Chief Library and Information Science Evangelist

I received a gift in the mail the other day that left me feeling so thankful and humbled. Deb Fanslow had a couple of journals made for me that featured the #LearnDAM tag and identified me by the title, “Chief Library and Information Science Evangelist.” On the inside of one of the journals was the sweetest note. My mother couldn’t have written anything sweeter! (Not that my mother has any idea what I do for a living.)

It’s been a long, long, long fight to get the DAM community (and DAM vendors, in particular) to recognize the value that information professionals can offer when it comes to planning and maintaining digital asset management initiatives. But it does seem as though people are starting to get it. So to get a recognition like this, from a library science professional, really meant the world to me. (I experienced the value Deb can offer while working with her on the DAM Guru Program membership management system.)

If you’re not familiar with Deb’s work, I encourage you to visit her website and absolutely do not miss her now-legendary Who Needs a DAM Librarian? series, published on the Digital Asset Management News website.

Thank you, Deb! You are already “paying it forward” in the most wonderful and effective ways. The DAM community is lucky you’re here, and I’m so happy to have met you.

— David

Are You Ready for Digital Asset Management?

I just recently published a piece in the Picturepark blog that deals with helping organizations determine whether or not they’re even ready to adopt a DAM system. (Yes, I realize that sounds like someone’s getting a puppy.) It comes from the “DAM Prep in 7 Steps” eBook, but we figured it was worth publishing on its own.

If you’re in the “I need a DAM” stage, please read it. Please also direct others to it who are getting into DAM. I’ve seen many DAM systems fail because the purchasing organization’s expectations weren’t in line with reality, or in line with the reality of the DAM they chose.

Read “Are You Ready for Digital Asset Management?” »

Creating Digital Asset Management Training Videos

Bonica Ayala, a woman who knows how to train and inspire DAM users, and at least one DAM author too.

Bonica Ayala is a digital asset management professional who first became known to me when I read her #GuruTalk interview with DAM Guru Program. I was impressed with much of what she said, so I decided to dig a little deeper into the DAM work she had done for Boston Architectural College.

I found the site where her system, the Boston Architectural College IMS Library, is presented to users. Note that I say presented as opposed to merely explained. In short, I have never seen a better example of how to make a DAM system available to users. Bonica has covered all the bases:

• Easy, accessible help email address — Bonica encourages users to contact her whenever they need help, and she makes it easy to do so by providing a dedicated email address.
• Live training — Some users prefer to sit back and be taught, making live training a valued offering. But the value is not just for the students: When you train someone in person, you can experience their education. This enables you, as the educator, to fine tune your presentation and perhaps even your DAM system.
• Documentation that describes the IMS Library — Resisting the temptation to just provide links to her DAM vendor’s user documents, Bonica documented use of the IMS Library. This enables her to explain digital asset management from the perspective of her users’ needs, rather than from generic concepts provide by DAM vendors.
• Video tutorials that show how to do specific tasks — Bonica created a library of short video tutorials that not only enabled me to understand within minutes how her system worked, they inspired me to contact her and ask if I could tell her story here.

Bonica Ayala comes to a discussion about digital asset management with an abundance of two things: energy and perspective. Her enthusiasm for the art and science of DAM is directly connected to user success, which is always the best motivator, in my opinion. Bonica isn’t obsessed with technology or theoretical approaches to digital asset management. Instead, her focus is on how things should work and how she can make things work for users today.

Watch Bonica’s video about downloading digital assets from the IMS Library.

In truth, I left the IMS Library page feeling a little ashamed that I hadn’t ever taken the time to create such a video library. Bonica even admits she had no idea how to do this when she started; she had only access to the same Internet that the rest of us have. “I have no time for that” has always been my ready excuse. “I can’t do everything” is another favorite.

But Bonica did find the time and she did do it all. On top of that, this is a person who had not been involved with digital asset management for a significant amount of time. This is a person who saw what needed to get done to properly encourage use of her system and, rather than make excuses, she got it done.

Bonica was gracious enough to answer some questions I had. I hope her answers inspire the rest of us—myself included—to start creating more video tutorials for DAM.

 

At what point did you realize that you would need to provide training materials for your users?

I incorporated the concept of a user support page with training materials for our users from the very beginning. The user support page is an extension of our live user training, and its benefits are manifold: it is a powerful resource for user education and help, available 24/7, but it also provides an interface for internal communication and continual ‘marketing’ to promote the system and encourage user adoption. The success of the DAM depends on our users, and for me, that means ensuring all users understand what the DAM is, why they need it, and of course, how to use it from Day One.

Why did you decide to provide video-based training?

