DAM Right Podcast

The Operational Model for DAM Success

Welcome to a comprehensive exploration of the Operational Model for Digital Asset Management (DAM) success, crafted by Kara Van Malssen, Managing Director at AVP. This model serves as a vital toolkit for organizations venturing into the complex world of digital asset management. It’s essential for understanding the multi-faceted nature of DAM, which extends beyond technology to encompass various critical factors that contribute to success.

Understanding the Operational Model

The Operational Model for DAM success is not merely a theoretical framework; it is a practical guide based on years of experience across diverse industries. The model illustrates the essential capabilities necessary for effective digital asset management. While many might seek a straightforward plug-and-play solution, the reality is that successful DAM requires thoughtful planning and execution.

At its core, this model serves two primary purposes: first, as a guide for organizations starting their DAM journey, and second, as a tool for evaluating existing DAM operations to identify gaps and areas for improvement. The model emphasizes that every organization, regardless of size or asset collection, can benefit from its principles.

Who Can Benefit from the Model?

This operational model is designed for any organization managing digital assets, regardless of its scale. While larger organizations with extensive asset collections may find the model particularly relevant, smaller organizations with significant digital assets can also leverage it for effective management. The guiding principle is that the need for organized and scalable asset management transcends the size of the organization.

The Importance of Purpose

A unique aspect of this model is its emphasis on purpose. The purpose acts as the foundation upon which all other elements are built. Organizations must clarify why they are implementing a DAM system—whether for cost savings, efficiency, risk reduction, or another goal. Understanding this purpose enables organizations to prioritize their efforts and allocate resources effectively.

The model encourages organizations to ask critical questions: Who will benefit from the DAM? How will they use it? What assets are needed? By addressing these questions, organizations can create a tailored DAM solution that meets the needs of its users.

Engaging User Groups

People play a pivotal role in the success of any DAM initiative. The model identifies three key user groups that must be engaged throughout the process:

• End Users: These individuals utilize the digital assets. Understanding their needs and preferences is crucial for designing an effective DAM solution.
• Contributors: These are the individuals responsible for uploading and submitting content to the DAM. Ensuring their workflows are efficient is essential for timely asset management.
• Administrators: This group is responsible for maintaining the DAM system. They handle quality control, configuration, and governance, ensuring that the system operates smoothly.

Engaging these groups through direct feedback and collaboration is vital. Organizations should not make assumptions about users’ needs; instead, they should involve users in the development and scaling of the DAM solution.

The Role of Governance

Robust governance is another cornerstone of the Operational Model. Effective governance encompasses decision-making, roles and responsibilities, policies, and standards. Without clear governance structures, organizations may face challenges such as stalled decision-making and unclear responsibilities, leading to inefficiencies.

Robust governance ensures that assets are managed effectively, quality is maintained, and the system continues to evolve. Organizations that excel in governance often exhibit smooth operations, high-quality data, and satisfied users.

Technology: Configuration and Integration

When it comes to technology, many organizations mistakenly view the selection of a DAM system as the end of the journey. In reality, successful implementation requires careful configuration and integration. After selecting a system, organizations must delve deeper into aspects such as metadata models, permissions management, and necessary integrations with other tools.

This phase involves prioritizing key integrations and incrementally building out the solution. Engaging users during this process ensures that the system meets their needs and enhances their experience.

The Importance of Process

Documenting processes is critical for maintaining the quality and value of the DAM system over time. Effective processes ensure that assets are managed consistently and efficiently. This includes creating guidelines for data entry, asset tagging, and user access.

Furthermore, good process documentation facilitates scalability. As organizations expand their DAM systems, having clear documentation helps onboard new users and maintain continuity even when personnel change.

Measurement: Evaluating Success

Measurement is essential for determining the effectiveness of a DAM system. Organizations must establish metrics to assess both quantitative data—such as asset usage—and qualitative feedback from users regarding their satisfaction with the system. This dual approach allows organizations to track progress, celebrate successes, and identify areas for improvement.

Fostering a Collaborative Culture

Culture plays a vital role in the success of a DAM initiative. A shift from viewing data as individual assets to shared organizational resources fosters collaboration and ownership. Organizations should strive to create a culture that values digital asset management and encourages cross-departmental cooperation.

This cultural shift can be supported by aligning DAM goals with broader organizational objectives, which helps ensure that the DAM system contributes to overall success.

Conclusion: Time for DAM Success

Implementing a successful DAM program requires a holistic approach that encompasses purpose, people, governance, technology, process, measurement, and culture. The Operational Model for DAM success provides a roadmap for organizations to navigate this complex landscape effectively.

By embracing this model, organizations can enhance their digital asset management practices, ensuring they deliver ongoing value and meet the evolving needs of their users. Whether you are just beginning your DAM journey or looking to refine an existing program, this model offers the insights and strategies necessary for achieving success in digital asset management.

5 Warning Signs Your DAM Project is at Risk

In the world of Digital Asset Management (DAM), recognizing early warning signs can mean the difference between success and failure. Chris Lacinak, founder and CEO of AVP, shares valuable insights from his extensive experience in the field. Here are the five key warning signs that indicate your DAM project may be at risk.

No Internal Champion

The absence of an internal champion can jeopardize your DAM project. This champion should possess the necessary expertise and experience to guide the initiative effectively. Pragmatically, it might sound like relying too heavily on external consultants or team members thinking they can manage without a dedicated point person. This reliance signals a potential failure in project management.

So, what does an effective internal champion look like? They need to:

• Have a solid understanding of the domain.
• Dedicate time solely to this project.
• Maintain the knowledge and context after external parties depart.

Having someone who can coordinate resources and make informed decisions is crucial for the sustainability and success of the project.

Insufficient Organizational Buy-In

Lack of organizational buy-in is another critical warning sign. If key stakeholders, especially leadership, do not understand the DAM initiative or fail to see its significance, the project is likely to struggle. This might manifest as leadership not being involved or departments feeling excluded from the process.

To foster buy-in, it’s vital to establish executive sponsorship early on. This sponsorship can come from various levels, including directors or C-level executives, who can advocate for the project and ensure it aligns with the organization’s strategic vision. Engaging with key stakeholders will help ensure they feel heard and included in the process, reducing potential pushback during implementation.

Inability to Articulate Pain Points

Another red flag is the inability to clearly articulate pain points. Statements like “we’re just a mess” or “we need a new DAM” indicate a lack of understanding of specific challenges. It’s essential to identify precise pain points to effectively address them.

Using the “Five Whys” technique can help drill down to the root of the problem. For instance, if a team is losing money, asking why repeatedly can reveal that the core issue might be difficulty in finding digital assets, leading to unnecessary recreations. This approach emphasizes that pain points are human problems, not just technological ones, and should be treated as such.

Unclear Definition of Success

Not knowing what success looks like or what the impact of solving the problem would be can lead to project derailment. If stakeholders cannot envision the outcome of a successful DAM implementation, it suggests a lack of direction and clarity.

To establish a strong business case, it’s crucial to articulate what success entails. Consider questions like:

• What will you be able to do that you couldn’t do before?
• What improvements will you see in workflows or team morale?
• How will this align with the organization’s strategic goals?

A well-defined vision of success helps secure leadership buy-in and provides a roadmap for measuring progress.

Skipping Critical Steps in the Process

Finally, wanting to skip critical steps or prematurely determining solutions can be detrimental. Statements like “we did discovery a couple of years ago” or “we just need a new DAM” indicate a lack of thoroughness in the planning process.

Discovery is essential for gathering updated information and engaging stakeholders. If stakeholders feel involved in the process, they are more likely to support the initiative and its outcomes. Rushing through this phase can lead to poor decisions and wasted resources, ultimately putting the project’s success at risk.

Conclusion

Identifying these five warning signs early on can help mitigate risks associated with your DAM project. Establishing an internal champion, ensuring organizational buy-in, articulating pain points, defining success, and taking the time to conduct thorough discovery are all critical steps toward a successful DAM implementation. By addressing these areas proactively, you can set your project up for success and avoid common pitfalls.

If you found this information helpful or have further questions, feel free to reach out to Chris Lacinak at AVP for more insights into managing your DAM projects effectively.

Transcript

Chris Lacinak: 00:00

Hey, y’all, Chris Lacinak here.

If you’re a listener on the podcast, you know me as the host of the DAM Right Podcast.

You may not know me as the Founder and CEO of digital asset management consulting firm, AVP.I founded the company back in: 2006

And I have learned what the early indicators are that are likely to make a project successful or a failure.

And I’m gonna share with you today five warning signs that your project is at risk.

So let’s jump in.

Number one, there is no internal champion to see things through, or there’s an over-reliance on external parties.

Now, what’s that sound like pragmatically?

That sounds like, “that’s why we’re hiring a consultant”, or “between the three of us, I think we should be able to stay on top of things.”

You might think it’s funny that myself as a consultant is telling you that you should not have an over-reliance on external parties, but the truth of the matter is, is that if you are over-reliant on us, and you are dependent on us, we have failed to do our job.Chris Lacinak: 01:06

That is a sign of failure.

But let’s talk about the champion.

What’s the champion look like?

Well, first and foremost, it’s someone who has the right expertise and experience.

We wanna set this person up for success.

They need to have an understanding of the domain.

They don’t have to be the most expert person, but they need to understand, they need to be conversant, they need to understand the players, the parts, how things work.

They need to be knowledgeable enough that they’re able to do the job.

Second, they need to have the time.

This can’t be, you know, one of ten things that this person is doing, part of their job.

It needs to be dedicated.

And it can’t be something that’s shared across three, four, five people.

That’s not gonna work either.

Things will slip through the cracks.

Now, why is this important?

Well, it’s important because it mitigates the reliance on external parties, as I’ve already said.

But what’s the other significance?

The other significance is that once the consultant leaves, or once the main project team is done doing what they’re doing, whether that’s an internal project team or external project team, this person is gonna be the point person that is going to maintain the knowledge, the history, the context of the project.Chris Lacinak: 02:14

They’re gonna have an understanding of what the strategy, what the roadmap is, what the plan is, and they’re gonna help execute that.

They’re gonna be the point person for coordinating the various resources, the people.

And, you know, it’s gonna depend what this position looks like as to what authority they have, what budget control they have, things like that, about exactly what it looks like.

But more or less, this person is either gonna be, you know, the main point of recommendations and influence, or they might even be the budget holder and actually be making the calls and decisions.

But one way or another, you need somebody that is gonna see this through, that’s internal to your organization in order for it to be sustainable and for it to succeed.

Number two, not enough organizational buy-in or poor socialization.

What’s that sound like in practice?

Well, it might sound like “leadership doesn’t understand, they just don’t get it.”

Or “there’s issues with that department that we don’t need to go into here, but we don’t need to include them.

They’ll have to fall into place once we do this.”

Or “we haven’t talked with folks about this yet, but we know it’s a problem that needs to be fixed.

It’s obvious.”Chris Lacinak: 03:14

Those are all signs that there’s poor socialization and that you haven’t gotten the appropriate buy-in from the organizational key stakeholders.

Now, who are the key stakeholders?

Well, let’s start with executive sponsorship.

It’s critically important that there’s an executive sponsor.

Now, executive can mean a number of things.

It could be director level, it could be C-level.

Essentially, it’s someone who is making decisions, is a key part of fulfilling strategy for the organization, the department, the business unit, has budget and is making budget calls.

So why is this important and how do you respond to this?

Well, it’s important because executive sponsorship is looking out for the vision, the strategy, the mission, and the budget of the organizational unit.Chris Lacinak: 03:59

You can’t be sneaky and successfully slip a DAM into an organization, right?

There’s no such thing as a contraband dam.

It’s not like that bag of chips you sneak into the grocery cart when your significant other is looking the other way.

It’s an operation, it’s a program.

It requires executive sponsorship.

It requires budget.

It requires a tie-in into the strategy, the vision, and the mission.

It’s not a bag of chips.

It’s all that and a bag of chips.

Who are the other key stakeholders?

Well, your key stakeholders are gonna be the other people that are either contributors, users, or supporters of the DAM in some way.

‘Cause it is an operation.

A dam has implications to workflows, to policies, to behaviors.

It touches so many different parts of the organization.

So it’s critically important that your key stakeholders are included as early on in the process so that they feel heard, they feel included, they feel represented.

And when it’s time to roll out that DAM, you don’t have people going and looking backwards, right?Chris Lacinak: 04:57

Everybody has an understanding of where you are, why you’ve arrived there, and how you’re moving forward.

And even if they don’t agree, they understand and they’re on board.

And you want concerns and objections.

You want those, as I said, not at the point at which you’re trying to do the thing, but you want it early on.

You wanna be able to respond to those.

You wanna be able to address them.

You hope they come out as early as possible so that you can build allies and trust as early on in the process as possible.

Now, do not confuse this with getting consensus and doing everything by consensus.

That is not what I mean.

And in fact, that could stand on its own as a major warning of potential failure here.

So doing everything by consensus is a huge downfall.

Do not go that route.

You want a robust, diligent system and a process for planning and executing the project that uses and addresses feedback of people along the way, but not one that requires everybody to agree on something.Chris Lacinak: 06:01

And not one where everybody’s wants and wishes are treated equally, right?

That’s just not how organizations work.

If you do that, you’re gonna end up with a system that makes nobody happy ’cause you’re not doing anything particularly well.

So it’s a setup for failure.

So do not do that.

And you might think, well, if I don’t give people what they want, if I tell people no, if we say their issue is a priority three instead of a priority one, they’re gonna object to the system or the program.

And that’s not true.

Actually, what people want, they wanna feel heard, right?

They wanna be able to raise their concerns, their objections, their wishes.

Then they wanna know that you hear them.

They want to understand why whoever’s making the decisions are making the decisions the way they are.

So if their issue or their wish or their request is number three instead of number one, people can live with that.Chris Lacinak: 07:02

If they understand why you’ve made that decision, you’ve addressed it, it’s transparent, and it serves the greater mission, vision, or purpose of what you’re trying to do.

So that is critical.

You need to lay out that mission, vision, purpose early on.

And again, if you look at our DAM operational model, that is at the center of the operational model.

Once you have people on board with that, then you can start to get people to organize around that.

And even if they don’t get everything they want, they’re willing to be on board and be a productive member of obtaining that greater goal.

Number three, unable to clearly articulate the pain points.

So what’s that sound like in practice?

Well, it sounds like something like, “we’re just a mess.

My friend works at such and such organization, they have their act together, we need to be like them.”

Or “we definitely just need a new DAM.

Jerry was in charge of getting the one we have now and nobody likes Jerry.”Chris Lacinak: 08:01

So that’s not often a good place to start.

You know, well, and maybe you do start there.

It’s not a good place to end.

You don’t act off of that point.

That begs more questions.

And here’s what I’ll say, you know, and I’ve been, I’m a buyer of services where I’m not an expert.

So there are things that I know I don’t know.

And I might have trouble talking to, you know, a service provider for me, not understanding what the landscape of service offerings are or exactly what I need, right?

You don’t need to know what you need or what the solution is.

It’s okay that you don’t know what you don’t know.

That’s not the problem.

That’s something where you can get, you know, the service provider that I’m talking to, or if you’re talking to AVP, we can guide you on that.

