Digital Media Assets and Digital Asset Media Management and YOU!

“True genius is knowing where to find the answer.” – Albert Einstein

Imagine the last time you updated a website, blog, facebook feed, or illustrated a research paper. Maybe you’ve watched a documentary that used still images and videos to illustrate a narrative. What digital media elements did you use to update, create, illustrate those different mediums? Digital images? Digital videos? Graphics? Have you ever generated a PDF or Powerpoint presentation that contains text, images, or videos working in concert to illustrate a particular idea? If the answer is all of the above then you are engaged in or working with digital media assets. Hell, even this post requires that I am organized and know where to find media assets to illustrate certain ideas.

What are digital media assets? Why do they have value and relevance in our digital lives? How do they impact how we communicate and learn? In the age of YouTube, Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, et al,  we can quickly see how the proliferation of digital media assets allows us all to tell stories in highly mediated ways, to learn how to do things we did not know how to do, and to participate in a high democratized media-verse regardless of consequence. So again, what are digital assets? From my own experience, a digital asset is any form of digital file that can be engaged with through a computational device (computer or mobile apparatus). Some of the files are videos, others are images, some are a hybrid of text, PDF, Powerpoint presentations, among others. Most importantly, they are the media elements used to illustrate particular ideas and sometimes the ideas/artifacts themselves.

Digital media asset file types by format.

In our readings for the week, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun writes in her essay The Digital Ephemeral  how “the major characteristic of of digital media is memory.” (Chun, pg. 154) She later quotes Vannevar Bush’s article As we May Think stating that “the crucial problem facing scientific progress is access… a record if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.” The idea of access to memory struck a resonant and familiar chord in me. This spurned in my mind the current challenge around how we access and organize our digital media, or memory, here at The New School. In order to understand this better we need to define a few things first. What are digital media assets?

Wikipedia, quoting researcher Albert van Niekerk, defines digital assets as “any item of text or media that has been formatted into a binary source that includes the right to use it. A digital file without the right to use it is not an asset. Digital assets are categorized in three major groups which may be defined as textual content (digital assets), images (media assets) and multimedia (media assets).” This definition is more pertinent to assets that are associated with learning, commonly used within academic coursework, corporate training, and/or online learning spaces. For the purposes of our class and for this discussion I will narrow the focus of digital media assets as any digital file that can be considered a finished work or a part of a finished work. An example would be a PDF or Powerpoint document that contains text, images, sounds, and videos – not only is the PDF a digital asset but so is all the associative media contained with it. The issue of digital rights management is important, and will be considered as a separate part of the digital asset ecology.

To put it more simply, where do you put all the digital stuff you use to make other digital stuff? How do you organize it? What are the implications and impact digital media assets have on your education, your research, and your life? Again, I will return to Albert van Niekark from his abstract A Methodological Approach to Modern Digital Asset Management where he writes

“The essential characteristic of a digital asset is that it is an asset and assets must be managed. The most important characteristic of a business’s (institution’s) DAM solution approach must be an “asset orientated solution”. If a twenty-dollar note is ripped in two, the result is not two ten-dollar notes – it is worthless paper. The same principal is true from a technical point of view for an asset orientated solution which implies security, transparency, flexibility and control which all rely upon the definition of an asset as an organizing principle.”

This allows to arrive to our next question. What is digital asset management?

Digital asset management (DAM), digital repository management (DRM), Digital media management (DMM) implies a value association to our digital file by qualifying them as an asset. We all take time out of our lives to create, curate, organize, design, photograph, film, and collate digital media into something meaningful. What happens if we cannot find what we are looking for when we need it? What happens to the access to that memory? What are the implications of not being able to find the content that provides dimension to our contexts? This tool is such part of our everyday lives that we are not even fully present to it. The magnifying glass in the upper right hand corner of your Apple computer functions like a database search tool turning the entire contents of your Mac into an associative search. One word is entered and your mac immediately starts to organize your search into independent contexts: applications, documents, folders, presentations, pdf documents, images, webpages, music, and other.

Digital asset lifecycle

Quoting from the software company Extensis (who makes the database software Portfolio Server) states that “files are only assets if they can be found and used.” Think about what it takes to search, compile, convert, organize, optimize, and eventually incorporate into any media that one creates. DAM’s allow for the management of different collections for digital media files to become searchable, usable, and convertible into different iterations depending on the context. DAM’s are effective because the assets that are contained within them are optimized with metadata (“data about data”) information like keywords, descriptions, and other file-related information. Once digital media files have a solid metadata schema associated with them, they become usable within appropriate contexts.

“If Content is King, then Context is God.” – Author and CEO of Vayner Media, Gary Vaynerchuk

What gives our content meaning? The technical definition of context is the “circumstances and facts that surround a situation.” Context is the way you are publishing, distributing and promoting your content. If you’re trying to connect in the wrong context, it doesn’t matter how good or bad your content is. It’s not going to be read, shared or discussed. So the inability to make sense of your content deprives your audiences of a richer and more relevant context. To quote Vannevar Bush again, “Presumably man’s spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.” This allows me to arrive to my main idea which is why should The New School organize its digital media assets? What is the value of generating a digital commons that allows everyone on campus to upload, share, organize, distribute, and access their digital media within the context of their pedagogical, promotional, and archival goals?