In addition to video-based tutorials, I also provide text-based training and live, online training sessions where I share my screen and interact with trainees. However, I decided to create video tutorials for a few reasons. For one, I’ve been using online videos to learn how to do things—everything!—for years. It’s fast, convenient and empowering. If there’s a video out there on the best way to tie your shoes, I definitely needed to provide customized videos on my DAM system.

I feel like users are more likely to watch a video than read documentation, no matter how visually appealing it is. Carol Thomas-Knipes touched on this briefly in the “Be a DAM Superhero” webinar. Feedback from my beta testers also indicated this, so this is why I focused my energy on creating videos. The videos not only support the end users, they also support the system, providing another way to steward the system forward. I wanted to give people context and a foundation—a place to start that would convey my vision of the DAM in a simple, straightforward manner.

How did you determine which topics were required?

I roughly determined topics to cover during the design phase, as I mapped out the upstream/downstream relationships. I decided to implement the DAM in small phases, bringing on both key influencers and select motivated groups whose user feedback helped fine tune the system to a stable point. Once we reached that point, I began working on a detailed outline of the user support page, the videos I wanted to feature, and the amount of detail I would cover.

I wanted to create video tutorials that basically work from the bottom up. I wanted someone new to the system to be able to pick it up quickly, and also provide topics that our advanced users could use. The videos currently listed on the user support page are just the beginning. I planned to phase in additional videos down the road for both front-end users and eventually back-end users and managers.

How did you go about creating these video tutorials?

I had to become a video tutorial creator. We didn’t have the budget to outsource video production, so I took on the project. These video tutorials were born out of a collaborative effort between several personas of myself—script writer, voice actor, editor and producer. It was a challenge for “Team Me,” but it was worth it in the end because I really do enjoy learning, creating and helping people.

Before I could get started, I needed to decide on a video editing software. I ultimately went with Camtasia by Techsmith. Camtasia is a lightweight software specifically designed for creating video tutorials. It did exactly what I needed it to do.

Before I started creating, I watched other tutorials, noting what worked, what didn’t, and why. Then I just jumped in. There was definitely a learning curve, and I now realize that I pretty much did the first videos the hardest way possible. But I quickly settled into a process that worked for me. Coming from an artistic background, I knew I just needed to get started and the process would work itself out.

This is what I found worked for me:

Step 1: Write a solid script. I used the text from the documentation I created for my user manuals as a guideline to get me started. I recommend doing a couple of run-throughs first because you tend to miss the most obvious steps when you’re writing.

Step 2: Record the audio. Read your script—don’t go rogue. Take your time and don’t worry about the ums, coughs or mess-ups. But do annunciate! I can’t stress that enough. Audio makes or breaks your videos. Users expect them to look good but it is equally if not more important that they can understand you. I tend to talk fast and mumble so, before each recording, I would warm up by placing a cork in my mouth and saying each vowel until I felt ready to go. It’s a tip I learned from a friend who gives vocal lessons.

Step 3: Edit the audio. Now’s the time to take out those pesky “uh, hmm, coughs,” etc.

Step 4: Record the visuals.

Step 5: Lay in the visuals.

Step 6: Add motion, transitions and additional text. All these tools are available in Camtasia.

Step 7: Sit back, watch, and learn! Take notes and make additional edits if necessary. You want to keep your videos concise and as short as possible.

Step 8: Export and share with select users for feedback.

Did you create and release them all at once or over time?

I provided an initial release to select users for feedback, but they were eventually released all at once on the user support page, prior to the roll-out of the DAM across the organization.

If you had it to do over again, is there anything you would do differently?

If I had to do it over again, I would clone myself, and schedule in more time for video production.

Watch Bonica’s video tutorials here »

Lost in the DAM

While recording Berlin’s second record, we ended up with a few too many tracks. You know, albums and cassettes had their limitations. One of the extra tracks was called Lost in the Crowd. I loved this track because it was one of the few on which I played guitar. I was officially a keyboard player for the band; but I was actually a better guitar player than I was a keyboard player–go figure. (Somehow, it made sense at the time.)

Anyway, because this was considered a “throw away” track, we got to have fun with it. For me, this meant bringing out my inner Blue Oyster Cult. You can hear my guitar at the opening and during the outro (3:30). But the most interesting part is at about 2:15. Right after our real guitar player, Ric, finishes his solo, I sort of stepped out of bounds. The part I added ended up in a feedback-sustain that actually caused an argument in the band. Some argued that this wasn’t Berlin. They said it stepped on Ric’s “new wave” guitar part that was more who were were. Others saw it as being cool.

Ultimately, all my noise stayed because, after all, this track wasn’t going to be on the album or cassette. It would be only on the CD player thing, and no one had a CD player.

So, here we are, just a few years later. I find myself writing a new piece for CMSWire that discusses how mandatory metadata fields or having too many metadata fields, and a few others things, can actually lead to content becoming lost in the DAM. Now, I know that this is going to piss off some people who are believers in these things. But I’m getting used to this social media-staged warfare. In fact, the anticipation sort of put me into the same rebel mood I was in when we recorded Lost in the Crowd, back in 1984.

