How Analogue Thinking Can Impact The Scalability Of Your DAM

In this article, Leala Abbot writing in the Off The Shelf blog discusses how applying analogue methods to asset cataloguing (where every detail about an asset will attempt to be recorded) can negatively impact archivists productivity and the resulting scalability of the DAM.  Although she is considering preservation and museum archives only, the advice applies equally to commercial DAMs for marketing operations and other business oriented Digital Asset Management solutions (arguably even more so):

“Digital Asset Managers understand that every digital asset we choose comes with a cost (resources it will take to manage, upkeep, file formats, migrations etc), therefore we are extremely judicious with both what we keep (the assets) and how we keep it (the metadata). We have to say “no” when something is just outside the scope of the collection or would involve to much manual metadata entry. Whenever possibly we side with automation as opposed to human processing or cataloging. For example a system that required every time an asset was used a job number to be entered into a metadata field is just not scalable over time. A more sensible approach would be that the ordering system and the DAM talked to one another and populated that field automatically. If that wasn’t possible then the digital asset manager might choose to only record the first order number associated with the asset.” [Read More]

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