We will get enough context and understanding to be able to guide you on that.Chris Lacinak: 09:02

What we need to know is what your pain points are.

So imagine going to the doctor, you have a hurt knee and maybe that hurt knee has you worried.

So your stomach’s upset with worry and you’re feeling down in the dumps because you’re not feeling well.

You need to be able to articulate the relevant pain points to the doctor, right?

You can’t just go in and say, “Oh, I feel awful.”

“Well, what’s wrong?”

“Everything.”

No, that’s not gonna help anybody.

You need to be able to say at least my knee is hurting.

That’s the main problem.

If there’s information and context on what caused that, that’s great and useful.

You know, “I had a fall.”

“I twisted it when I was on the trail”, whatever the case may be.

That might be helpful information, but you don’t need to know why your knee hurts and you don’t need to know what the solution is.

You just need to be able to point the doctor in the right direction of where the pain is.

Similarly with DAMS, right?

So let me give you a tip for identifying pain points.

I talked about, I gave those examples of what it sounds like up front.

And I said, you know, that might be an okay place to start.

I mean, it might be.Chris Lacinak: 10:01

Sometimes you’re just frustrated, you’re overwhelmed, right?

And that’s the thing that comes out.

But that’s not the place you end.

So there’s something called the five whys.

It comes out of a root cause analysis that I think can be really useful here.

And I’ll give you as a tool to use for kind of drilling down on what the pain points are.

So let’s give an example.

Let’s state a problem.

And then you ask why five times to get down to the core of the problem.

So let’s say we start at, “we’re just a mess.”

Well, why?

“Well, we’re losing money.”

Why is that?

“Because we keep missing deadlines and going over budget on production expenses.”

Well, why is that?

“Well, because people continuously have to recreate assets that we’ve already created in the past, and that just takes more time and more money.”

Well, why is that?

“Because people can’t find what they’re looking for.

They have to recreate it.

Or maybe it’s lost and we have to recreate it.”

Well, why?

“Well, because when they search for things using the terms that are meaningful to them, they don’t get the right results.Chris Lacinak: 11:00

They don’t get the things they are looking for.

And it takes too much time and it’s too hard.”

Now that is extremely useful, right?

That’s where we get down to the pain points.

People can’t find what they’re looking for.

That gives us something to work with.

And remember here too, you put humans first.

Pain points are not technology problems, they’re human problems.

And we’re aiming to solve human problems.

Now, technology has a role to play in solving these problems, but technology problems are not what we’re aiming to solve.

The problem is not that you don’t have a DAM.

The problem is that the digital assets can’t be found easily.

Digital assets are being lost and recreated.

Licensed content is being misused.

Brand guidelines are being violated.

All of these things cause pain to people in the way of time, money, frustration, excellence, et cetera.

So one solution to this may be a DAM technology, but there’s more to it than just that.

And again, I’m gonna point you to the DAM Op model.

Number four, you’re unable to understand what success looks like or what the impact of solving the problem would be.Chris Lacinak: 12:01

And that sounds like, (crickets chirping) crickets.

I always like to ask, if you could solve all of these pain points and problems, and if this project is a total success, imagine, what does it look like?

What are you able to do that you couldn’t do before?

What do you have that you didn’t have before?

And this ties back to pain points ultimately, and you put them together to make what’s called a business case.

And while it’s always a great idea for a business case to get down to dollars, it doesn’t have to.

So don’t be distracted by the money.

Let’s go for the money, that’s important, and I’ll talk about why.

But don’t be distracted by that.

Let’s talk about the other things too, ’cause there are qualitative factors that are meaningful and important as well.

For instance, you might say, “if we could solve the search problem, we’d be able to come in on or under deadline and budget.

The team would have a much better work experience, people would feel happier, less frustrated.

The CEO or executive director would be ecstatic because we’d be able to support three of their five key strategies over the next year.

We’d be able to reduce storage costs by 200%.Chris Lacinak: 13:01

We could cut the legal budget for license fee violations by 90%”, right?

And I’m gonna link to a business case post and slide deck template that we have for you to help you there.

And I’m gonna encourage you to go and check that out.

But the point here is that you need to be able to articulate what success looks like.

And tied into the vision and strategies of the organization and leadership, that puts so much wind in the sail of your DAM project.

Less pain is one thing, but more joy is even better.

If you don’t have a strong business case and you can’t speak to what success looks like or what the impact will be, I’m gonna say it’s unlikely that you truly have the buy-in of leadership.

Or that there’s even a sustainable path forward that is at least clear today.

Why?

Well, because leadership, whether it’s at a Fortune 500 or a nonprofit or higher ed institution, prioritizes where they spend their resources based on how well it supports their vision, strategies and mission.Chris Lacinak: 14:04

If you can’t convince them and demonstrate how your DAM project will do that, then you’re not going to get anything more than play money.

What do I mean by play money?

It’s something that keeps you busy and out of their hair while they go about realizing their vision, strategy and mission.

It’s not a sustaining revenue source.

It’s not a sustaining funding source, I should say, in order to support a DAM project and program.

Also, if you don’t know what you’re aiming for, how can you measure, track, report, prove, and improve?

In order to keep the attention of leadership, you need to be able to consistently demonstrate the value of the DAM program.

And aside from leadership, it also creates direction orientation for the organization.

Number five, wanting to skip critical steps or predetermining that you need something you don’t.

What’s this sound like in practice?

It might sound like, “We did discovery a couple of years ago.

We’ll use that so we can do this faster or cheaper.”

Or, “We know we just need a new DAM.

Let’s just focus on that.”Chris Lacinak: 15:03

Or it might sound like, “We’re just a mess.

My friend works at such and such organization and they have Acme DAM and it works great.

And nobody likes our DAM vendor anyway.

We just need a new DAM.”

Well, let’s start with the discovery part.

So the reality is that discovery serves multiple purposes.

One purpose is information, right?

And in six months or twelve months or two years, things change and can change dramatically.

So for just informational purposes, you’re setting the foundation up here for your strategy, your plan, your implementation, whatever it is, you don’t wanna take a risk on getting that wrong.

Make sure that your information is up to date, it’s accurate, it’s robust, right?

I wouldn’t use information from six months ago or two years ago as a stand-in for today for that reason.

But discovery serves other purposes.

Discovery gets stakeholders, key stakeholders specifically, sitting down at the table and engaging.Chris Lacinak: 16:07

That’s critically important for change management, for buy-in.

Earlier, we talked about getting those objections and concerns out on the table as early as possible.

It does that.

It gets people talking, people feel included, they feel part of the process.

It greatly increases from a human and organizational perspective, the success probability.

So you wanna get people down and engaging in this process early on.

The other funny thing about this is that someone is coming, when they’ve predetermined, we just need a new DAM.

Someone’s coming to an expert that they have sought out, seeking their expertise and their experience.

And they are, in that regard, they have acknowledged that they don’t have the appropriate expertise and experience.

On the other hand, they are sure that they know best, better than the person’s expertise and experience that they’ve sought out.Chris Lacinak: 17:02

So let’s start with, “we’re just a mess.

My friend works at such and such organization and they have Acme DAM.”

They might go on to say, “we know we need Acme DAM and we just need you to convince procurement that we need Acme DAM and get them to get it for us.”

This is like going to your doctor with a hurt knee and saying, “my friend got a knee replacement and it did them wonders.

I know I just need a knee replacement and I need you to convince the insurance company to pay for it.”

Now, it’s possible you need a knee replacement, just like it’s possible that this organization needs a new DAM.

And it’s within the realm of possibility that this organization would benefit from Acme DAM and you would benefit from a new knee.

But if that doctor says, “okay, let’s look at the surgery schedule, how’s noon today work?”

You should run.

Well, maybe don’t run.

You do have a hurt knee after all, walk briskly out of there and don’t go back.

Similarly, if a consultant says, “okay, let’s get to work on getting you that Acme DAM” after that conversation, you should run, which is okay in this scenario because you don’t have a hurt knee as far as I know.Chris Lacinak: 18:03

The real deal is that there are lots of reasons that DAM operations and programs don’t work.

That experienced doctor is gonna look at your gait, at how you hold your body, ask questions about your activities, look at whether it’s a bone or a tendon issue, et cetera.

They’re gonna look systematically and holistically before making a judgment call in the best course of action.

And that’s exactly what you or your DAM consultant should do in this scenario in order to stand the best chance of getting to success in the fastest and most cost-effective manner.

Because the disaster scenario is that you get the new knee or you get the new DAM and not only does it not make things better, but it makes them worse.

In the knee situation, you’ve only hurt yourself.

It’s still unfortunate, but you’ve only hurt yourself.

In the DAM scenario, you’ve likely wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars.

You stand to lose more.

You’ve lost trust.

You’ve hurt morale.

You’ve possibly put your job at risk.

So there’s a lot to lose.

And I’m gonna link to a blog that we wrote about the cost of getting it wrong, just so that you can understand a little bit better why you don’t wanna go that route.Chris Lacinak: 19:02

So those are the five warning signs that your DAM project is at risk.

I hope that you have found this extremely helpful.

Please email me at [email protected].

Leave comments, like, and subscribe.

Let me know how you liked it.

And let me know if you’d like to see more content like this or hear more content like this.

Thanks for joining me today.

Look forward to seeing you at the next DAM Right Podcast.

Selecting the Perfect DAM for Your Organization

Choosing the right Digital Asset Management (DAM) system can feel overwhelming, especially with the myriad of options and the complexities involved in the selection process. If you’re like many organizations, you may find yourself questioning your choices, feeling uncertain about your requirements, or unsure of how to navigate the procurement landscape. This guide dives deep into the essential steps and considerations for selecting the ideal DAM system for your organization.

Understanding Your Needs

The first step in selecting a DAM solution is understanding your organization’s specific needs. This process involves more than just listing features; it requires a comprehensive assessment of your current assets, workflows, and user requirements.

• Stakeholder Engagement: Engage with different teams to gather insights about their needs and pain points. This ensures that the selected system will cater to the diverse requirements of all users.
• Discovery Process: Conduct interviews and surveys to identify what users expect from the DAM system. This step is crucial as it uncovers needs that might not be immediately obvious.
• Documentation: Document all findings in a clear manner. This will serve as a reference throughout the selection process.

The Importance of a Structured RFP Process

A well-structured Request for Proposal (RFP) is vital in the DAM selection process. It not only communicates your needs to potential vendors but also sets the tone for how they will respond.

• Clarity in Requirements: Clearly outline your requirements using user stories or scenarios. This helps vendors understand the context behind your needs.
• Prioritization: Prioritize your requirements into mandatory, preferred, and nice-to-have categories. This helps vendors focus on what’s most important to your organization.
• Engagement: Allow stakeholders to participate in the RFP process. Their involvement increases the likelihood of buy-in and adoption later on.

Common Pitfalls in DAM Selection

Many organizations fall into common traps when selecting a DAM system. Avoiding these pitfalls can save you time and money.

• Ignoring User Needs: Skipping the discovery process can lead to selecting a system that does not meet the actual needs of users.
• Over-Reliance on Recommendations: Choosing a system based solely on a colleague’s recommendation can be misleading. What works for one organization may not work for another.
• Underestimating Costs: Focusing only on the initial purchase price without considering implementation, training, and ongoing costs can lead to budget overruns.

Evaluating Vendor Responses

Once you’ve sent out your RFP, the next step is to evaluate the responses from vendors. This involves more than just looking at prices; it requires a thorough analysis of how each vendor meets your specific needs.

• Scoring System: Develop a scoring system to compare vendor responses based on how well they meet your requirements. This allows for an apples-to-apples comparison.
• Demos: Schedule vendor demos focused on your specific use cases. This helps you see how the system performs in real-world scenarios relevant to your organization.
• Qualitative Feedback: Collect feedback from stakeholders who attend the demos to gauge their impressions and preferences.

Understanding Customization and Configuration

Many organizations grapple with the concepts of customization and configuration during the DAM selection process. Understanding the difference is crucial.

• Configuration: This involves setting up the system using available features without altering the underlying code. It’s generally easier and cheaper to implement.
• Customization: This entails modifying the software to meet specific needs, which can be more complex and costly. Be sure to inquire about the implications of customization during vendor discussions.

Managing the Implementation Timeline

Timing is everything in the DAM selection process. Many organizations underestimate how long it takes to select and implement a new system.

• Anticipate Delays: Factor in time for vendor responses, stakeholder feedback, and potential procurement delays.
• Implementation Timeline: A typical DAM selection process can take several months, so start early to avoid rushed decisions.
• Post-Selection Support: Ensure that you have a plan for training and onboarding users once the system is selected.

Conclusion: Making the Right Choice

Selecting the right DAM system is a significant decision that can impact your organization for years to come. By following a structured process, engaging stakeholders, and carefully evaluating options, you can make an informed choice that meets your organization’s needs. Remember, the goal is not just to choose a system, but to select a solution that enhances your workflows and improves the management of your digital assets.

For more resources on DAM selection, including checklists and guides, visit AVP’s Free Resources.

Transcript

Chris Lacinak: 00:00

Amy Rudersdorf, welcome to the DAM right podcast.

Amy Rudersdorf: 02:15

Yeah, thanks for the opportunity.

Chris Lacinak: 02:17

I’m really excited to be here. So for folks that don’t know, you are the Director of Consulting Operations at AVP. And I’ve asked you to come on today because you’ve just written a piece called Creating a Successful Dam RFP, and you’ve included with it a bunch of really useful handouts. And so I wanted to just dive into that and have our listeners better understand what the process is, what the value of it is, why it’s important, what happens if you don’t do it, so on and so forth. But I’d love to just start, if you could tell us, what is the expertise and experience and background that you bring to this topic?

Amy Rudersdorf: 02:54

Sure. So before I came to AVP, I was working in government and academic institutions where we had to go through a procurement process to buy large technologies. And so I’ve seen this process from the client side. I know what the challenges are. I know that this can be a really time-consuming process and really challenging if you don’t know how to do it. And then when I came to AVP, I had the opportunity to help guide clients through this process. And over the years, we’ve really refined what I think is a great workflow for ensuring that our clients get the right technology that they need.

Chris Lacinak: 03:33

And you’ve been doing this for years, as you say. So I’m curious, why now? What inspired you to write this piece after refining this for so many years? Why is now a good time to do it?

Amy Rudersdorf: 03:44

I think the main… Well, there are a couple of reasons, but one of them is that there’s just been in the last couple of years a proliferation of systems. There are hundreds of systems out there that we call DAM or MAM or PIM or PAM or digital preservation. There’s all kinds of systems. From a pricing standpoint, DAMS range from as low as $100 a month to six figures annually. And the market is really catering to a diverse set of needs from B2B to cultural heritage to Martech, and then your general purpose asset management systems. And I’ve seen organizations recognize that it’s really important to do it right. They want to make sure that when they acquire technology, it’s something that’s going to work for their institution for the long term. But they really struggle with how to do it. So what I hope through this piece is that I can help individuals and organizations with this step-by-step guide to successfully procure their own technology without us, and maybe in addition, see the value of working with an organization like AVP.

Chris Lacinak: 05:00

And how would you describe who this piece and these checklists are for?