In 2005, I began working at The New School as a graphic designer. When tasked to find an image to aid in illustrating a particular design, it was next to impossible. The school did not have a system for managing digital content within the communications office. There was an antiquated database, but it had run stagnate due to lack of management. This changed in the summer of 2006 when a colleague and I researched and advocated for the implementation of a digital asset management tool. We settled with a company called Extensis Portfolio. It was costly, but highly effective. This was prior to the proliferation of Cloud technology. Today, in the communications office, I manage a photographic database called the Digital Photo Library using the Portfolio software that is comprised of approximately 155,000 digital photographs: http://portfolio.newschool.edu:8090  The database is only accessible to my colleagues and select faculty on campus, and can only be accessed within the firewall. This is due to the copyright arrangements we have with our photographers, and to the diminish the risk of metadata information within the database becoming compromised. I also developed an API with support from the IT department to allow selected students at Parsons to submit their student work through an online form. The form allowed for the students to fill out their name, contact information, descriptions of their projects, area of study, degree plan, and their personal websites to inject into the digital files as metadata. Most importantly, the form allowed students to give permission for their work to be featured on the Parsons website. Beyond this, to the best of my knowledge, there is no other infrastructure at The New School that hosts student work for any division using this method. If I was able to manage it for a curated set of students at Parsons, then I imagined what infrastructure could be developed to allow all students to share student work? Work that is not just visual, but data driven? What are the implications and possibilities pedagogically and institutionally?

Login portal to the custom photo database with TNS’s communications department.

Web interface with metadata field schema on the right.

I also manage the university’s YouTube, Vimeo, Livestream, and Soundcloud accounts alongside an eight terabyte server that functions as the main area of production for all my video projects. I am often asked to host video content for academic programs, for class lectures, but because I am not a member of the academic side of The New School, I am not allowed to host that kind of content on the YouTube channel. I process and upload public programming to YouTube for different departments across the university,. Much of the content on this channel is important digital media that is a record of the memory of the university. The public programming content that The New School produces is one of the oldest institutional pastimes going as far back as

Martin Luther King Jr. Lecturing on the Race Crisis in America at Tishman, February 6th 1964

Martin Luther King’s participation in the Race Crisis in America at Tishman Auditorium in 1964.

Fortunately, this tape was found, at least, part II was found. Part I, is lost. What does this say about how The New School relates to its cultural memory? What does message does this send to students and staff? From my perspective, it says that The New School does not care. Institutionally, it does not value this content enough to protect it and provide access to it. Currently, the public programming content that I am responsible for resides on the servers at Google within the social media of YouTube. Beyond this, I’ve kept a record of these public program going back to 2009, and I have a separate database going back to 2000 (using Real Player). The problem with this system is that it is not sustainable, and blurs the boundaries of my job role. There is only one other, part-time steward of this video content within the entire school.

I am not a librarian nor am I an member of the faculty fluent in the best practices concerning research. This public programming content is currently not being shared with New School libraries because they do not have the server space to host it. More importantly, they have not been provided with the space to host it and make it more accessible and to protect that content for that time “if they prove important” such as the case with Dr. King. 50 years after his speech on Washington, being able to listen to him speak within the walls of our school, connected me to him as a part of a continuum. Having access to that memory provides context for The New School within the cultural dialogue concerning civil rights over the arc of time. It says that our school made a space for something special to occur. Here are a few selections from our YouTube channel: Occupy Everywhere (a dialogue on Occupy Wall Street), Jeremy Scahill on Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, and Teaching Pronunciation: Seven Essential Concepts. What cultural memory does this content hold for The New School?

Currently, the communications office is one of the only departments with an infrastructure to manage and share assets across working groups. My intention is to advocate for the university to move towards a more centralized digital repository where digital assets are sharable, accessible, and manageable.  In the university strategic plan, technology and infrastructure are key areas identified as requiring major improvement. Article five in the The New School’s strategic plan states “We will improve overall administrative services and operations to be more efficient and user‐focused…” By developing a strategic plan for the management of digital media assets (to host student work, video, images, and other rich media) working in concert with the Canvas learning management system, users throughout The New School will benefit from a user-focused point of access to share their work and contextualize it within their areas of study. The strategic plan continues, “…Administrative structures will be streamlined and reorganized so that they support rather than hinder student and faculty success…Our information technology functions will closely partner with those who run our teaching and research activities…Improve our technology infrastructure to support the global and distributed academic agenda, address student needs and new pedagogies, and improve operations, services and communication.” Digital asset management is an essential part of improving our technology infrastructure because it provides a space to organize our the content that provides context to our educational, promotional, and archival efforts. The consensus is that the issue of digital asset management transcends functional areas, and is a project large enough to be addressed institutionally (similar in scale to the Adobe Creative Cloud initiative).

Digital asset management affects the daily workflow of everyone here now at The New School and will for the foreseeable future. What type of access are student paying for when they study at The New School? What happens to the memory of a class once it is concluded? Blackboard dumps the entire history of the class after 60 days even though students paid for access to that class content. What happens when storage capacities are reached on Canvas? Syllabi incorporates online resources similar to course-packets. What responsibility does The New School have in providing continued access to this content? Why do so many professors at The New School circumvent the LMS tools and post their classes on WordPress blogs? The continued fragmentation of information, media, and educational content is bad for the school and runs contrary to the strategic plan. Thus, I submit the crucial problem facing academic progress at The New School is wider access to our collective memory.

The first working group met on Oct. 23rd. I was tasked with drafting a survey to aid in diagnosis the current state of digital assets.  You can visit the working draft of this survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/tns-dam-survey. Your feedback and participation is welcome.

Read the strategic plan here http://www.newschool.edu/strategic-plan and provide feedback on the comment forum. You can download a PDF of the strategic plan here.

My sketch for a digital repository that works within our existing infrastructure and alongside external infrastructures.