Panelists at the Digital Asset Management Symposium stress the value of thorough metadata—and the expense of doing it right.Implementation of a digital asset management system is challenging, but with enough care and forethought the investment can pay a rapid return. This was the message from panelists who shared their secrets Monday at the Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management Symposium in New York.
"Disaster recovery is not considered the same as digital asset management," said Steve Kotrch, director of publishing technology at Simon & Schuster, recognizing that some organizations had only seen the value of DAM after the Sept. 11 tragedy.
Kotrch started building his company's system in 1995 from a simple repository of product shots, gradually expanding that system enterprisewide using the Artesia platform. "Metadata for books is not a big deal; workflow is," he said, emphasizing the importance of matching the business case to the appropriate technology.
Abby De Millo, director of technology at Scholastic, echoed the importance of workflow features at her company. She also said that she considered taxonomy a crucial element in an effective DAM launch.
"Library science people are the more valuable people on the face of the earth," in her estimation, she said, because they can help create effective systems of keywords so that users can locate assets efficiently.
Click here to read more about the DAM Symposium.
Pete Peterson, director of Media Management Services at Getty Images, explained the importance of balancing the value of an asset against the cost of digitizing that asset. "If it doesn't have the potential for multiple reuse, it isn't worth" the $10 to $50 per image it can cost to ingest an analog asset into the system, he said.
Getty manages 70 million images, 5 million of which are available online to a user base of over 10,000 people. "Metadata is not free," he cautioned, pointing out the amount of effort and expertise involved in cataloging a large image repository. Unlike most DAM users, Getty relies almost entirely on proprietary systems rather than off-the-shelf offerings.
The case for DAM in a manufacturing company was presented by Manish Mallick, program manager for digital asset management at General Motors, who recalled how GM previously paid service bureaus hundreds of dollars in copying fees each time it wanted access to one of its own images.
After implementing a DAM system in conjunction with Getty Images, the company not only eliminated those costs, it regained control of its own property for use in marketing materials.
The video asset management world was represented by Carin Foreman, director of digital asset management for Discovery Communications Inc., who detailed her company's plans to move its 8,000 hours of video programming to a totally tapeless environment.
Discovery's implementation started small but grew in a "stair step" fashion. The company started by managing video clips, then as users got comfortable it added still images, then added global availability and kept "stepping up" as user demands required.
"Think big but start small" was Foreman's advice when drawing up a road map for DAM implementation. Above all, "don't underestimate metadata and the importance of search," she said, which is essential for creating a DAM system that returns real value to the enterprise.
Web Design 