Amy Rudersdorf: 05:06

Well, I would say specifically, they’re for organizations looking to procure a DAM. And this could be your first DAM or moving from a DAM to an enterprise DAM technology or MAM. So that’s the specific audience. But really, if someone’s looking to procure a technology, the process is going to be very similar. And so many of these checklists will be useful to those folks as well.

Chris Lacinak: 05:38

Yeah, I think it is important. You’ve kind of touched a couple times on, you know, the piece is called, or calls out specifically DAM. As you mentioned, and it’s worth reiterating, we’ve talked about it here on the podcast before, but we use a very broad interpretation of DAM to include things like you mentioned MAM, PIM, PAM, digital preservation, so on and so forth. So it’s good to know that folks looking for any of those technologies in the broader category of DAM that this is useful for. For someone out there considering procuring a DAM and thinking, you know, we don’t need an RFP process or we don’t need to use this complex, time-consuming process, is it still useful for them? Or are they things that they can grab out of this piece, even if they don’t want to go through the full process?

Amy Rudersdorf: 06:32

Well, my initial response to this question is, you should be considering the RFP process. And if not a full RFP process, at least an RFI, which is a request for information as opposed to a request for proposals. The RFI is a much more lightweight approach. But in either case, I feel like this document, this set of checklists is useful for anyone thinking about getting a DAM. Because the checklists step you through not just how to write an RFP, but also how to gather the information you need to communicate to vendors. So if you look at checklist number two, for instance, it really focuses on discovery and how to undertake the stakeholder engagement process, which you’ll want to do whether or not you’re writing an RFP. You really need to understand your user needs before you set out to identify systems that you might want to procure.

Chris Lacinak: 07:39

Yeah, that’s a good point. And maybe it’s worth saying that for smaller organizations maybe that aren’t required to use an RFP process, that what you’ve put down here, when I look at it, I think of it’s kind of the essential elements of an RFP, right? You might give this to an organization that then wraps a bunch of bureaucratic contractual language around it and things like that. But this is the essence of a organization-centered or user-centered approach to finding an RFP or finding a DAM that fits. So let’s talk about what are the pitfalls that people run into when they’re procuring a DAM system?

Amy Rudersdorf: 08:25

So I’ll start by saying, I think it’s really important that when you’re procuring a technology that you talk to your colleagues in the field and see what they’re using. But just, as much as that’s important, I will say that’s also a major pitfall if you do that, if that’s your only approach. Because you may have a colleague who uses a system they love, it does everything they need it to do, and they say to you, “Yeah, you should definitely buy this system.” But the reality is that that system works for them in their context and your context, your stakeholders are very different. And so that assumption is, I think, flawed. You have to go through a stakeholder engagement and discovery process where you’re talking to your users and finding out what they need, what their requirements are in order to communicate to vendors what it is that you need that system to do for you, as opposed to what it’s doing for your colleagues. I’ll say, Kara Van Malssen posted a LinkedIn post a few weeks ago, and it was really useful. It’s the eight worst ways to choose a DAM based on real world examples. And one of those is choose the system that your colleague recommends. And as she says, your organization’s use cases are totally different from theirs. I think there’s also the pitfall of, you go to a conference and you met a salesperson, they were really nice, the DAM looked great, it did everything that they said it could do. But when you’re at a conference, that salesperson is on their best behavior, and they’ve got a slick presentation to show you. So just approaching this with a multifaceted approach is going to be far more effective than just saying, my colleague likes it, or I saw it at a conference. You combine all of those things together as part of your research to find the system that works for you.

Chris Lacinak: 10:44

Yeah. And that makes me think of requirements and usage scenarios, which I want to dive into. But before we go there, I want to just ask a similar question, but with a different slant, which is, what’s the risk of not getting this right, of selecting the wrong DAM?

Amy Rudersdorf: 11:02

Yeah, so the risk is huge. I think DAMS are not cheap. I would say that’s the first thing. You do not want to purchase or sign a contract, which is typically multi-year, with a vendor for a system that doesn’t work for you. You will be miserable. And I think more importantly, your users will be miserable. And this will cause work stoppage, potentially loss of assets, and it could be a financial loss to the organization. Not doing this right will have repercussions all the way down the line for the organization, and you’ll be hurting for years to come.

Chris Lacinak: 12:00

Yeah, I think one thing we’ve seen is an organization, maybe they go out and they buy a cheap DAM, and maybe they think, “Well, you know what? It’s cheap. If it doesn’t work, we only spent, what, $15,000 or $20,000,” or whatever the case may be. Not realizing that that might be the cheapest part, right? Because you got to get organizational buy-in, you got to train people, you got to onboard them. And then it goes wrong, or it goes, you know. And we’ve seen this. We’ve come in on the heels of this. Where like, there’s a loss of trust. There’s poor morale. People don’t believe that it’s going to go right this time. So yeah, there’s a lot to lose there, and it’s more than just the cost of the DAM system, as you point out. So let’s jump back to requirements and usage scenarios. So you talk quite a bit about the importance of getting requirements and usage scenarios documented and getting them right. Could you just talk a bit about those two things, how they relate to each other, and then we’ll kind of dive in and I’ll ask you for some examples of each of those.

Amy Rudersdorf: 13:03

Okay. Well, this is where I’ll probably start to nerd out a little bit. But you’re going to, as the centerpiece of your RFP, communicate your needs. And when I say your, I mean your organizational needs for a new system. So you will be representing the needs of your stakeholders, if you’re doing it right. Their challenges or pain points, their wishlist, all of that needs to be communicated to vendors in a clear and concise manner that they can interpret appropriately and provide answers that are meaningful to you so that you can then analyze the responses in such a way that you can understand whether that system will work for your organization. So structuring your requirements and your usage scenarios, we call them usage scenarios at AVP, lots of people call them use cases, but structuring those correctly is going to be the part that gets you the responses you need in order to make a data-driven decision.

Chris Lacinak: 14:20

And I’ve heard you talk about before, I mean, to that point, I guess, we have seen RFPs in which the question that is posed is, can you do this thing to the vendor? And the vendor just simply has to check a yes or no box. To your point, I think from what I’ve seen from your work is like, you really get to how do you do this thing so that there’s much more information around it. So it sounds like structuring those, getting those right and structuring them in the right way is going to give you not a yes or no answer, which is often misleading and unhelpful and things, but like a much more nuanced answer.

Amy Rudersdorf: 14:56

I think the other part is, you want to help the vendor understand. You want to work with them to get the best outcome from this process. And so giving them as much context as you can is important too. And that’s why we structure our requirements the way we do so that the vendor sees what the need is, but also understands why we’re asking for it.

Chris Lacinak: 15:20

That’s a really good point. That is something that you hear vendors complain about with RFPs that they don’t provide enough information. And I want to ask you later about what ruffles the feathers of vendors, but let’s keep on the requirements and usage scenarios. So can I ask, you said most people call them use cases, AVP calls them usage scenarios. Why is that?

Amy Rudersdorf: 15:42

Well, a use case is just a standalone narrative of, it’s a step-by-step narrative of what the needs are for a system. So you’re telling a story about a user going through a process or a series of processes. A usage scenario offers context beyond that. So you provide some background information. Why is this usage scenario important? Well, you’re explaining that we’re asking you to respond to this because this is our problem. And so providing, again, it’s that context. So the vendor understands why you’re asking for something or why you need something. It just makes their answers better. They’re more informed. I think they feel more confident in their responses. And so it’s just a little bit more context around the use case than just a standalone use case.

Chris Lacinak: 16:38

What does a well-crafted requirement look like?

Amy Rudersdorf: 16:44

So at AVP, we use the user story structure, which comes out of the agile development process. It’s basically an informal sort of general explanation of a software feature that’s written from the perspective of an end user or a customer. And we call them personas. So as part of your user story, it’s a three-part structure. So as a persona, or the person that needs something to happen, I need to do something so that something is achieved. So a standard requirement is just a statement of a need. But here you can see there’s a real person. So this is user-driven content. There’s a real person who has a real need because something really needs to be achieved. And I think that structure is really powerful. I just said “really” a lot of times. But there are a lot of examples for how to build user stories on the web. And again, just giving that vendor as much context as possible. You have to think about you’re handing over to these vendors 20-page documents that they have to sift through to try to understand what your needs are and how to match them to their system. And so any background you can give them, any context you can give them, is just going to be a win for everyone. So it really will impact whether you’re seeing responses from the vendors that align with your needs or not. I think it provides clarity in the process that the standard requirement structure doesn’t offer.

Chris Lacinak: 18:31

Right. So I’ll go out on a limb here and venture a guess that a bad requirements list might be a list of bullet points, something like integrations, video, images, things like search, things like that. Not a lot of context, not a lot of useful information.

Amy Rudersdorf: 18:49

The other thing to keep in mind is these have to be actionable. So you can’t say “fast upload.” Every vendor is going to say “yeah, our upload is super fast.” But you could say, “As a creative, I need to upload five gigabyte video files in under 30 seconds” or something like that. You want them to be something that a vendor can respond to so that you get a useful response.

Chris Lacinak: 19:24

How might you explain what a well-crafted usage scenario looks like?

Amy Rudersdorf: 19:30

Sure. So usage scenarios are, as I said earlier, they’re these step-by-step narratives. So it’s a story about a user moving through the system. They flow in a logical order. They cover all of the relevant steps, all the decision-making points. They are user-centric. So the scenario should define who the user is. We always use real users in our usage scenarios. So we’ll have identified some of the major personas from the client’s organization. And that might be, like I said, a creative. It might be the DAM Manager. It’s real people who work in their organization. We don’t name them by name, but we name them by their title. So that this is truly representing the users. So it’s the story of the user performing tasks. And every usage scenario should have clear objectives, outlining what the user is trying to achieve. And it’s their specific tasks. They’re solving a problem. So it might be, for example, just this isn’t how you would write it, but it might be a story about a marketing creative who needs to upload assets in batch and needs to ensure that metadata is assigned to those assets automatically every time they’re uploaded. And the DAM Manager is pinged when those new uploads are in the system so that they can review them. So that might be a story that you would tell in a usage scenario. It’s realistic. It’s based on real people. And it represents real challenges that users face.

Chris Lacinak: 21:26

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. There’s a lot of things that we see in marketing and in communication around the power of stories. I can imagine that that is a more compelling and meaningful way to communicate to vendors. It makes me wonder, in your experience in working with organizations, you craft this story and someone listening might think that’s information that’s at the ready that just simply needs to be put into story form. But I’m curious, you put a lot of emphasis on discovery and talking to different stakeholders. And I’m just curious, how useful is this process to people within an organization coming up with these stories? Are they at the ready? Or is it through the discovery process that they’re able to synthesize and really understand to be able to put it into that form?

Amy Rudersdorf: 22:21

Yeah, I would say if you take nothing away from this discussion except the fact that discovery is absolutely necessary as part of your technology procurement process, it’s that. Discovery is the process of interviewing your users and stakeholders to understand what their needs are, their current pain points are, and what they wish the system could do. That’s it in a nutshell. And I have never had a core team or the person leading the project on the client side say, “Oh, I already knew all that.” Time and time again, their eyes are opened to new challenges, new needs from these users. So, it’s a really powerful process. I think this is taking it a little off topic, but just to ensure that you have buy-in from your stakeholders, bringing them in at the beginning of the process is key. So it’s a benefit for you in that you learn what they need, you learn how they use systems today and what they need the system to do in the future, but you’ve also kind of got them engaged in the process as well. They see that they’re important and that you’re making decisions on their behalf and thinking of them as the system is being procured. And all of that together, I think, is really powerful and can only make for a better procurement process.

Chris Lacinak: 23:58

Yeah. So, wow, it really does point out the value of the process. So earlier I was saying like, what’s the pitfalls or maybe someone doesn’t want to go through the RFP process, but like the RFP, I mean, let’s say somebody did just throw together an RFP without going through the process, it would be a very different RFP than after going through the process. And the process, and also it sounds like the process solidifies things that don’t manifest in an RFP. They actualize through greater adoption and more executive buy-in and in other ways that you wouldn’t have if you didn’t go through this.

Amy Rudersdorf: 24:35

Absolutely.

Chris Lacinak: 24:36

Let me ask about that, the buy-in side. So in discovery, well, not so much the buy-in, I think more about adoption here, but like one of the challenges has to be you talk to, let’s say 10 different people, each person has many requirements they want to list. And maybe one of those is in creative ops, maybe one is in marketing, maybe one is in more administrative role. Who knows? They are different stakeholders with different focus points and they all give you lots of requirements. And on one hand, I have to think it’s important for those to be represented so someone doesn’t look at it and say, “Well, it doesn’t have any of my stuff in there. This system’s not right for me.” On the other hand, it’s got to be such a huge load. It just makes me wonder, how do you get to prioritization to both represent but also make sure that the most important stuff is represented up front?

Amy Rudersdorf: 25:31

Right. Well, it’s definitely a team process. So the first thing I’ll say is just to provide a little context, when we do these requirements, these user stories, in the past, we would write 150 requirements. And we try really hard not to do that. It’s really hard on the vendors to ask them to respond to 150 requirements. And so we really try to synthesize what the users are telling us and really hone in on the key needs. Now that doesn’t mean that we disregard different users’ needs. But in some cases, their need is something that every dam can meet. So there’s no need to include that in the requirement list. You want to be able to search. They all can search, so that should be fine. But once you have got your requirements list, which I think in a healthy RFP is probably in 50 or so requirements range, then it’s up to the organization to prioritize those requirements. So as a company, we will write those user stories on behalf of the client. But then we give them that list and say, now prioritize these. This is your part of the process. And typically, this is the core team’s job. So when we work with a client, there’s usually two to four people who are part of the client core team. And they are either sitting in on the discovery interviews or reading transcripts or just really engaged in the process. So they understand what these priorities look like. So by the time they get that list, they should be able to, as a group, sit down and identify the priorities. And we prioritize based on the list we do is mandatory, preferred, and nice to have. So if there are some requirements that someone is noisy about really wanting to have in the list, we can always just call it nice to have. And they’re there. But then it’s not mandatory that the system is able to do it.

Chris Lacinak: 27:59

So it sounds like that’s done through a workshopping or group process where folks are able to discuss and talk about those. So that seems like that innately. Being able to be heard, have the conversation, and then even if it’s not called mandatory, you still feel like you got to have the conversation and it’s represented in some way.

Amy Rudersdorf: 28:23

Yeah. And I wanted to also say that gathering these requirements from the users is really obviously important, as I’ve said. But then engaging them throughout this process is also really valuable. And so not just asking them at the beginning what they need, but actually letting them come to demos and things like that, I think, is important as well. It’s going to make implementation and buy-in much more successful.

Chris Lacinak: 28:51

You’ve got these requirements. You’ve got these usage scenarios. You create a bunch of things to hand over to a vendor. I guess I’m wondering, how do you manage apples to apples comparisons? Because there’s going to be such a wide variety in how they respond to things. And how do you manage comparing pricing to make sure that there’s not surprises down the road? How do you manage those things?

