DIGITAL ARCHIVIST

Laurel A Calsoni

Friday, October 1, 2010

Library Of Congress Reports On Recording Preservation

The Scary Situation Surrounding Our Recording Legacy…

Digital Music News

Thursday, September 30, 2010

The following issues were outlined in a detailed report by the National Recording Preservation Board, part of the Library of Congress.  The report followed a “comprehensive, national-level study of the state of sound recording preservation.”

• Many important recordings have been lost or have become unplayable since the introduction of recorded sound in the late-nineteenth century. Many others are at risk of becoming lost.

• Public institutions, libraries, and archives hold an estimated

46 million recordings, but few institutions know the full extent of their holdings or their physical condition.

• Few institutions have the facilities, playback hardware, and staff resources to preserve recordings.

• Master recordings are now more often in the possession of the original artists than they used to be. Many of these recordings are at risk because they are not being properly stored.

• Many recordings believed to have been made of radio broadcasts are untraceable, and numerous transcription discs of national and local broadcasts have been destroyed. Little is known of what still exists, where it is stored, and in what condition.

• Privileges extended by copyright law to libraries and archives to copy sound recordings are restrictive and anachronistic in the face of current technologies, and create only the narrowest of circumstances in which making copies is fully permissible.

Complete and exhaustive report here.


posted by Laurel Calsoni at 8:10 pm  

Thursday, June 24, 2010

DAM, CMS and Collections Management Systems – What’s the big dif?

From Digital Asset Management digitalassetmanagement.org.ukDAM:
Digital asset management is all about the digital. The focus here is on access and retrieval. These systems fit well into busy production environments.CMS
Specifically web CMS, enables the management of different types of web content. It basically helps users with no technical knowledge to easily create and edit content that is delivered onto the web.

Collections Management Systems:
The Collections Management System manages information about the “object” and associated metadata (COO, CDWA, VRA).

Read full article HERE

posted by Laurel Calsoni at 12:02 am  

Thursday, June 24, 2010

The Importance Of Digital Asset Management For Business

from Digital Asset Management – Covering Your Assets UK

Simply put, Digital Asset Management (DAM) products provide a way to organise your company’s valuable files – your ‘digital assets’ – in a way that makes them quick-to-find and easy to access.
Small to medium enterprises (SMEs) live or die by their data. In an information economy, just about every business owner understands that they can gain a huge advantage over their competitors by handling their business data more effectively than the next guy. Companies are only as good as the data they hold, how quickly and flexibly they can access it to make use of it.

Digital Asset Management is familiar to all of us in some form. We all process digital assets (files), whether as documents sent to us via email, photos from digital cameras, or files from USB keys. In each example, we follow a system of folder structures, labels, hierarchies, etc. These systems allow us to find and manipulate these assets in a predictable way.
But if your files are of significant value to your organisation, number in the thousands, or need to be accessible by co-workers and clients all over the world, you need the power and flexibility of a DAM system. Think of your operating systems as the warehouse where you keep all the crucial data on which your business depends. DAM is your inventory control system, security guard, facility manager and global courier service, all rolled into one.

posted by Laurel Calsoni at 12:02 am  

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Enter The DAM Professional

From Another DAM Blog

Most of us did not go to college nor university knowing we would be working on Digital Asset Management (DAM) today. Many might even say ‘DAM picked me. I did not pick to work on DAM.’ Those of us who are working on DAM come from diverse career backgrounds, which may include:

Archives and records management
Business Management
Design
Education
Engineering
Film
History
Journalism
Library Science
Marketing
Photography
Project Management
Sales
Video
And many other career paths
Is a career in DAM really planned at all? It may be fair to say that at the time of this blog post and according to a recent poll, most people did not plan on a career in DAM, but rather volunteered for it or were volunteered for it. Either way, that is okay. Allow me to explain why…

DAM is a growing field

Growth in DAM means growth in careers which manage information (Has your organization stopped accumulating digital assets? This is not likely to happen anytime soon)

DAM has the ability to measure growth and progress within an organization, which is very lucrative in any business, as long as you know exactly what is being measured

Part of running a DAM can lead to better record keeping and Rights Management which reduces liability within the organization (aka not getting sued for unauthorized use)

There are more and more DAM jobs waiting to be filled

There are not enough DAM professionals available with the needed experience, some even say there is a shortage of qualified individuals

More education about DAM is coming soon to help reduce this shortage and further the knowledge of people who find themselves newly involved in DAM

DAM internship and mentorship programs are being explored in order to share the knowledge and hands-on experience needed

It takes a certain type of individual to work on DAM and not everyone can do this type of work. You may be that person and not realize it. Do not expect overnight change, but rather baby steps of progress

Some organizations are still scratching their heads wondering why there is a low adoption of their systems, while their own people don’t understand how to use them and there is no one to help them internally. As soon as it dawns on them, they will begin seeing the value of a DAM professional who can assist them within their organization whether it is an internal resource who knows their processes (is that you?) and/or an external resource (such as a consultant) if you are not sure where to start or how to move forward in a phased approach. Yes, I will be blogging about the phases of DAM too.

Who will drive the adoption, implementation, operations, support and workflow of the DAM within your organization?

Enter the DAM Professional.

posted by Laurel Calsoni at 12:01 am  

Thursday, June 24, 2010

DAM Market Opportunities, Strategies, Forecasts, 2008-2014

WinterGreen Research announces that it has a new study on digital asset content management markets. Systems are poised for significant growth as the entertainment and media industry adopts digital media technology. The costs of making and distributing film goes way down, video and images are repurposed and reused, different types of entertainment is being developed based on what ordinary people create and watch on UTube. Changes relate to purchase of marketing and Web 2.0 based applications based on XML and integration technologies.