So, I’m ready for it. Tell me I don’t understand DAM policy. Tell me my experience is theoretical and not practical. Tell me all about it. All I know is that my guitar was howling that day. It was so loud that it was like a taste of World War III. And by adding this track, we didn’t know what to expect. Would our synth fans abandon us? Would real rockers make fun of us? I remember hearing it all.

But sometimes, you just have to turn things up to 11 and deal with the consequences. Sometimes you have to admit when something isn’t working and either be ready to fix it or walk away.

Read Lost in the DAM here.

And thanks to the fact that there are others who are willing to shake things up, we have YouTube, so you can actually hear my inspiration too. (And another thing, David, new-wavers aren’t supposed to have facial hair. So lose the Clark Gable mustache.)

A DAM is no place for an “image”

“This Adaptive Metadata stuff is nothing new. Our DAM can do this. Oh look, we just got support for a new file format!”

My most recent article on CMSWire resulted in a flurry of argumentative comments on various LinkedIn threads as well as below the article itself. The title, “Why Images Don’t Belong in Your DAM,” was intended to do one thing: Get people to click and read.

And it worked.

To be honest, this really is what the article is about, so there is nothing misleading going on. It’s just that people apparently expected me to write an article that literally explained—what?—why I thought that images shouldn’t be inside a DAM?

The primary point (which most sober and mentally functional readers got) was that the classification of “image” and the concept of file format-based management did not belong in a DAM. We remain too file-format focused in the way we do DAM. DAM vendors are even known to refer to the “asset lifecycle,” which always bothers me because people confuse “asset” with “file.” It is the content of a file that we care about; not the box (file) in which we store and share it.

With content-focused DAM, you think in terms of, for example, of the words in yesterday’s press release. You don’t think in terms of the press release’s Word and PDF files as being separate entities. They are merely disposable containers for the content. And it is the content that needs metadata, not the files. It is the content that has a lifecycle, not the files.

Yet, how many DAMs out there today that still force us to think in terms of file format? Does your DAM create a perfect PDF from a Word doc? Nope, that’s why you catalog both. Two files, the same content. Two sets of metadata. Two sets of permissions. You do the same with your InDesign files. And in some cases, instead of cataloging that single 500MB Photoshop master and letting the DAM create the derivatives we need, we create them ourselves. We have way too many reasons for why we do this, even though our DAM vendors tell us they are more than capable of doing it for us.

For these reasons and tons more, we end up with multiple files in our DAMs that each contain exactly or virtually the same content. And this means we have to manage each of those files independently.

Show of hands: Have you ever asked your DAM vendor to make it easy to copy metadata between records?

One of the many advantages of the Adaptive Metadata technology that Picturepark developed (and is now getting flack for from other DAM vendors who don’t understand it or fear it), is that metadata can be abstracted from the assets themselves. This means, for example, the metadata can exist entirely on the asset class definition. Those assets assigned to the class inherit the metadata while they remain assigned. (Yes, you can create local metadata values too. And yes, you can embed class metadata into outbound files.)

This is the foundation for being able to adapt metadata schemas between assets and, for a given asset, over time too. Recalling the example above, your PDF and Word files don’t need separate metadata editing sessions because you’ve added them both to the same asset class, and you’ve added the common metadata to the class.

What we have been seeing since the release of this article reminds me of the first time I ever opened an early beta release of the Mosaic Web browser. At that time, I think there were fewer Web pages in the world than I have today in this blog. I tried to like Mosaic, but I just didn’t get the point. (We didn’t even call it “the Web.” We just knew it by the application’s name.) Further, Gopher worked fine for browsing “online” information, and most people weren’t “online” anyway. (And spell checkers used to make us hyphenate “online” too. God, I’m old.)

The reason I didn’t understand the value in the Web when I first tried it was that I was evaluating it in terms of a few Web pages. I couldn’t see that the ultimate value came not from just a few websites, but from millions of websites that would each evolve over time.

Today of course, I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I didn’t see that potential. But this exactly what others are failing to see in this big argument over the value of adaptive metadata. You can’t just look at one asset and “get it” any more than you can look at one frame from a film and understand the concept of a motion picture. This is about metadata schema evolution, not metadata value updates. And isn’t this exactly the kind of thing that DAM professionals should appreciate? After all, the value of DAM is quite limited if you have only 3 assets.

I predict that in a few years, there are going to be many in the DAM industry who are eating a little bit of crow because they’ve been posting all over Hell and back that Adaptive Metadata is nothing new.

And, unlike my private humiliation of not getting the point to Mosaic, the Internet today never forgets.