Amy Rudersdorf: 29:16

Well, so I’m going to set the pricing question aside for a second. So the way that we do it at AVP is, I think, a methodology that is unique to the RFP process. And that is that we’ve created a qualitative methodology. So we create the requirements, and the client prioritizes them. The vendor responds to them in a certain way. And then we’re actually able to score those responses. And it’s based on priority. So if something’s mandatory, it’s going to get a higher score. The vendor may say it’s out of the box. They’re going to get a higher score. If they say it has to be customized to do that, they’re going to get a lower score. So we create this scoring structure that allows us to hand over to the client data that they can look at. So they’re actually seeing side-by-side scores for all of the respondents to the RFP. Pricing is really tricky. It is so complicated. Every vendor prices their system completely differently. And so we really have to spend a lot of time digging out the details to understand where the pricing is coming from and what the year-to-year pricing looks like. And then we do actually provide a side-by-side analysis of that as well. It’s really tricky to do it. But in the end, the client gets data that they can base their decisions on. And then you asked a question about avoiding surprises when it comes to pricing. I think this is the hardest thing to talk about when you’re buying technology. And I think this is probably the case for lots of different types of technology, not just the DAM, MAM, PIM, PAM world. But this information is not widely available on the web. You can’t go to a vendor’s website and see how much it’s going to cost for you for the year, an annual subscription or license. And the reason for that is that there are so many dependencies around their pricing, including how much storage you need and what that storage growth looks like over time, how many users and what type, some vendors base their pricing on seats, like the number of users you have and the different types of users in their different categories, SLA levels, service level agreement levels. So if you want the gold standard, it’s going to cost this. So the costs are going to be unique to your situation. Just to sort of toot our horn that we know this market really well. And so if somebody says, how much does it cost for an annual license to vendor X? I can say, but that just comes with years of experience. Otherwise, it’s a wild west out there as far as pricing goes.

Chris Lacinak: 32:48

You know that I know that you want to get your hands on Amy’s how to guide and handouts for DAM selection. Come closer and I’ll tell you where to find it. Closer. I don’t want anyone else to hear this. Okay. It’s weareavp.com/creating-a-successful-dam-rfp. That’s where the guide is. Here’s where you get the handouts. It’s weareavp.com/free-resources. Okay. Now delete those URLs once you download them. I don’t want that getting out to just anyone. All right. Talk to you later. Bye.

Two thoughts here. One is, um, I mean, you talked about the kind of like spreadsheet analysis and scoring. But I know you, you dive deeper than that. I mean, part of your comparison, comparative analysis process is also demos as well. And I imagine that that, that plays, that makes me think of a couple of things. One is like one using those as a tool in the apples to apples comparison. But two, like I imagine, you know, you have this list of requirements and uses scenarios and some solutions can probably meet that out of the box. And some probably need some custom development to do it or some sort of workflow development or something in order to meet those. So could you just talk a little bit about the role of demos and custom configurations related to pricing?

Amy Rudersdorf: 34:20

Yeah. So a demo is a general term, um, that can mean many different things in this, in this realm. Um, so vendors love to give demos, uh, and they would love to, you know, spend an hour and a half with you telling you how great their system is. That’s their job. Their system may be great. And, and so, you know, that’s, that’s okay, but that’s not how you base a decision, a purchasing decision. Um, you, you, you go, you see those, those demos, those sort of bells and whistles demos to get a sense of what the system looks like. What we do is, um, after the RFP comes back and you know, we’re sort of playing with different ways to do that now. Um, but the way that we’ve done it typically is that after the, the, um, RFP comes back, let’s say you get six responses, you choose your top three, and then you spend two hours in a demo with the, with the vendor. The vendor does not get to, um, uh, make the agenda. We do. And in that demonstration, they’re going to, um, respond to the, some of the usage scenarios that we wrote for the RFP. So for 15 minutes, talk to us about that uploading, um, usage scenario I mentioned earlier. And in order to do that, here are assets from the organization and metadata from the organization, um, that you must use in your examples. So now you’re seeing side by side, um, demonstrations of how the systems work with your data. And I think that’s really powerful, um, because now you’re going to start to see the system maybe move a little slower with that five gigabyte movie that you have. Um, and, and, and it’s not quite as slick as the, as the, the assets they use typically in their, in their demos. So you get to see a real sense of how the system works in that way. And as part of those demonstrations, we always have the clients fill out feedback forms. So again, um, we’re going to get some, some qualitative, um, responses like what, what did you like? What other questions do you have? But we’re also going to get quantitative responses, score this vendor, um, on use the, on the usage scenario that you saw, what, you know, from one to five, did they, did they do what they said the system could do? And so again, we’re, we’re trying to set up opportunities for that apples to apples, um, uh, comparison. And how about the, um, kind of custom configuration aspects? I guess this goes, really goes back to kind of, I guess it’s both pricing and timeline, right? Like how do you manage that through the RFP process? I think that’s really probably one of the toughest things. The vendors differ on how involved they want to be in customization and configuration. Some systems require lots of configuration, um, but not so much customization. And maybe we should define those terms. So configuration means, you know, pressing some buttons behind the scenes to make something happen. Um, maybe turning on a feature, turning off a feature. Customization means writing some code to make the system do what you need it to do. So configuration should be cheaper and easier than customization. And so, uh, from a configuration perspective or from, from a cost and timeline perspective, configuration is, is less of a challenge. Um, because typically the, the vendor can do that. And that’s part of the, the offering. Customization is different. Uh, if something is custom, we ask them to tell us how much time it’s going to take and how much it’s going to cost to do it. Uh, so that that’s in, that’s in their proposal as well. In order to get to that point can be challenging. You really have to be very specific and clear about what you need. Um, so an example would be integration, which is something that everyone asks for, um, in an RFP. DAMS aren’t systems that just stand alone in your organization. They integrate with collections management systems or marketing technologies. Um, and so understanding for instance, who is responsible for building the integration and maintaining the integration. Uh, knowing that upfront is super important. If a vendor says, yeah, we can do that. Make sure they explain how that happens and what it’s going to cost and what the real cost is going to be for you. Um, so I, I guess I just say that you’re your best advocate and, and if you have a question, ask it and ask them to, to, um, document it.

Chris Lacinak: 39:44

Speaking of vendors, like what, what have you heard as responses from vendors to, you know, the, the RFPs that you’re proposing people do in this process. Do they love them? Do they hate them like that? How have they been received by vendors generally speaking?

Amy Rudersdorf: 40:01

Um, well, I’ll, you know, we have actually reached out to vendors and asked them this question and I have heard on a number of occasions that they really like the RFPs that we put together for them because they’re so, they’re so clear and they understand what we’re asking and why we’re asking it. And you know, going back to this, this point I made earlier about not having 150 requirements, you know, the vendors appreciate that as well. It’s a, it’s a lot of work for them to respond to these and, and we, we don’t want this to be onerous, um, or overly complicated for them. So we’ve really tried to create RFPs that serve the client foremost, but also, um, make the process as pain free as possible for the vendors as well. And we’ve gotten feedback from them, from a number of them that they like, um, the way that we present the data.

Chris Lacinak: 41:04

Having been someone that’s been on the responding side of RFPs, I will say, you know, one of the things you worry about when you’re in that position is the, uh, customer being able to make an apples to apples comparison, making sure that the appropriate context is there, making sure that they fully understand, um, and that you have all the right information to be able to provide the right responses. So I guess everybody has a vested interest in being clear and transparent, right? That’s actually helpful to everybody. And I imagine that also helps people like opt out. Maybe a vendor says, you know what, we’re not, they look at that RFP and they say, this really is not our strong spot. We should not spend the time on this. So that’s probably helpful to them to be able to filter out what is and isn’t in their wheelhouse.

Amy Rudersdorf: 41:50

Yeah, absolutely. I, I think it’s important to recognize that we don’t work in a vacuum. Um, we, we work very closely. We are vendor neutral as a company, but we work very closely with, um, the sales teams at lots of different, um, vendor companies. And we want to be partners with them as well. We want, we want them to be successful, um, whoever they are and whatever we can do to make sure that they’re able to, um, show off their system as well at, and as appropriately as possible, you know, that’s a win for everyone. And so I do really keep in mind that perspective when I’m putting these, um, documents together.

Chris Lacinak: 42:40

So what are some of the things that you’ve heard vendors complain about with regard to RFPs? Not ours, of course, other people’s RFPs. Like, what are the things that would turn a vendor off or make them not want to respond or make them feel poorly about an RFP?

Amy Rudersdorf: 42:57

I think I’ve mentioned this now a couple of times. I think one of the common deterrents is just the overwhelming number of requirements. And when they’re not written as user stories, they can be really confusing, hard to interpret. Um, and, and just really probably pretty frustrating to, um, try to answer or respond to. The other challenge, and I talk to clients all the time about this is you can’t make every requirement mandatory because there is not going to be a system out there that can do absolutely everything you want out of the box turnkey solution. Um, and it’s, it’s unreasonable to ask for that, I think, in my opinion. Um, and so, you know, making sure that you’re really prioritizing those requirements helps vendors see that you’ve really thought about this and that you, um, understand what you’re asking for and what your needs really are. So I think that maybe isn’t a deterrent, it’s a positive, but flipping that every, every requirement being mandatory is, um, is probably really frustrating. I would say too that, I mean, there’s, there’s sort of the flip side of this. Um, there’s excessively detailed or overly complex, and then there’s not enough information to, to provide a, a useful response. Um, so finding that sweet spot where you’re giving them the context, the background, the information they need, um, but not overwhelming them is, is, is, um, important. And I, you know, we’ve all seen a poorly structured RFP, you know, something that lacks clear vision or is ambiguous or vague, or, you know, is filled with like grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. It just makes everybody look bad. And, you know, if I was responding to that, I would question, um, the organization and their sort of dedication to this process.

Chris Lacinak: 45:04

We should, we should point out that you’re a hardcore grammarian.

Amy Rudersdorf: 45:08

I am.

Chris Lacinak: 45:09

So, um, let’s talk about timeline. What, you know, you talked about who is this, who’s the guide and checklist for, and you said it’s for people who are maybe getting their first DAM. Maybe it’s for people who are getting their second or third DAM. They’ve already got one. When is the right time to start the RFP process? People are surprised at how long this process takes. At AVP, it is a 20 week process. And so that’s five months. And that is, uh, that is sort of keeping all the, the, the milestones tight, moving the process along quickly. Uh, that’s, that’s just how long it takes. Um, so, you know, thinking about things like, Oh, my contract is coming up in a year, you know, working backwards from that, you need a solid six months or more for implementation. So, you know, you should, you should be, um, working on that RFP now. Uh, but, you know, give yourself, you know, expect this process, if you do it right, to, to take a solid four or five months. Um, and, and then you also have to, you know, build in buffer for your procurement office. You’ve got your InfoSec, uh, reviews. All of these things can take even longer. So, um, yeah, as soon as you realize that you’re going to get a new system, uh, start the work on that RFP.

Chris Lacinak: 46:40

And we should say that five months that you mentioned includes, uh, a pause while you wait for vendors to respond to the RFP as well. Right. And how long is that period typically?

Amy Rudersdorf: 46:54

Um, I, I usually say a month, I think less than a month is not, is not being a, a good um, you know, I think it’s sort of, uh, inhumane to make them respond in, in less than a month. These are complicated. They want to make sure they’re getting it right. We want them to get it right. So a month is a solid amount of time. We also build in time where they can ask questions and so they can’t really start working on it until they get the questions, the answers back. So a month I think is the, is the sweet spot there.

Chris Lacinak: 47:28

You’re right. I, I feel like we run into frequently where people might hear five months and they’re a little put off by how long that sounds. Uh, and then it is extraordinarily common that, uh, contracting and security takes significantly longer than that to get through. So that is something I think people often underestimate, especially if you’re not used to working through procurement, like that’s something that people really need to consider as a, as a part of their timeline.

Amy Rudersdorf: 47:57

This is a real, this happened yesterday. I have a client who was very adamant that we, um, shorten that time, time frame by a month. So we had compacted all of our work into four months and they came back to me and said, you know, we’re going to need more time. So let’s, let’s go with your original timeline. And then he said, it’s like, you know what you’re doing.

Chris Lacinak: 48:24

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That happens sometimes. So I mean, I do what, you know, I have, there has been this concept lately though, that I’ve heard repeated consistently about a fast track selection process and it’s something that’s significantly faster. And I wonder, I don’t know, do you have thoughts about that? Is that a realistic thing? Does that sacrifice too much? Is it possible as long as you’re willing to accept X, Y, and Z risks? I mean, what’s the fastest you might be able to do a selection process if someone really pushed you?

Amy Rudersdorf: 49:00

That’s a tough question. I mean, there are, there are people who talk about this fast track process. I think you’re putting yourself at risk if you don’t at least spend the time you need to with your end users and stakeholders. Whatever else you do around this process to make it go faster for you, you know, whether it’s not do the RFP and just invite vendors to do their demos. I still think spending the time with your stakeholders is going to be really important and drafting their requirements in some way that communicates those to the vendors so that when you have them demo, you have them demo with your user needs in mind. You know, I think you could do that. I’m not entirely sold on it. I think our process works really well. But if someone came to us and said, “We want to do it a different way,” I think we’d be willing to discuss other methods.

Chris Lacinak: 50:08

It makes me think, you know, if you were going to have, say, I’m thinking of a shape, Amy, and I want you to draw it, and I’m going to give you a number of dots to draw the shape that I’m thinking of, right? If I give you three dots, the chances of you getting that shape right are pretty slim. If I give you 50 dots, you’re more likely to get the shape that I’m thinking of, right? You can draw the line and connect the dots. And it seems that if you fast track it, you’re going to miss some dots and you’re less likely. And as we talked about earlier, like, I guess I do want, I mean, now that we’re talking about it, it’s like weighing the risk reward here. Like, okay, let’s say that the fastest you could do this with some level of certainty that everybody was willing to accept was three months. But you increase your chance of getting it wrong by 30%. We talked earlier about what are the risks of getting it wrong. Like, that just seems on its face obvious that that’s not worth it. Like, the amount, it’s not just the cost of the DAM system. Because to get back all those stakeholders again, do discovery again, go through the process. Like, everybody’s burnt. They’re unhappy about it. The thing didn’t work. It failed. I don’t know. It just seemed, yeah. Now that we talk about it, it just seems obvious that that’s not a great idea.

Amy Rudersdorf: 51:25

You’ve broken their trust. And if you, and I’ve seen this in implementation too, where if you invite your stakeholders into the system before it’s ready, or it’s not doing what they need it to do, they’re going to hesitate to come back. And to have to go through this process all over again, I just can’t see, you’re going to lose their trust.

Chris Lacinak: 51:56

You can imagine the Slack message already. Hey, did you see that? I went in there and nothing’s in there. I couldn’t find anything. It’s like all of a sudden that starts creating a poor morale around the system.

Amy Rudersdorf: 52:07

Yeah, it gives me shivers.

Chris Lacinak: 52:10

Yeah. In your piece, you go through the whole RFP process. We haven’t gone through that here because it’s rather lengthy and I think that it’s a lot to talk about. So we’ll leave that to folks to see in the piece. But I’m curious if you could tell us, when you see people do this on their own and they don’t have the advantage of having an expert like yourself guiding them along, what’s the number one most important part of the process that you see people skip?