Digital asset content management solutions matter to corporate IT because they are used to manage the ever-increasing volumes of information used by marketing departments dispersed all over the world. Media, video, and Web content needs to conform to mounting regulatory requirements and legislative pressure. Digital asset content management systems are used by marketing departments to provide information in a manner that is responsive to local needs and requests from distributors for material that is highly localized and personalized.

Caching systems are evolving inside repository systems to speed up delivery of information. Alternative delivery systems are creating flexibility for document and content capabilities. The entry of SaaS players and open source players changes the market by giving Web 2.0 market participants strategic advantage.

Protecting a global brand, delivering streaming video to a corporate portal, and making complex images available to promote products and services are done. Managing rich media assets is an essential component of an enterprise content platform. Increasing volumes of rich media assets means companies are struggling to easily find, manipulate and re-purpose rich media content across the enterprise. The digital brand management systems put users in control of rich media assets.

Digital asset content management markets at $203 million in 2007 are anticipated to reach $558.6 million by 2014. Market growth is a direct result of movements to leverage the Internet as a channel, respond to implementation of broadband networks for video and image transmission, create automated marketing systems implementation, and leverage market opportunities brought by the ability to have data sent over portable wireless devices. Disparate changes in the presentation of video and image content promise to drive market growth.

http://www.reportlinker.com/

posted by Laurel Calsoni at 12:00 am  

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Digital Preservation

A compelling lesson for digital asset management via a cartoon on YouTube:
Digital Preservation and Nuclear Disaster: An Animation

posted by Laurel Calsoni at 11:59 pm  

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Digital Archivists, Now in Demand

February 8 2009
New York Times
By CONRAD DE AENLLE

Digital Archivists, Now in Demand

WHEN the world entered the digital age, a great majority of human historical records did not immediately make the trip.

Literature, film, scientific journals, newspapers, court records, corporate documents and other material, accumulated over centuries, needed to be adapted for computer databases. Once there, it had to be arranged — along with newer, born-digital material — in a way that would let people find what they needed and keep finding it well into the future.

The people entrusted to find a place for this wealth of information are known as digital asset managers, or sometimes as digital archivists and digital preservation officers. Whatever they are called, demand for them is expanding.

One of them is Jacob Nadal, the preservation officer at the University of California, Los Angeles. He does not use the “digital” modifier because his duties include safeguarding analog materials in U.C.L.A.’s collection, not just preparing them to cross the digital divide.

“I don’t think there’s any day where I would say I’m the digital guy,” he said. But he concedes that he’s not really an analog, ink-on-paper guy, either, and that is increasingly the case in his field. These days, he noted, “if you want to work in a library, you have to deal in electronic resources.”

Mr. Nadal and 10 or so colleagues at U.C.L.A. devote much of their effort to organizing and protecting material in digital form. Their duties include licensing and buying digital content from vendors, assigning identification markers called meta-tags so that material can be found easily, researching copyright matters and ensuring that files remain intact whenever new iterations of relevant software or hardware come along.

Befitting a nascent discipline like digital asset management, Mr. Nadal, 32, said he went into it almost by accident. Unsure of his career ambitions, he began work on various book-scanning and preservation projects as a student at Indiana University, then took them over when the head of preservation left. After that, he said, it “took a year or two for me to realize my career in preservation had started a year or two past.”

He reckons that many of his peers have had similar experiences. “Among librarians, I think that happenstance may be a typical career path,” he said.

Some backgrounds are considered better than others for budding digital asset managers. Familiarity with information technology is necessary, but it is possible to have too much tech know-how, said Victoria McCargar, a preservation consultant in Los Angeles and a lecturer at U.C.L.A. and San José State University.

“People with I.T. backgrounds tend to be wrong for the job,” she said. “They tend to focus on storage solutions: ‘We’ll just throw another 10 terabytes on that server.’” A result, she said, can be “waxy buildup” — a lot of useless files that make it hard to find the good stuff.

Ms. McCargar estimates that 20,000 people work in the field today — plus others in related areas — and she expects that to triple over the next decade, assuming that economic conditions stabilize before long.

Many work for public institutions, and businesses use them, too, said Deborah Schwarz, chief executive of Library Associates Companies, a consulting and headhunting firm. Especially big employers in this area are law firms, which need experts on digital copyright and other issues tied to the migration of legal documents from filing cabinets to databases.

One comparative advantage of private-sector jobs is the pay. Digital asset managers at public facilities would do well to make $70,000 a year. Salaries for their corporate counterparts are generally higher.

“Compensation varies wildly because it’s an emerging area,” said Keith Gurtzweiler, vice president for recruiting at Library Associates. “Consultants who can make recommendations on systems can make $150 an hour.” Those who “manage them once they’re up and running and maintain the machinery,” he said, make from the $70,000’s up to $100,000.

Michael Doane is an information management consultant at Ascentium, a consultancy in suburban Seattle that employs 100 to 150 digital asset managers in a staff of 500. He said that fresh graduates with master’s degrees in information systems management or a similar discipline could “easily expect $80,000 to $90,000 in consulting and a little less in the commercial world.”

As much as it might help his bank balance, Mr. Nadal cannot envision leaving U.C.L.A. for a corporate job. He finds the challenge of taming a vast collection of information for a major academic institution too appealing.

“We belong to the people of California and hold our collections in trust for them and for future generations of students, scholars and members of the public,” he said. “Public-sector institutions just strike me as far, far cooler. They have better collections, obviously, and they are innovative, connected and challenging in ways that seem more substantial to me.”

posted by Laurel Calsoni at 11:58 pm  
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