Digital asset management requires cooperation among co-workers who may have markedly different perspectives and priorities.Library science experts are essential in creating an effective digital asset management system. But IT staffers and librarians don't always see eye to eye on priorities.
As a case in point, experts on both sides shared their somewhat differing viewpoints at this week's Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management Symposium in New York.
One of the panelists, Dan DiPierro, executive director of archives at CBS News, described the kinds of problems that can arise in a fast-moving news operation. "You don't want to develop a system that is going to make your business a slave to the workflow, or a slave to the vendor who comes in and sells you the system."
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As an example, he brought up a recent case in which the network wanted to develop a three-page fact book when Pope John Paul II died. "What we ended up with was about 2,600 pages of everything you ever wanted to know about the pope. … It was hard for the librarians to whittle that down to three pages. We had to bring other people in to overrule and get it very specifically to where we needed to be."
At that point, Linda Tadic, director of operations at ARTstor, offered a librarian's opinion. "I don't think there should be one department that leads the team; it has to be a team. The IT people are going to build [the system]. The library science people are going to have to build that metadata structure because they understand the data, and they know it more than perhaps even you do.
"You can do your business requirements, interviews with legal people, users. … They can say, 'Yeah, we want to do this, we want to do that,' but they don't even know what they want to do. [That's] why you need to have a professional who has the experience to look at it all and say, 'OK, you need to have these fields, track this, etc.'
"It can be incorporated into your workflow because usually it's more than one person creating the metadata record. It's important to have business people and IT people to build it and library science people to actually create that metadata structure so that everything feeds together. You can't have one lording over the other; whenever you do that then you're doomed."
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Chris Orr, visual asset archivist for Landor Associates, offered a useful trick she found for increasing participation in the data collection effort. "We're talking about team players, here, but … another important part of the team is the creator of that asset, who isn't always interested in being on a team. Designers are very creative, and part of their creative process is their independence."
She described the process she used for giving creative people a "hook" that would motivate them to participate in the metadata naming process. "I have a mantra. … 'If the client sees it, we archive it.' Now you may have another hook; 'If we broadcast it, we save it,' or 'If it's published and has an ISBN, we keep it.'"
Orr explained that offering simple "hooks" to asset creators help them connect to the process. "You want to get to the higher business level [by explaining] 'Why are you collecting at all?'"
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