Amy Rudersdorf: 52:40

Well, I think it’s the discovery process. It’s getting in front of your users and stakeholders. Without that information, you don’t know what you need. And you can only guess at what you need based on your personal experience.

Chris Lacinak: 53:00

So people think, “Oh, I know what my users need. I’ve been working with these people for years. I can tell them.” Or maybe like, “I know what we need better than anybody else. I’m just going to write it down.”

Amy Rudersdorf: 53:08

I don’t know if I said this already, but I’ve never had anyone say, “Oh yeah, I knew all that,” after they went through the discovery process. Time and again, they’re like, “Wow, I had no idea.”

Chris Lacinak: 53:18

I bet.

Amy Rudersdorf: 53:20

Yeah. It’s pretty interesting to talk to the core team after the discovery process is complete. Because they often sit in on these interviews and you can just see their eyes pop when they hear certain things that they had no idea about. And that happens every time we go through this process.

Chris Lacinak: 53:48

So we’ll put a link to your piece in the show notes here. I’m curious though, if you could tell us when people download the handouts, what’s in there? What can people expect to see?

Amy Rudersdorf: 54:01

It’s six checklists that guide you through the entire RFP process, from developing your problem statement to the point where you’re selecting your finalists. Some of the checklists are things that you need to do. So they kind of step you through discovery and how you structure your RFP. But then there are checklists that you can actually include in your RFP. We always have an overview document that sort of introduces the RFP to the vendors. And there’s a very long checklist that we include that they have to answer those specific questions that are in that download. They’re in the actual RFPs that we create as well. So it’s a little bit of, we’re offering a little IP to users.

Chris Lacinak: 54:56

So it’s the things that you would use for yourself as part of the process.

Amy Rudersdorf: 55:01

Yeah.

Chris Lacinak: 55:02

That’s great. So for the question I ask everybody on the DAM Right podcast, which is, what is the last song that you added to your favorites playlist?

Amy Rudersdorf: 55:12

Oh, I’ll tell you right now. I have it right in front of me.

Chris Lacinak: 55:17

Great.

Amy Rudersdorf: 55:18

Heart of Gold by Neil Young.

Chris Lacinak: 55:19

What were the circumstances there?

Amy Rudersdorf: 55:21

He’s back on Spotify. He had left Spotify. They pulled all of his stuff off Spotify. And I realized he was back. And so I grabbed that song. Yeah. Four days ago.

Chris Lacinak: 55:32

That’s right. Well, thank you so much for joining me and sharing your expertise and your experience and all this great information. It’s been fun having you on. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Amy Rudersdorf: 55:41

Yeah. Thanks again for the opportunity to talk about a topic that some people might not find very exciting, but I do.

Chris Lacinak: 55:52

You know that I know that you want to get your hands on Amy’s how-to guide and handouts for DAM selection. Come closer and I’ll tell you where to find it. Closer. I don’t want anyone else to hear this. Okay. It’s weareavp.com/creating-a-successful-dam-rfp. That’s where the guide is. Here’s where you get the handouts. It’s weareavp.com/free-resources. Okay. Now delete those URLs once you download them. I don’t want that getting out to just anyone. All right. Talk to you later. Bye.

Exploring the Future of Object Storage with Wasabi AiR

In today’s data-driven world, object storage is revolutionizing how we manage digital assets. Wasabi AiR, an innovative platform, uses AI-driven metadata to enhance this storage method, making it more efficient and accessible. This blog explores how Wasabi AiR is reshaping data management, the benefits it offers, and what the future holds for AI in this field.

How Wasabi AiR Transforms Object Storage

Wasabi AiR integrates AI directly into storage systems, automatically generating rich, searchable metadata. This feature allows users to find, manage, and utilize their data more effectively. By enhancing storage with AI, Wasabi AiR helps organizations streamline data retrieval, boosting overall productivity and efficiency.

The Evolution of Metadata in Object Storage

While AI-generated metadata has existed for nearly a decade, its adoption in data storage has been slow. Wasabi AiR simplifies this integration, allowing organizations to leverage automation without complexity.

Aaron Edell’s Vision for AI in Storage

Aaron Edell, Senior Vice President of AI at Wasabi, leads the Wasabi AiR initiative. His vision is to make AI a seamless part of data management, enabling organizations to generate metadata effortlessly and manage digital assets more efficiently.

Advanced Technology in Wasabi AiR

Wasabi AiR uses advanced AI models, including speech recognition, object detection, and OCR, to create detailed metadata. This capability enhances the storage system by making data more searchable and accessible. One standout feature is timeline-based metadata, enabling users to locate specific moments within videos or audio files stored in their systems.

Use Cases: How Wasabi AiR Benefits Different Sectors

Wasabi AiR has numerous applications across industries, improving data handling in:

• Media and Entertainment: It helps create highlight reels quickly, as seen with Liverpool Football Club’s use of Wasabi AiR to boost fan engagement.
• Legal Firms: Law firms save time by managing extensive video and audio records efficiently.
• Education and Research: Institutions make their archived content more accessible through AI-driven metadata.

Cost Efficiency of AI-Powered Data Storage

Wasabi AiR offers a cost-effective solution, charging $6.99 per terabyte monthly. This straightforward pricing makes it easier for organizations to predict costs while benefiting from AI-enhanced solutions.

Activating Wasabi AiR

Setting up Wasabi AiR is simple. Users connect it to their existing system, and the platform begins generating metadata immediately, enhancing value and usability without requiring complex configurations.

The Future with AI

As data continues to grow, efficient management is increasingly important. Wasabi AiR is set to play a key role by enhancing searchability and usability through AI-driven solutions.

Integration and Interoperability

Wasabi AiR supports integration with other data management systems, enhancing workflows. Its APIs allow seamless metadata export to Digital Asset Management (DAM) or Media Asset Management (MAM) systems, making data handling more efficient.

Ethical AI Considerations

Ethical considerations are crucial when implementing AI in data management. Wasabi AiR ensures data security and transparency, building trust and ensuring responsible AI use.

Conclusion: Elevating Data Management with AI

Wasabi AiR is a game-changer, enhancing how we manage, search, and utilize data. By combining AI with innovative technology, organizations can significantly improve efficiency, accessibility, and data management. As digital data management continues to evolve, Wasabi AiR positions itself as a leader, offering a future where data isn’t just stored—it’s actively leveraged for success.

Transcript

Chris Lacinak: 00:00

The practice of using AI to generate metadata has been around for almost a decade now.

Even with pretty sophisticated and high-quality platforms and tools, it’s still fair to say that the hype has far outpaced the adoption and utilization.

My guest today is Aaron Edell from Wasabi.

Aaron is one of the folks that is working on making AI so easy to use that we collectively glide over the hurdle of putting effort into using AI and find ourselves happily reaping the rewards without ever having had to do much work to get there.

It’s interesting to note the commonalities and approach with both Aaron and the AMP Project

folks who I spoke with a couple of episodes ago.

Both looked at this problem and aimed to tackle it by bringing together a suite of AI tools

into a platform that orchestrates their capabilities to produce a result that is greater than the

sum of their individual parts.

Aaron is currently the SVP of AI at Wasabi.

Prior to this, he was the CEO of GreyMeta, served as the Global Head of Business and

GTM at Amazon Web Services, and was involved in multiple AI and ML businesses in founding

and leadership roles.

Aaron’s current focus is on the Wasabi AiR platform, which they announced just before

I interviewed him.

I think you’ll find his insights to be interesting and thought-provoking.

He’s clearly someone who has thought about this topic a lot, and he has a lot to share

that listeners will find valuable and fun.

Before we dive in, I would really appreciate it if you would take two seconds to follow,

rate, or subscribe on your platform of choice.

And remember, DAM Right, because it’s too important to get wrong.

Aaron Edell, welcome to the DAM Right podcast.

Great to have you here.

Aaron Edell: 01:38

It’s an honor.

Chris Lacinak: 01:40

Thank you for having me. I’m very excited to talk to you today for a number of reasons.

One, you’ve recently announced a really exciting development at Wasabi. Can’t wait to talk about that.

But also, our career paths have paralleled and intersected in kind of strange ways over

the past couple decades.

We both have a career start and an intersection around a guy by the name of Jim Lindner, who

was the founder of Vidipax, a place that I worked for a number of years before I started

AVP, and who was also the founder of Samba, where you kind of, I won’t say you started

there, you had a career before that, but that’s where our intersection started.

But I’d love for you to tell me a bit about your history and your path that brought you

to where you are today.

Aaron Edell: 02:34

Yeah, definitely.

The other funny thing about Jim is that he is a fellow tall person. So folks who are listening to this can’t tell, but I’m six foot six, and I believe Jim is

also six six or maybe six seven.

So when you get to that height, there’s a little Wi-Fi that goes on between people of

similar height that you just make a little connection.

You kind of look at each other and go, “I know your pain.

I know your back hurts.”

So my whole life growing up, ever since really I was five years old, I loved video, recording,

shooting movies, filming things.

I eventually went to college for it.

I did it a lot in high school.

And this is back in the early 90s when video editing was hard.

And the kid in high school who knew how to do it and had the Mac who could do it was

kind of the only person able to actually create content.

So I was rarefied, I guess, in that sense.

So I would go to film festivals and all sorts, and it was just great time.

And I was never very good at it.

I just really loved it.

And when you love something, especially when you’re young, you learn all of the things

you need to know to accomplish that.

So I learned a lot about digital video just because I had to figure out how to get my

stupid Mac to record and transcode.

And then I got introduced to nonlinear editing very early on and learning that.

So when I went to college, I went there for film and video, really.

That was what I thought I wanted to be when I grew up was a filmmaker.

My father was talent for KGO television and ABC News for a long time.

So I had some familial– and my mother was the executive producer of his radio show.

So I had a lot of familial, sort of, media and entertainment world around and was very

supported in that way, I suppose.

By the time I got– so I went to college, and I loved my college.

Hampshire College is a fantastic institution.

It has no tests, no grades.

It has a– you design your own education, which is not something I was prepared for,

by the way, when I went there.

I’m so thrilled I went there because all of my entrepreneurial success is because of what

I learned there.

But at the time, I had no appreciation for that.

And I just thought, well, this is strange.

I’m here for film and video, and they’re like, here’s a camera.

Here’s a recording button.

And I thought, mm, this is an expensive private college in Massachusetts and probably need

to make it a little bit harder.

So my father is a physician, so I thought pre-med.

And I did it.

I went full on pre-med.

I was going to be a doctor.

I was going to apply to medical school.

But I was also working on documentaries and producing stuff and acting in other people’s

films and things like that.

So I still– that love, that passion never went away.

I was just kind of being creative about how to do it.

And my thesis project ended up being a documentary about a medical subject, which was kind of

perfect.

Because at the end of the day, my father, he’s a physician, but he’s actually a medical reporter.

And that’s a whole separate field that fascinated me.

So when I graduated, I was like, OK.

I went and actually got a job producing and editing a show for PBS, which was super cool

in New York City.

And that was around: 2000

I was doing it for a couple of years.

And we were– it was a PBS show, so we were very reliant on donations and whatnot.

And: 2008

It dried up.

We ran out of money.

And I was looking for a job.

And I worked on a couple of movies that were being shot in the city.

And I found this job at this weird company called SAMMA Systems on 10th Avenue and 33rd

Street or something that was Jim Lindner’s company.

That came to learn later.

But they were making these robotic systems that would migrate videocassette tapes to

a digital format.

So think of a bunch of tape decks on top of each other with a gripper going up and down

and pulling videotapes out of a library, putting them in, waiting for them to be digitized,

taking them out, cleaning them– not in that order, but essentially that way.

And I was just fascinated.

I mean, it was so cool.

Building robots.

Chris Lacinak: 07:02

Yeah.

Aaron Edell: 07:03

You know, video.

It was everything I loved kind of in one. And the rest is just really history from there.

Chris Lacinak: 07:09

Yeah.

So we have another intersection that I didn’t know about, which was Hampshire College, although I was denied by Hampshire College.

So you definitely one-upped me on that.

Which I taught at NYU in the MIAP program, and Bill Brand also taught there, also taught

at Hampshire College.

And I told him that I was denied by Hampshire College.

And he said, I didn’t know they denied people from Hampshire College.

Aaron Edell: 07:30

Oh, that makes it worse.

Chris Lacinak: 07:32

Anyway, all things happen for a reason.

It was all good. But that’s very cool.

That is a great school.

And what a fascinating history there.

So it’s not– I mean, I still think there’s– let’s connect the dots between working for

a company that was doing mass digitization of audiovisual and where you are today at

Wasabi.

Like, that is not necessarily easy to fill in that gap.

So tell us a little bit about how that happened.

Aaron Edell: 08:00

Yes.

Well, as my father likes to say, you know, life is simply a river. You just jump in and kind of flow down and you end up where you end up.

I don’t think I could have engineered or controlled this.

p– you know, SAMMA, this was: 2008

If I could jump back, you know, and say to myself back then, this is where you’re going

to end up, I would just been like, how?

How do you do that?

How is that possible?

So this is what happened.

I mean, I– you know, SAMMA was very quickly acquired by a company called Front Porch Digital

in: 2000

Very close to: 2009

And Front Porch Digital, you know, created these products that were– the core product

was called DIVA Archive, which still exists today, although it’s owned by Telestream.

But essentially, it is– you know, you’ve got your LTO tape robot and you’ve got your

disk storage and you have– you’re a broadcaster.

And you need some system to keep track of where all of these files and digital assets

live and exist.

And you’ve got to build in rules.

Like, take it off spinning disk if it’s old.

Make sure that there’s always two or three LTO tape backups.

You know, transcode a copy for my man over here.

Automation wants some video clip for the news segment.

You know, pull it off tape and put it here.

All of that kind of stuff was the DIVA Archive software.

And I’m oversimplifying.

But through that process, you know, I was– I joined as the– I was kind of bottom of

the rung, like, support engineer.

And I had delivered some SAMMA systems, you know, installed some and did a little product

managing just because we were– you know, we needed it.

We were only eight people.

And I was probably the most knowledgeable of the system other than one or two people

at the time.

And so by the time I got to Front Porch Digital, you know, I was doing demos and I was– I

was architecting solutions for customers.

So I was promoted to a solutions architect.

And that’s kind of where I learned, you know, business, just like generic business stuff,

emails, quotes.

I learned about the tech industry and media and entertainment industry in particular and

how, you know, how sales works in those industries and how it doesn’t work sometimes.

And all of the products that are– that are involved.

So I was kind of, you know, getting a real good crash course of just how media and entertainment

works from a tech perspective and how to be a vendor in the space.

I did a brief stint at New Line.

For those of you who don’t know New Line, I don’t think it exists anymore, but it was

a company based in Long Island that kind of pioneered some of the like set-top box digital

video fast channel stuff.

And then– but I was more or less at Front Porch for about seven years.

And then Front Porch was acquired by Oracle.

And working at Oracle was a very different experience.

You know, they are a very, very large company and they have a lot of products.

And I don’t know, I just– it just didn’t feel like I could do my scrappy startup thing,

which I had kind of spent the last 10 years honing.

