It’s been a week packed with info sessions, as last week not only brought together moving image archivists from all over North America at the AMIA conference, but also featured a smaller scale workshop in the Metropolitan New York Area. 55 archivists from various domains gathered at NYU for the NY Archivist’s Round Table on Digital Asset Management. A topic that’s not merely talk of the town, but an issue that every institution actively has to find its way around with these days. Here at WITNESS we have day-to-day discussions on how to exactly fit each piece of incoming or outgoing information in the data puzzle of digital extraction and cataloging, so it was more than helpful to take a look at the struggles and solutions neighboring institutions came up against.
Managing your institution’s resources through digital assets is what it’s all about, reminded us Leala Abbott, who opened with a brief introduction on where to start if you want to implement a D.A.M. system. Her golden rules were: standardize your metadata, do not home build and always, always, always think of the end user you’re setting it all up for. Rules that seem very logical, but can get lost in the process of arguing about file naming discussions and the likes.
Continues @ http://archive.witness.org