The Incredible Value of DAM for GLAM

This article has been kindly contributed by Yvan Cohen, Co-Founder of LightRocket Enterprise, as part of our series on DAM within GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums).

 

Reflecting on the value of a DAM system, it’s easy to get caught up in the details: in the relevance and value of this or that feature, or the details of specific workflows, in niggling questions of governance and in a confusing blizzard of speculation as to where the industry might be heading.

My advice is to slow down, take a deep breath, zoom out for a moment. Take a look at the bigger picture.

Why is digital asset management so valuable? Why is the sector enjoying such robust growth? What are we doing this for? Before you start thinking I’m going weird on you, don’t worry I’m not going ask what the meaning of life is. Well, not quite, not yet J.

Beneath DAM’s nebulous jargon and slick marketing, there lies a profound bedrock of value and meaning that is often taken for granted, and sometimes overlooked (especially by organisations that don’t yet have a DAM). That value resides in a DAM system’s vocation to both preserve and release the value of archives.

Of course, DAM professionals know that in good DAM practice these two elements are inseparable.

Just as we understand that to preserve an archive is relatively easy; we also know that the hard part, the part you really need a great DAM system for, is all about releasing value – which we also know is a lot more complicated than it sounds.

To be clear, my focus here is admittedly traditional (in DAM terms). We’re not talking templates and artwork for splashy advertising campaigns. I’m talking about ‘good old’ reliable DAM for GLAM – galleries, libraries, archives and museums.

Viewed in this context, digital asset management feels part service and part serious mission. For GLAM clients, the DAM mission is about creating connections with and between elements of data and, more broadly, about opening up previously inaccessible archives from which we can learn so much.

Allow me a moment to wax philosophical again. I’m a photographer who got into media management a couple of decades ago. At that time, I didn’t know exactly where our fledgling business was heading, nor where we would end up.

What I did understand, and what I still value greatly today, is the importance of maintaining a bridge between the past and the present. In our digital world, that bridge is necessarily composed of the data – the digital assets – that we DAM professionals (and our systems) manage for galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM).

Why is this connection so important? Because our ability to access and learn about the past (even the very recent past – like yesterday or last week), gives us the intellectual tools to better understand the present, which in turn helps us chart a path into the future.

In short, if we can’t access and understand history, we have no means of anchoring ourselves in the present. It may be a threadbare cliché to say we should learn the lessons of history, and yet it is as vital a truth today as it ever was.

In short, DAMs for GLAM have become the repository of our collective memory and, to take it a step further, of our identity.

Wow! I bet you never knew that a DAM system could be so meaningful, so profound, so essentially valuable.

The beating heart of a DAM for GLAMs is tagging and search – a truth that probably stands for almost any DAM, but is particularly central to clients who are focused on making valuable historic archives accessible to a broader audience.

The foundations of accurate search results are laid through the creation of hierarchies of terms that allow files to be comprehensively tagged, without blurring results through unrelated and irrelevant terms.

We’re all aflutter at the potential of AI tagging, and value there surely is in automated AI tagging. And yet, a machine is still unable to determine the relative meaning and relevance of the content it analyses. It doesn’t necessarily know which parts of a caption should trigger the addition of which tags. These are skills (and they are skills) that human beings need to learn and apply. So, yes, in the ‘traditional’ DAM for GLAM world, tagging is typically still very manual and very specialized.

There is, as yet, no short cut to a properly tagged efficiently searchable archive. You have to put in the hard yards. Specialized tagging staff need to look at each asset and then decide which relevant tags to apply.

If the DAM system is the enabler, if the bells and whistles we include in our software tools smooth the way, the central pillars of DAM for GLAM remain simple and unchanged: a reliable DAM puts your archive somewhere safe, in a place where authorized users can easily access it, organized in such a way that those same users can find the exact asset they need when they need it. An efficient DAM simplifies complex workflows while delivering the data needed to understand how your archives are being used while helping you chart a strategic course towards innovation and improvements for the future.

 

About Yvan Cohen

Yvan Cohen, Co-Founder of LightRocket Enterprise, has spent the past two decades immersed in the challenges and realities of digital asset management. As a professional photojournalist, Yvan has used his decades of media experience to help shape LightRocket’s DAM platform; focusing on collaboration, intuitive workflows and continuous innovation.

You can connect with Yvan via his LinkedIn Profile.

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