So that is– so, you know, that is kind of at the point where I– a sales guy that I

had worked with at Front Porch named Tim Stockhaus went off to California to start this company

called GrayMeta based on this idea that we were all kind of floating around, which is,

man, metadata is a real problem in the industry right now, especially as it relates to archives

and finding things.

So GrayMeta was founded on that idea.

When I joined there, I was the first or second employee.

So it was– we were building it from scratch.

And I mean building everything, not just the product or the technology, but the sales motions

that go to market.

And that’s where I learned all that stuff.

I quit GrayMeta about two years in to go start my own startup because I just wanted to do

it.

I wanted to be a founder.

I wanted to know what that was like.

And I, at that point, had learned a lot about machine learning and how it applies to the

media and entertainment industry, specifically around things like transcription and AI tags.

And a couple of my coworkers at GrayMeta had this really great idea that let’s build our

own machine learning models and make them Docker containers that have their own API

built in and their own interface and just make them run anywhere, run on-prem, run in

the cloud, wherever you want.

Because it solved a lot of the problems at the time.

So we jumped ship.

We built the company.

It exploded.

I was the CEO.

My founders were the technical leaders.

And between the three of us, man, we were doing everything– sales, marketing, building,

tech support, all of it.

And gosh, what a learning experience.

Also as a founder and CEO, you’re raising money.

You’ve got to figure out how the IRS works.

You need to figure out how to incorporate stuff.

So a whole other learning experience for me.

a company called Veritone in: 2019 

Changed our lives.

I mean, we went through an acquisition.

We walked away with a lot of money.

And it was a whole new world.

Things open up, I guess, when that happens to you in business.

And I actually got recruited to join AWS.

And the funny thing is that it had nothing to do with media and entertainment or AI at

all.

AWS said, hey, you have a lot of experience taking situations where there’s a lot of data

and simplifying it for people or building products to simplify it for people and make

it more consumable and understandable.

AWS has that problem with their cost and usage data.

Chris Lacinak: 13:47

Oh, interesting.

Aaron Edell: 13:49

Yeah. And you get a, especially if you use a lot of the cloud and you’re a big company, you

get a bill. It’s not really a bill.

You get like this data dump that’s not human readable.

It’s billions of lines long, has hundreds of columns.

You can’t even open it in Excel.

It’s like, how do I use this?

So AWS was like, go figure this out, man.

So I mean, gosh, it was such a great experience.

We built a whole business based on this idea.

We built a product.

We built a go to market function.

We changed how AWS and actually I think how the world consumes cloud spending.

I think we had that big of an impact, not to toot our own horn, but it was for me, for

my career and my learning as a human, wow.

Like seeing how you can impact the whole world.

Chris Lacinak: 14:39

Yeah.

Well, as a consumer of AWS web services, I’ll say thanks because the billing definitely improved dramatically over the past several years.

So I know exactly what you mean.

And I see the manifestation of your work there.

I didn’t realize though that that’s what you’re doing at AWS.

I did always have in my mind that it was on the AI front.

So that’s really interesting that you kind of left that.

So in some ways, your role now is kind of a combination of the two in the sense that

Wasabi is a competitor to AWS, but you are very much in the AI space.

So tell us about what you’re doing at Wasabi now.

Aaron Edell: 15:17

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, you know, it was your point is really spot on because one of the biggest problems, I think for customers of the cloud is that, and I learned this thoroughly, is that it’s

not forecastable and it’s really hard to actually figure out what you’re spending money on.

And it’s also can be expensive if you do it wrong.

There really is a right way to do cloud in a wrong way.

And it’s not always obvious how to navigate that.

So when I first came up, so, you know, the board of GrayMeta called me while I was AWS,

you know, kind of chugging along and said, “Hey, Aaron, why don’t you come and be CEO?”

And I thought, you know what, that’s scary.

But it’s also like, it’s perfect because the Graymeta story, I feel like we never got to

finish telling it.

I left, you know, before we got to finish telling it.

And so I came back and I said, “Guys, I’ve now had the experience of creating our own

machine learning models and running a machine learning company, like one that actually makes

AI and solves problems.

Let’s do that.”

So that’s when I met Wasabi, was very shortly after I came back.

And you are totally right, because when I met Wasabi, it was like a door opening with

all this, you know, heavenly light coming through in terms of cloud FinOps.

Because Wasabi is, you know, cloud object storage, just like S3 or Microsoft Blob, that

is just $7.99 per terabyte and, sorry, $6.99 per terabyte and just totally predictable.

Like, you don’t get charged for API fees, you don’t get charged for egress, which is

where the kind of complexity comes in for other hyperscalers in terms of cost optimization

and understanding your cloud use and cloud spend.

That’s all the unpredictable stuff.

That’s what makes it not forecastable.

So the fact that, you know, Wasabi has just like a flat per terabyte per month pricing

and there’s just nothing else.

It’s just elegant and simple and beautiful and very compelling for the kind of experience

I had in the, and we call it the FinOps space or cloud FinOps space, where for three and

a half years, all I heard were problems about that this solved, right?

So it just pinged in my brain immediately.

The connection with AI, you know, goes back even further in the sense that I had always

advocated for, I always believed fundamentally that the metadata for an object and the object

itself should be as closely held together as possible.

Because when you start separating them and they’re serviced by different vendors or whatever,

that’s where the problems can seep in.

And one of the best analogies for this that I can think of is, you know, our Wasabi CEO,

Dave Friend, I love how he put it because he always refers to, you know, a library needs

a card catalog, right?

You go into the library and the card catalog is in the library.

You don’t go across the street to a different building for the card catalog, right?

It’s the same concept.

I mean, it’s obviously, you know, the physical world versus the virtual computer world, but

similar concept in the sense that, you know, the metadata that describes your content,

it should be as close to the content as possible because if it’s not, you know, you are at

risk of losing data at the end of the day.

I mean, I’ve talked to so many customers that have these massive libraries, sometimes they’re

LTO libraries, sometimes there are other kinds of libraries where they’ve lost the database,

right?

And, you know, in LTO, like you need a database.

You need to know what objects are written on what tape.

It’s gone.

I mean, what do you do, right?

You’re in such a bad, it’s such a bad spot to be in.

So hopefully we’re addressing that.

Chris Lacinak: 19:18

Yeah.

So that’s, I remember reading something on your website or maybe a spec sheet or something for air, which said object storage without a catalog is like the internet without a search

engine or something.

So, and to take that, to tie that to your other analogy, it’s like a library without

a card catalog, right?

You walk in, you just have to start pulling books off the shelves and seeing what you

find.

Although there, we have a lot of text-based information.

When you pull a tape out of a box or a file off of a server, there’s a lot more research

to do than there is maybe even with a book.

So yeah.

Aaron Edell: 19:55

Yes.

Chris Lacinak: 19:56

So tell me, what does AiR stand for?

It’s a capital A lowercase i capital R. Tell us about that. What’s that mean?

Aaron Edell: 20:05

So I believe it stands for AI recognition.

Chris Lacinak: 20:08

Okay.

Aaron Edell: 20:09

And so the idea is that, so the product wasabi AiR is this new product and it’s, you know,

the kind of combination of the acquits. So I guess we skipped the important part, which is that wasabi acquired the Curio product

and some of the people, including myself came over and the Curio product really was this

platform.

We called it a data platform, if you will, that when you pointed at video files and libraries

and archives, it literally, it would do the job of opening up each file, like you just

said and watch essentially watching it, you know, logging, you know, taking it, making

a transcript of all the speech, looking at OCR information.

So, you know, recognizing text on screen, recording that down, pull, you know, pulling

down faces, object recognition, basically creating a kind of rich metadata entry for

each file.

So this is where I think the, the, the kind of marriage between that technology and Wasabi

comes in because you’re, we now have a way of essentially with wasabi AiR it’s, you know,

it’s your standard object storage bucket.

Now you can just say anything that’s in that bucket.

I want it, I want a metadata index for that.

We’ll just do automatically with machine learning and you have access to that and you can search

and you can see the metadata along a timeline, which is really kind of turning out to be

quite unique.

I’m surprised that I don’t see that at a lot of other places in specifically seeing the

metadata along the timeline.

And that’s important because the whole point, it’s not just search, it’s not just, I want

to find assets where there’s a guy wearing a green shirt with the Wasabi logo.

I want to know where in that asset those things appear because I’m an editor and I need to

jump to those moments quickly.

Chris Lacinak: 21:54

Right, right, right.

Aaron Edell: 21:56

So that, that’s, that’s what we’re doing at, at, at wasabi with wasabi AIR.

And that’s, that’s why AiR stands for recognition, AI recognition, because you know, we’re essentially running AI against and recognizing objects, logos, faces, people, sounds for all your

assets.

So I want to dive into that, but before we do that, on the acquisition front, did Wasabi acquire

a product from GrayMeta or did wasabi acquire GrayMeta?

Wasabi acquired the product, the Curio product.

So GrayMeta still exists.

In fact, it’s really quite, is thriving with the Iris product and the SAMMA product, which

we talked about SAMMA.

That was the other piece I skipped over that too.

When I, when they called me and said, come be CEO of GrayMeta, it really made sense because

SAMMA was part of that story.

And that, that was like a connection to my first job in tech, which was wonderful because

I love, I love the SAMMA product.

I mean, we were, we were preserving the world’s history, you know, the, the National Archives

and Library, the Library, US Library of Congress, the Shoah foundation, the, you know, criminal

tribunal in the Rwandan genocide from the UN, like just history.

So anyway, I digress.

Chris Lacinak: 23:07

Well, no, I mean, actually the last step, as we sit here today and talk, the last episode

that aired was with the video of Fortunoff, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, which was, I think one of the first, if not the first SAMMA users.

So that, that definitely ties in.

s that around, I think it was: 2015 

maybe: 2016 

I remember wandering around the NAB floor and, and for the past several months had been

having conversations with Indiana university about this concept of a project around, you

know, this, this, they, they had just digitized or actually were in the process of digitizing

hundreds of thousands of hours of content, video, film, audio.

And they had the problem that they had to figure out metadata for it.

You know, they had some metadata in some cases, in other cases, they didn’t have any, in other

cases it wasn’t dependable.

So we, we were working on a project that was how does Indiana university and others tackle

the challenge of the generation of massive amounts of metadata that is meaningful.

And so we, that, that was the spawning of this project, which became known as AMP.

And by the time this episode airs, we will have aired an episode about AMP, but I was

wandering around the NAB floor.

I come across GrayMeta.

As I remember, it was in like the backup against the wall.

And and I’m like, Oh my God, this is the thing we’ve been talking about.

Like it was kind of like this amazing realization that you know, other folks were doing great

work on that front as well.

I think at the same time there was maybe Perfect Memory.

I mean, they’re, they’re one of the ones who I see doing metadata on the timeline and in

a kind of a similar way that you’re talking about, but but yeah, there weren’t, there

weren’t a lot of folks that were tackling that issue.

So it’s really cool one to have seen the evolution.

Do I have that timeline right?

Was it about like: 2015

Was that you had a product at that point?

I remember seeing it.

So like you had been working.

Aaron Edell: 25:08

Yeah, so I, so we, I joined, I was, like I said, the second employee at GrayMeta, which

would have been August of: 2015

Right.

It must have been.

Chris Lacinak: 25:23

Yep.

Aaron Edell: 25:24

Yes.

So we, we did have a big booth and we had a product, but it’s possible. I can’t remember exactly when it is we introduced machine learning for the tagging is possible.

It was by then.

Yeah.

But it wasn’t right away that originally we were just scraping exif and header data from

files and, and sort of putting a, putting that in its own database, which yeah, it’s

cool.

It’s useful.

But when, when machine learning came out, holy cow, I mean just speech to text alone.

Yeah.

Think of the searchability.

Yeah.

s was definitely a problem in: 2016 

so for many years was that your only option was to use the machine learning as a service

capabilities from the hyperscalers and they were great, but they were very expensive.

Chris Lacinak: 26:13

Yeah.

Aaron Edell: 26:14

And talk about like cost optimization.

You know, we would even as testers, we would get bills from, from these cloud providers that, that shocked us after running it, running the machine learning.

So we, it’s why we started Machine Box was because it just, we just didn’t think it had

to be that, that, that that was the only way to do it.

And, and it was a problem.

Like we were having trouble getting customers because it was just too expensive.

That’s all been solved now.

But, but that’s why I think this is why it’s interesting because the, the, it’s really

good validation that you guys, that other people had come up with the same idea.

That to me is a great sign.

Whenever I see that when independently different organizations and different people kind of

come to the same conclusion that, yeah, this is a problem.

We can solve it this way.

But I think it’s taken this long to do it in a way that’s affordable, honestly, and

secure.

And also the accuracy has really improved since those early days.

Chris Lacinak: 27:15

Yeah.

Aaron Edell: 27:16

It’s gotten to the point where it’s like, actually this, I can use this.

This is a pretty, the transcripts in particular are sometimes 90 to 99 to a hundred percent accurate even with weird accents and in different languages and all sorts.

Chris Lacinak: 27:29

Yeah.

I agree. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s come a long way to where it’s, it’s production ready in many

ways.

Let me ask you though, from a different angle, from the, from the customer angle, do you,

what are your thoughts on whether consumers are ready to put this level of sophistication

to use?

What do you see out there?

Do you see wide adoption?

Are you struggling with that?

What’s that look like?

Aaron Edell: 27:54

So do you mean, you mean from the perspective of like, Hey, I’ve got a Dropbox account or something and I want to, I want to process it with AI? 

Chris Lacinak: 28:01

Well, I think there’s, I think about it in a few ways.

One is, are people prepared? And here let’s think about logistics and technology.

They have their files in a given place.

They know what they know, what they want to do.

They can provide access, they can do all those things.

But the other is kind of policy wise, leveraging the outputs of, of, of something like Wasabi

AiR to be able to really put it to use in service of their mission and providing access,

preservation, whatever those goals are.

Do you, I guess I’m wanting readiness on both those fronts.

Do you, do you see that as a challenge or do you find people are diving in whole hog

here?

What do you think?

Aaron Edell: 28:40

I think, I think people are diving in.

I think we’ve really reached the point now where I do think it’s kind of, it’s a combination of the accuracy and the sort of cost to do it.

Because if it’s not very accurate and very expensive, that’s a problem.

If it’s very accurate and very expensive, it’s still a problem.

But but we’re at a point now where we can do it inexpensively and accurately.

And so I’ll mention that even just today, which, which, you know, by the time folks

listen to this, it’ll probably be a few weeks in the past now or so.

But Fortune magazine published a post about Wasabi AiR and the Liverpool Football Club.

And they, what I, what I love is that they make it very clear, right?

Their use case, which is we want our, the fans of the football club to be able to go

onto an app and just watch highlights of, you know, Mohamed Salah crushing Man U, right?

Manchester United.

And just get it like a quick 30 second compilation of like all the goals or whatever, you know,

just just fan engagement.

And in order to accomplish that, you know, Liverpool has unbelievable amounts of video

content from every game from multiple cameras.

They’re, you know, they’re, I think people imagine that there’s there’s like a whole

bank of editors sitting around with nothing better to do.

It’s not really true.

They don’t, they don’t have that many editors.

And these editors have to, you know, create content from all of this library and archive

constantly and based basically Wasabi AiR makes them do it so much faster that they

can actually have an abundance of content ready for their app, which helps with increases

fan engagement.

