DAM And Digital Preservation Webinar – September 9th 2014, 10am PT


DAM Guru are hosting a webinar DAM and Digital Preservation, with Emily Kolvitz as the speaker (who appears in our list of featured resources) on September 9th 2014 at 10am Pacific Time (1pm Eastern Time, 6pm UK & Ireland, 7pm Continental Europe).  The webinar will cover a variety of DAM and digital preservation related subjects:

In this webinar, you will learn concepts of archival theory that easily translate to the practice of Digital Asset Management, in a variety of digital environments including Library, Archive, WIP (Works-in-Progress) DAMs, and assets living in the wild.” [Read More]

There is a useful interview with Emily elsewhere on the DAM Guru site, in particular, her response to the question: “What is your vision for DAM? What will it look like in 5 years?”

I think of current-state DAM as a bucket–a very sophisticated bucket, but the content is what we are all interested in, not the container. People will move to the technology with the least amount of barriers to access and the greatest return on investment. A shift in the way we think about the technologies surrounding DAM, or even the technologies surrounding a very simple problem can often open up new solutions that were not apparent previously. I’ve heard people say things like ‘In the future, maybe assets will describe themselves and we will just be around for a human qc spot check or where a subjective decision is required,’ but that’s not so far-fetched. If the data used to catalogue the assets has already been entered into a disparate system before the asset was created, then you have a situation in which assets can ‘catalogue themselves’ by linking together metadata fields from the original database and the image repository through an automation tool or script.” [Read More]

This is a fair point and it’s a more plausible theory of how automated cataloguing might develop than many of the futurist propaganda theories espoused by some technologists (in DAM and elsewhere) which assume that this will become a problem that the great AI god in the Cloud will solve for them as long as we all just keep making the necessary financial sacrificial offerings.  I still think this is decades away before it becomes anywhere close to practical, but if digital media repositories get to the stage where they are as efficiently organised as other business operations where these concepts are already widely understood, then there is an opportunity to take advantage of that to incrementally reduce the time required to catalogue digital assets by systematically re-using data that has already been generated.

On Emily’s own site, there are a number of her papers which are in-depth and cover some of the subjects discussed in her interview (amongst others).  These are worth reading also and no registration is required to access them.

Share this Article:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *