a Service Mindset

Kara Van Malssen is Partner and Managing Director for Services at AVP.  Kara works with clients to bridge the technical, human, and business aspects of projects. Kara has supported numerous organizations with DAM selection and implementation, metadata modeling and schema development, and taxonomy development, and user experience design efforts.

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Audiovisual Metadata Platform Pilot Development (AMPPD) Final Project Report

This report documents the experience and findings of the Audiovisual Metadata Platform Pilot Development (AMPPD) project, which has worked to enable more efficient generation of metadata to support discovery and use of digitized and born-digital audio and moving image collections. The AMPPD project was carried out by partners Indiana University Libraries, AVP, University of Texas at Austin, and New York Public Library between 2018-2021.

Report Authors : Jon W. Dunn, Ying Feng, Juliet L. Hardesty, Brian Wheeler, Maria Whitaker, and Thomas Whittaker, Indiana University Libraries; Shawn Averkamp, Bertram Lyons, and Amy Rudersdorf, AVP; Tanya Clement and Liz Fischer, University of Texas at Austin Department of English. The authors wish to thank Rachael Kosinski and Patrick Sovereign for formatting and editing assistance.

Funding Acknowledgement: The work described in this report was made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Read the entire report here.

PROBLEM STATEMENT

Libraries and archives hold massive collections of audiovisual recordings from a diverse range of timeframes, cultures, and contexts that are of great interest across many disciplines and communities.

In recent years, increased concern over the longevity of physical audiovisual formats due to issues of

media degradation and obsolescence, 2 combined with the decreasing cost of digital storage, have led institutions to embark on projects to digitize recordings for purposes of long-term preservation and improved access. Simultaneously, the growth of born-digital audiovisual content, which struggles with its own issues of stability and imminent obsolescence, has skyrocketed and continues to grow exponentially.

In 2010, the Council on Libraries and Information Resources (CLIR) and the Library of Congress reported in “The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States: A National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age” that the complexity of preserving and accessing physical audiovisual collections goes far beyond digital reformatting. This complexity, which includes factors such as the cost to digitize the originals and manage the digital surrogates, is evidenced by the fact that large audiovisual collections are not well represented in our national and international digital platforms. The relative paucity of audiovisual content in Europeana and the Digital Public Library of America is a testament to the difficulties that the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) community faces in creating access to their audiovisual collections. There has always been a desire for more audiovisual content in DPLA, even as staff members recognize the challenges and complexities this kind of content poses (massive storage requirements, lack of description, etc.). And, even though Europeana has made the collection of audiovisual content a focus of their work in recent years, as of February 2021, Europeana comprises 59% images and 38% text objects, but only 1% sound objects and 2% video objects. DPLA is composed of 25% images and 54% text, with only 0.3% sound objects, and 0.6% video objects.

Another reason, beyond cost, that audiovisual recordings are not widely accessible is the lack of sufficiently granular metadata to support identification, discovery, and use, or to support informed rights determination and access control and permissions decisions on the part of collections staff and users. Unlike textual materials—for which some degree of discovery may be provided through full-text indexing—without metadata detailing the content of the dynamic files, audiovisual materials cannot be located, used, and ultimately, understood.

Traditional approaches to metadata generation for audiovisual recordings rely almost entirely on manual description performed by experts—either by writing identifying information on a piece of physical media such as a tape cassette, typing bibliographic information into a database or spreadsheet, or creating collection- or series-level finding aids. The resource requirements and the lack of scalability to transfer even this limited information to a useful digital format that supports discovery presents an intractable problem. Lack of robust description stands in the way of access, ultimately resulting in the inability to derive full value from digitized and born-digital collections of audiovisual content, which in turn can lead to lack of interest, use, and potential loss of a collection entirely to obsolescence and media degradation.

Read the entire report here. 

Designing a User-driven DAM Experience, Part 1

To the user, a digital asset management (DAM) or similar system is only as good as the search and discovery experience.

If users are greeted with a homepage that they can’t relate to, if searches don’t return expected results, and if they can’t figure out how to use the navigational tools to browse, they get frustrated and leave. Many will never return.

DAM and similar systems exist to help people find assets they are looking for and use them effectively. Getting the search and discovery experience right is the key to adoption.

To design a system for findability, you have to start with the building blocks: metadata, taxonomy, and information architecture. To translate these into a good search and discovery experience, you have to learn how your users see the world.

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