And it’s that simple for them.

And they like the quote in the article from Drew Crisp, who is their senior vice president

of their digital world, says that that’s how they think about applying AI.

You know, we want to solve this use case.

We want to be able to create this 30 second compilation of all these goals.

Maybe it’s against a specific team or whatever the context is.

But we can’t sit around for hours and hours and hours watching every single second and

maybe manually logging things or tagging things or, you know, it’s always like, it’s always

a, it always happens after the fact, right?

You’ve recorded it all.

Okay, now it’s on a, it’s safe on, it’s on a disk.

I’ve got all my footage.

And then maybe you, you know, you in the file name, you put the team you played, but that’s

not enough metadata.

So, yeah, so I think they are ready.

I think, you know, it’s, it’s, um, people have to think about it the right way.

You know, this is a productivity boost.

This is a time-saving boost.

This is a, what hidden gems do I have in my archive boost?

You know, that latter, that latter use case, by the way, is, is really spectacular, but

very hard to put a number to and hard to measure.

You know, how much money do I make from the hidden gems?

The things that I didn’t even know I had in the first place.

Chris Lacinak: 31:57

And I, and sports organizations are interesting.

They’ve always kind of been at the leading edge, I think when it comes to, um, creation and utilization of metadata in service of analytics, statistics, fan experience.

I mean, we think about Major League Baseball was always doing great stuff.

NBA has done some great stuff.

I mean, it’s, and, and they have something going for them, which is a certain amount

of consistency, right?

There’s a structure to the game that allows there’s, there’s known names and entities

and things.

So, um, so that does make a lot of sense.

And it seems like it’s just ripe, uh, for, for really making the most of something like

Wasabi AiR.

I can just see that being a huge benefit to, to organizations like that.

Um, are you seeing, can you give us some examples?

Are there other, um, maybe non-sports organizations that are, that use cases that are using Wasabi

AiR?

Aaron Edell: 32:53

Yeah, definitely.

Um, I’ll give you one more sports one first though, because there there’s, you know, the, the use case I gave you is, is about creating content and marketing content for channels

and for consumption of consumers.

But they also are, you know, especially teams, individual teams are very brand heavy in the

sense that they, you know, they seek sponsorship for logo placement in the field or the stadium

or whatever.

And AiR is used for, by sports teams to look at that data and basically roll up, hey, the

Wasabi logo appeared in 7% of this game and the Nike logo appeared in 4% of this game.

And then you can go to Nike and say, Hey, do you want to be 7%?

You should buy this logo stanchion or whatever.

So really interesting use cases there, but non-sports use cases.

So one of my all time favorites is a, uh, a company called, uh, Video Fashion and Video

Fashion has a very large library.

I think it’s on the, to the tune of 30,000 hours of video footage of the fashion industry

going back as long as video can go back.

And they, um, and, and a lot of this was on videotape and needed to be digitized.

And I think they still have a lot that still needs to be digitized, but they used Wasabi

AiR back when it was called Curio, um, basically to kind of, you know, auto tag and catalog

these things so that when they get a request for, and they licensed this footage, right?

So this is how they make money.

This is how they monetize it.

This is why I like this use case because it’s a very clear cut monetization use case where

they sell the, you know, they licensed this footage per, I want to say per second probably.

And they, and so Apple TV Plus came to them one day as just an example and said, Hey,

we’re making a documentary.

It’s called Supermodels.

Do you have any footage of Naomi Campbell in the nineties?

It took them like five seconds, right?

To bust out every single piece of content they have where not only does Naomi Campbell

appear, but her name is written across the street.

Somebody talks about her, right?

So it, it’s literally like a couple seconds.

Yeah.

And then they just, they license it, right?

So they, they get all this revenue and have very little cost associated with servicing

that revenue.

And that’s exactly the kind of thing we want Wasabi AiR to empower.

You know, it’s time is money, my friend.

Yeah.

We’re saving time.

Chris Lacinak: 35:21

I love, one of the things I really like about Wasabi AiR is that it allows you to do sophisticated

search where you can say, I want to see Naomi Campbell. I want it in this geographic location.

I want it at this facility and wearing this color of clothing or something, right?

Like you can put together these really sophisticated searches and come up with the results that

match that, which I think is just fantastic.

I think that is, that is the realization of what the ideal vision is for being able to

search through audio visual content in the same way that we search through Word documents

and PDFs today.

I mean, that’s, that’s, that’s fantastic.

I’d love to dig into like, let’s dig, let’s make this a little bit more concrete for people.

We haven’t really talked about exactly what it is.

We’ve got this high level description.

But let’s jump in a little bit more.

So, so folks that are going to use Wasabi AiR would be clients that store their assets

in Wasabi, in Wasabi storage.

Is that a true statement?

Aaron Edell: 36:15

Yes, they, they can be existing customers or, you know, new customers. But yes, you need to, you need to put your stuff in Wasabi storage. 

Chris Lacinak: 36:23

You’ve got your assets in Wasabi storage.

How do you turn Wasabi AirRon? Is it something that’s in the admin panel?

How does that work?

Aaron Edell: 36:31

Not yet.

I mean, that is, that’s where we’re working towards. Right now, you reach out to us, you know, reach out to your sales representative or,

you know, honestly, on our website, I think we’ve got a submission form, you say, I’m

interested, this is how much content I have.

And you don’t have to be a Wasabi customer when you reach out, right?

Like, we’ll help you sort that, sort that out.

But essentially, when we will, we’ll just, we’ll create an instance for you of Wasabi

AiR.

And when we do that, we’ll attach your buckets from your Wasabi account, and it’ll start

processing and basically, you’ll get an email or, you know, probably an email with a URL

and credentials to log in.

And when you click on that URL and log in, you’ll have a user interface that looks a

lot like Google, right?

It’s, it’s, there’s, you know, some buttons and things on the side, but essentially, right

in the center is just a search bar.

And we want it to be intuitive, of course, obviously happy to answer questions from folks,

but you should be able to just start searching, you know, we’ll be processing the background

and maybe you want to wait for it to complete processing, it’s up to you, but you can just

start searching, and you’ll get results.

And those results will sort of tell you, you know, some some basic metadata about each

one, there’ll be a little thumbnail.

And then let’s say you search for the word Wasabi.

And maybe you specified just logos.

I just want where the logo is a Wasabi, not the word or somebody saying Wasabi.

When you get the search results, let’s say you click on the first one, you’ll have a

little preview window and you can play the asset if it’s a video or audio file, right?

We have a nice little, you know, proxy in the browser.

And then you’re going to see all this metadata that’s all time line, timecode accurate along

the side.

And you can kind of toggle between looking at the speech to text or looking at the object

tags, and then on the bottom will be a timeline kind of like a nonlinear editor, be this long

timeline and your search term Wasabi for the logo, you’ll see all these little like kind

of tick marks where it found that logo.

So you can just click a button and jump right to that moment.

And what I like about that is so let’s say, let’s say in the use case, you’re trying to

you’re trying to quickly scan through some titles for bad words, or for nudity or violence

or something like that.

Those, you know, those things will show up and you can just in five seconds, you can

just, you know, make go through them and make sure they’re either okay or not, right?

Like sometimes, for example, it’ll, you know, it’ll give you a false positive.

That’s just what happens with machine learning.

But it doesn’t take you very long.

In fact, it takes you almost no time at all to just clear it and just, you know, go through

and then if you want, you can even edit it and just remove it or add a tag or something.

So let’s so hopefully that gives a good picture.

Aaron Edell: 39:19

Yeah, so well, and I’ll ask this question, because wasabi is so transparent about pricing.

You’ve mentioned $6.99 per terabyte. Is there is there transparency on that level yet with AiR?

Or is this still something that’s in motion?

Or?

Aaron Edell: 39:34

Yeah, we’re still we’re still working on it.

But we do have a kind of a we, we came out with a pricing for NAB, we’re calling it the NAB show special.

So you know, get it while it’s hot, I guess, because we probably will have to change it.

But it’s just $12.99 a terabyte per month.

So think of it almost like a different tier of storage, although, you know, it’s, it’s

the same storage, it’s just that you have now all this indexed metadata.

Chris Lacinak: 39:58

And is that $12.99 per month on top of the $6.99 per month? Or is that inclusive of so $12.99 total? 

Aaron Edell: 40:05

Exactly.

Yeah, which is still cheaper than I think the 20 or 30 bucks per terabyte per month for just the storage for some of the hyperscalers.

So you know, even even if you didn’t use air, and you were just paying for the storage,

it’s still a lot, a lot less expensive.

And there’s no egress and no API fees and all that.

Chris Lacinak: 40:23

Yeah.

So in the I mentioned the project that I was working on before called AMP, we, we call we came up with the term MGM, which stands for metadata generation mechanisms.

And this is to say speech to text or object recognition or facial recognition, as would

all be things we called MGMs, right?

Do you have a term for those?

What do you call those

so I can refer to them the way you do?

So this is so funny you ask, because when we we when we started gray meta, we had so

much fun trying to come up with that term.

And the original product was called haystack.

Because we thought you’re going to find the needles and I like that.

Right?

Chris Lacinak: 41:01

I like that.

Aaron Edell: 41:02

Yes.

So so how do you find a needle in a haystack? Bring a big old magnet.

So we called those things magnets at first.

You’d have a magnet for speech to text or whatever.

I think I think they were still called magnets by the time I left.

When I came back, we were calling them harvesters, which are maybe gosh, extractors, maybe extractors.

Okay, so but but since we joined Wasabi, I think we’ve just been referring to them as

models honestly, models, not all of them are machine learning models, but you know, okay,

Chris Lacinak: 41:36

well, I just just so we have a term for this discussion.

And I’ll use the term models then to talk about that. So so can you tell us what models you have built into air right now?

Aaron Edell: 41:46

Yes.

So right now, we have speech to text, which is outstanding and understands I think, 50 languages and will translate it even to English, as well as do a transcription in the native

language.

We have an audio classification engine, which, you know, basically tries to tell you what

sounds it hears, you know, coughing, screaming, gunshot, blah, blah, blah.

We have a logo and brand detection system, which we just trained ourselves from scratch

and is very good, actually, I’m really surprised because that that’s that was when we were

doing this before, it was a really hard problem to solve.

It still is, but we actually got it working.

Then we have an object recognition model, which will essentially try to tag things that it

sees lamp post shirt, beard, that kind of thing.

And then we’ve got OCR optical character recognition.

So words that appear on the screen get turned into metadata.

And then we’ve we’ve got we call it we call it technical cues.

So this is very specific to the M&E industry, but bars and tone, slate, titles, that sort

of thing.

And then faces and people.

So, you know, we will we will detect faces and then kind of kind of like how in iphoto

on your phone, like it’ll it’ll say, who’s this?

Right.

Here’s a bunch of photos of this person.

Who is this?

Same thing.

Right.

We group unknown faces together.

You can type in who they are.

And then going forward, you basically have names associated with with faces.

Right.

So it’s a very, very simple system.

Chris Lacinak: 43:31

And if I remember right from the demo, you can also upload images of individuals that

you know are going to be in your collection and and identify proactively. Right.

Like if for myself, if I could I could upload three photos of myself, say this is Chris

Lacinak and then it’ll use that.

You can do it ahead of time.

Aaron Edell: 43:52

Exactly.

Yeah. Yes.

So if you know the people ahead of time, you can do it, too, which is which is really useful.

Chris Lacinak: 43:57

I like that feature.

I mean, that’s another thing that is similar with AMP is just the concept of using non audiovisual materials in order to train models on to describe audiovisual objects.

So the OK, that’s great.

And do you do you are those are all of those models, things that Wasabi has built that

are owned by Wasabi?

Or are you connecting to other providers of AI services?

Aaron Edell: 44:24

We built we built all our own models, all homegrown.

This was this was my this was my big change when I came back to GrayMeta because I had experience doing it.

I knew it was possible and I didn’t think that relying on third party models was a good

idea.

I mean, obviously, for intellectual property reasons, but also it’s just really expensive

to do it that way.

We wanted to make it just basically I don’t want to I don’t want to say cheap, but we

wanted to make it economical for people.

Right.

Because that was a major barrier.

If you are, you know, a large library, you could have millions of hours of footage.

And if you’re paying the hyperscalers, which charge like 50 bucks an hour in some case.

I mean, what are you going to spend 120 million dollars on money on

AII tagging? Probably not.

So so we built all our own.

And the reason we were able to do that, and by the way, like, don’t think you can just

go on to Hugging Face and pull down a model off the shelf and just pop it into production.

I have seen that you can’t do that.

And the reason is because, you know, a lot of those models are trained on not media and

entertainment.

They’re trained on other world things and they don’t work.

They don’t their accuracy drops when you’re talking to people like L of C or you’re talking

to to, you know, you know, pick pick your pick your broadcaster, pick your network,

pick your pick your post house.

When you’re talking about media and entertainment content, they need to be trained for that.

And then you got to build in pipelines and we had to do all kinds of stuff to make it

efficient, because there’s a lot of really cool machine learning out there that’s very

advanced but very expensive and compute intensive to run.

And that’s also not going to work for customers.

They can’t spend 50 bucks an hour on their machine learning tagging.

It’s not it’s a no go.

So we’ve put we’ve put years of experience into our models and and also understanding

like what to expect on the other end.

I there’s a there’s a guy who works for me, Jesse Graham.

He’s been doing this for so long that you can give him any machine learning model now.

And he can just he he knows he knows the pieces of content that’s going to throw it for a

loop and he can see the results and he knows customers are going to either be OK with this

or not.

Chris Lacinak: 46:43

Yeah.

Aaron Edell: 46:44

And that that experience is so valuable to us because it gives it lets us quickly iterate.

It lets us go to market with with production models that actually work for customers. They’re not just cool demos.

You know, they’re not just kind of fluffy fun things.

They’re real.

They have real value.

And that’s why we spend so much time building our own models.

Chris Lacinak: 47:04

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by following me on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/clacinak.

And let me ask related to that, talking about training it based on media and entertainment

broadcast content.

How how have you found it to work or have you done testing on archival content stuff

that’s not production necessarily like production broadcast quality, always highly variable,

maybe lower quality audio and video stuff like how how how is it performing on that

sort of content?

Aaron Edell: 48:00

Surprisingly well, actually, I’ll give you an example.

So Steamboat Willie, which is now in the public domain, you know, practically an ancient piece of animated content featuring, I think, the original appearance of Mickey Mouse, although

I don’t think he was called Mickey Mouse back then.

Anyway, there there’s it correctly identifies the boat is a boat.

You know, it the object recognition, surprisingly, is able to tag things that are animated and

in black and white.

I have I have also seen it pick up logos that are on almost undetectable by human eyes.

So we had so much fun showing this off at NAB because I we Wasabi sponsored the Fenway

Bowl recently.

And so we had we had the Fenway Bowl.

We ran we ran it against wasabi air.

And there’s obviously a ton of logos everywhere.

And so there was this one logo golf, I think it was Gulf Oil or something like that.

And I would show it.

So I’d pull it up on the screen and I would click and jump to that moment.

And I would say, OK, everybody who’s watching me do this demo right now, tell me when you

see the Gulf Oil logo in the video.

