DAM For Museums Conference Write Up

Last month, we ran an item about the Digital Asset Management For Museums Conference which was held earlier this week in London (UK) on 27th November.  Ian Matzen, whose Tame Your Assets blog is one of our featured DAM resources, has a summary write up of the event:

“I have experience working for cultural heritage institutions from several years ago (BAVC, San Francisco and KCET, Los Angeles). Much has changed during my time away, however. Digital production tools are no longer novelties; they permeate the entire workflow. As Nick Poole concluded this afternoon, museums have come to see the digital ouptut of these processes as assets. As part of that shift, digital asset management — the process of storing, cataloguing, and retrieving digital files – has become a standard practice.  As part of that shift, digital asset management — the process of storing, cataloguing, and retrieving digital files – has become a standard practice. Here are some of my immediate observations culled from today’s presentations, Q&A sessions, and informal conversation with several attendees.” [Read More]

He has summarised ten key points from the various speakers.  They are all good ones – in fact he’s done a better job at promoting the event than the people organising it (in my opinion).  It’s hard to pick which are the ones that resonate with me the most, but possibly 3,4 and 5 which I have paraphrased below are the most poignant:

• Be prepared for conflict and develop a Change Management strategy for your DAM implementation.
• Manage user expectations. Free online services have given users a false sense of how easy & cheap services are to implement.
• DAM has little to do with technology. DAM is first and foremost about people and processes. Technology comes last.

Ian’s Twitter feed: @ianmatzen has a live commentary about the event, as it happened a few days ago for anyone interested in finding out more.  According to Ian’s blog entry, a longer report will be posted in a few days, so if DAM for museums is an area of interest for you, it’s well worth keeping up to date with what Ian is posting.

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