And they’re like squinting and, you know, most people don’t see it.

But if you kind of expand it and zoom in, it’s just there, teeny tiny little thing in

the background.

So, yeah, I’ve I’ve been I’ve been really pleased with a lot of of where machine learning

has has how far it’s come in terms of the research that’s gone on behind it.

The you know, the the embeddings and weights that you that people are open sourcing and

making available.

It’s just extraordinary.

Chris Lacinak: 49:38

Yeah.

Let me dive into the weeds a little bit here about kind of the the the models and things. I’m curious, I mean, one of the things that we developed in AMP and I’m wondering, I know

that you had to have thought about this and I’m curious where you’ve arrived and what

you’re thinking about for future.

But is the concept of workflows.

It sounds it sounds like and correct me if I’m wrong once I’m done saying this, like

I have my I have my videos and my audio and things stored in in Wasabi.

I turn on Wasabi AiR and it runs these models.

It sounded like seven or eight-ish models, I think, in parallel.

But let’s say that I wanted to create a something that does speech to text and then runs it

through named entity recognition, sentiment analysis.

Right.

I take and I want to take outputs of one model, plug it into another model and create workflows

instead of just getting the output of a single model.

Where are you at?

Does that exist today?

Is that on the horizon?

What’s that like?

Aaron Edell: 50:44

Yeah.

So I’ve experimented with that in some way or another at actually several different companies. In fact, I think at Veritone, we even had like a workflow builder that you could do

where you could sort of drag nodes in and go output from this to there.

The state, I think the way that we’re thinking about it today is we just we don’t want you

to even have to do that.

So let’s pick apart why you’re doing that.

So named entity recognition based on speech to text.

It’s a really good example.

Like I want maybe I want to search by places.

So speech to text is particularly the one that we’ve developed is surprisingly good,

is shockingly good at proper nouns and proper names for things.

This is where speech to text in the past has always fell down.

But it’s just text.

So the way we think about it is instead of you having to come up with that use case for

that workflow, we’re just going to build that in.

So when you’re running product and you’re thinking about, “Okay, how do I solve these

problems?”

I like to I like and this is a great thing I learned from from working at Amazon is just

put yourself in the customer’s shoes, be customer obsessed.

Think about, okay, the editor is sitting down, they got to do their job.

They want to get shots of the Eiffel Tower or something or maybe just I don’t know, I’m

trying to think of a better example of that.

Because if you search for Eiffel Tower, you just show up.

But named entity recognitions like companies or something like that.

Maybe I’m looking for people.

Okay, I got it.

When people are talking about Wasabi the company and not wasabi the sushi sauce, right?

I want to differentiate.

So normally, if I search for the word Wasabi, obviously, all references will show up.

We are going to give you an experience where that is just seamless, right?

It’s a new option.

Just search for Wasabi the company or I’m doing named entity recognition on the speech

to text.

That’s how we might solve it in the back end.

We may solve it some other way.

There is a lot of the whole machine learning pipeline thing is what’s really evolving.

Like for example, our audio classification and speech to text are one multimodal model,

for example.

So there’s this kind of newer world of these end to end neural networks that are really

good at doing different things.

Instead of in the old way, which is what you described where we would kind of have the

output of one and go and make it be input in another, that kind of ends up being like

a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox sometimes.

So we’re building kind of more capabilities around combining these things into one neural

network so that A, it’s way more efficient and B, it’s more accurate.

So that you’re going to see from us in the coming months, a lot of innovations around

that and with the express goal of doing what you described, which is just better search,

better, more contextual, more accurate search.

Chris Lacinak: 53:56

Well, I have to hand it to you.

I mean, I think what you gain with sophistication, you kind of add a burden of complexity. And right now I’ve seen the demo of Wasabi AiR and it is elegant in its simplicity.

I can totally understand aiming for simplicity.

That’s going to be a better user experience.

So yeah, that’s interesting.

It’d be good to maybe, I don’t want to bore our listeners with that, maybe a sidebar sometime

offline we can talk about that.

And another question in the weeds here, I mean, one of the things that I’ve grappled

with or we grappled with in the AMP project that I’d love to know what you’re thinking

about or how you’re managing this, if you’re able to share is on the efficiency front of

processing efficiency, right?

The concept of running, for instance, speech to text where there’s nobody talking, it’s

music or BPM analysis on music where there’s somebody talking, right?

Facial recognition where there aren’t people.

You got the idea here, but trying to really only feed segments of relative things to models,

using your term in order to create more efficient and cost-effective processing.

Is that so negligible?

Is that so processor intensive that it doesn’t really pay off or is that an actual model

that I’m now using model in a different way that works?

Aaron Edell: 55:26

I know what you mean.

Yeah, I think it does add up. So in the true FinOps cost optimization fashion, once you take out the big things, you go after

the little things because they just add up, right?

If I can reduce some fee that’s one cent or something to half a cent, that in theory would

add up.

So it’s worth it to think about it.

We do have some of that.

So for example, you mentioned a really good example of that, which is don’t run speech

to text if there’s nobody talking.

So we actually have a separate model that we call, I think it’s called the voice activity

detector or something like that.

So this is what I mean.

It’s such a good example of what I was trying to convey, which is that you have to think

about these things when you’re doing this in production.

And these are the things that drive efficiency to make it actually viable for customers to

pay for and use.

So when we first started building our own speech to text, we just plopped it in, we

ran it and my goodness, it was so slow.

And the accuracy was great, but it just was not going to work.

Over time, we built the pipeline better.

We introduced VAD that greatly improved the accuracy of the timecode markers for the speech

to text, as well as improved the overall efficiency.

I mean, I don’t want to get in trouble for this, but I think we improved the efficiency

by a hundred times.

Think about that.

Chris Lacinak: 57:00

Yeah.

Aaron Edell: 57:01

That’s a huge, huge difference.

And that’s just basically trial by fire in some ways. I mean, I believe in iterative product design.

I don’t like to sit around for six months and try to build the perfect product.

I like to build little things and iterate quickly and learn.

And that was one of the first things that we learned when we first started doing speech

to text.

And we just iterated it and made it faster, faster, faster until we got to this super

efficient state.

So yeah, for an in the weeds question, that was a really poignant one because it is where

I think the value of AiR comes from and perhaps other systems that are trying to accomplish

the same thing is when you build your own machine learning, there’s a lot of things

you got to think about and it’s hard to know what they’re going to be up front.

And it’s taken us years to get it right.

Now, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll take everybody years.

You can always learn, but it’s a trial by fire.

Chris Lacinak: 57:56

It makes me think of Formula One racing with hundreds of little tweaks to these vehicles

to make things just get a 10th of a second faster or something. Right.

Let me jump over to the questions around ethics and AI.

And I’m going to break that into a couple categories to kind of go off of here.

I guess, you know, when it’s come up, typically there’s one around bias, how do the AI models

in this way perform across a variety of contexts?

Another is around intellectual property.

Like here we think of in Chat GPT now, I can buy the business license in which my content

that I’m feeding it is not going to train the model, right?

As opposed to the free or the cheap one where my data that I feed it goes to train the larger

model.

Can you talk about how you are thinking about and acting on those sorts of ethical questions

today?

Aaron Edell: 58:57

Absolutely.

You know, for me, machine learning is not a means to an end. So I kind of like to use the analogy that, you know, I don’t go around talking about

how Wasabi AiR is built on electricity, right?

Like that doesn’t make sense.

Electricity is a technology that we kind of take for granted.

Machine learning solves the real problem that I’m trying to solve, which is I don’t want

people to have to lose content in their archives.

I want people to be able to find stuff quickly and be able to get it out the door.

And I want editors to just have a wonderful life, not be miserable.

And so I think about machine learning in that sense.

I don’t think about it as a, hey, we’re going to try and scrape as much data and make the

best overall models and make money by selling machine learning, if that makes sense.

So I think your motivations for your ethical use of AI start there.

The bias thing is really interesting, and I have to hand it to, I mentioned my Machine

Box co-founders before, Mat Ryer and David Hernandez.

David Hernandez, brilliant computer scientist, he really taught me a lot.

And one of the things that he pointed out to me was, and this was back in, we were doing

Machine Box in, I don’t know,: 2017 

turn words into vectors.

And this is important because for the listeners who don’t know what that means, basically

take the word frog and take the word toad.

Now instinctually as humans, we know that those are a lot closer together in concept

than the word frog and the word curiosity.

So vectors attempt to kind of do the same thing.

We take basically every word, and this is, you have to picture a thousand dimensions,

right?

It’s not a three-dimensional thing, it’s like thousands of dimensions.

But basically in these thousands of dimensions, we can do math to figure out that the word

frog and the word toad are very close together.

And this helps us in search.

So if I search for toad, I get pictures of frogs because they’re very relevant.

Now those systems, a lot of these embedding and vectorization systems were trained, at

least back in the day, and I’m pretty sure this has been addressed, but they were trained

on news articles and written material from humanity ranging all the way back.

So what happened was that if you actually look at the distance between, for example,

the word doctor and the word man, much closer than doctor and woman, and the inverse was

true for nurse and man and nurse and woman.

Now that’s a bias.

That bias came from the training data, which is again, I think was a lot of news articles

written over the last 70 years or something like that.

So what you end up with is a machine learning system that’s just as biased as humans are

or have been in the past.

And they don’t necessarily reflect our inclusive nature and how we want our society to exist

where we don’t want that bias.

That’s not something we want in our machine learning because we’re using our machine learning

to solve problems in the real world and it doesn’t reflect the real world.

So I think about that a lot and I think about how can we improve our machine learning.

Now it’s the training data.

It’s not the machine learning models.

It’s the training data.

So we as humans have to go back and fix that in the training data and do our best to think

of those things ahead of time.

And there’s ways, there’s tools to process your training data in certain ways and look

at patterns and things like that.

And you can detect that kind of thing.

So I’m always thinking about that and I always want to make it better.

And it’s probably an ongoing challenge that’s never going to really end, but something that

we have to pay attention to.

Ethically, like any technology, any new technology, what I’m about to say could be applied to

nuclear physics.

It could be applied to electricity.

It could be applied to taking metal and making it sharper.

Don’t use it for bad things.

Your intentions, like I mentioned before, my intention is to make people’s lives at

their jobs, in particular media and entertainment editors and marketing people and these professionals,

I don’t want them to have to sit around trying to find stuff.

I want to make them immediately find the thing they’re looking for and deliver the content

and the value that they want.

That’s my purpose.

If your purpose is to go around electrocuting people or dropping nuclear bombs or stabbing

people, you’re going to use these technologies in the wrong way.

So I don’t mean to say that we all have to just be responsible for our own actions.

I think we do, but the rules that we come up with, scientists have rules around bioengineering,

for example.

There’s laws against you can’t patent certain molecules, you can’t patent DNA.

Those things are being challenged all the time.

But I do think that we can collectively as a society agree that we’re not going to use

AI for these purposes, even though some people will.

You can’t legislate bad guys out of existence.

They will be there and they will test it.

But I think the more educated we are about it, the more we can tackle it.

But I don’t think that means we have to stop using AI or ML or we can’t innovate and we

shouldn’t innovate and we shouldn’t see where this can go.

I think that’s equally as dangerous.

Chris Lacinak: 64:43

I’ve got a question that’s a little bit out there, but if you don’t have a response to

this, I don’t know anybody who does. So you’re the best person I can think of to ask this question.

And that is about the prospect of a future in which the machine learning models, and

here I’m not talking about models as in things that generate metadata, but the machine learning

model as in the thing that you train over time, are interoperable.

Is there a future in which I go to Wasabi as an organization, my data is there, I

spend years training it and cultivating that data, not just the data, not the output of

just the metadata, but let’s say the machine learning that we do over time and training

the models and giving it feedback and maybe triangulation of that data, that God forbid

Wasabi goes out of business in 20 years, that I could take that and transfer it to another

entity that has machine learning.

Is there a future in which such a thing exists or is that not even on the horizon?

Aaron Edell: 66:04

Well, today, I’m a very customer obsessed person.

I mentioned that already. And I think if I’m the customer, when I spend effort and time training a machine learning

model, let’s say in Wasabi AiR, which you can do, you can train it on people and soon

you’ll be able to train it on other things.

I’m putting my effort and my data into that.

I should own that.

And I believe in that.

So we segment that all off.

We don’t aggregate people’s data.

We don’t look at the training data and make our own models better.

You own it.

It’s your data.

If you trained it, it’s yours.

But I think that it would be hard, just the nature of the technology itself, it’s hard

to take all that training and shuffle it off somewhere else.

I mean, I guess in theory, there’s like embeddings and vectors and stuff like that and you could.

I think more likely over time, you won’t have to train it.

I think our models will get better at context.

They will be larger.

They’ll have more parameters.

But I also think that they’ll get more specific and I kind of like this agent approach that’s

kind of emerging where, let me put it this way.

I do not think that artificial general intelligence is anywhere near happening.

I mean, I think people will change their definition of what that means to kind of fit their predictions.

But I don’t think that we’re in danger of one very large AI model that just does everything

and takes over humanity and kills us all.

Or I don’t know, who knows, maybe they’ll do something wonderful, like help us explore

other planets, whatever.

I think what’s more likely is that we will get better at segmenting off specific tasks

and making machine learning models that are just very, very, very good at that and then

orchestrating that, which is kind of what Wasabi AiR does today.

But I don’t think the need for training it is interesting because if you asked me this

question back in: 2017 

machine learning, which is that your machine learning model should be trained on the data

that it’s expected to run against.

You should not be able to tell the difference.

And this was kind of at the time when synthetic training data was emerging and you can’t beat

a human curated, really, really clean, really good data set.

You can’t beat it.

And today I think that that might be changing a little bit and that the need to train models

to be more specific or to train it on your own data is not heading up.

I think it’s probably going down.

In fact, we already see some of it a little bit.

Like, you know, take, okay, great example, the Steamboat Willie example.

It used to be that you would have to train your object recognition system to recognize

animated objects as kind of custom objects.

We have been experimenting with some machine learning that we haven’t put into air yet,

but we might at some point where you don’t have to do that anymore.

In fact, it actually interprets your search in a different way.

So if I searched for, let me put it this way, like it would process a picture.

Let’s say it takes a picture of the two of us talking and I have a beard and you don’t

have a beard.

And I sent it to this system and processed it.

Instead of coming back with brown hair, beard, blue shirt, microphone, right, this whole

list of things, it just sits there.

Then you ask it, is there a microphone in this picture?

Yes, there is.

Here it is.

Is there, and this is what I like about it because the words that we use can be very

different.

So is there a mustache?

Yes, there’s a mustache.

And it draws a line just around this part of my beard.

Instead of saying the whole thing is a beard, right?

Or it’s using an LLM to interpret the question rather than trying to seek custom training.

And it has a fundamental deep understanding of the picture in a way that we don’t understand

as humans, right?

It’s broken it down into vectors and things that are just basically math.

And when you ask it, is there a green shirt here?

It interprets your question and goes, okay, this vector over here kind of looks like a

green shirt.

I’m going to say there’s a 60% chance that that’s what it is and draw a bounding box

around it and there you go.

I think that’s the future.

I think that’s where we’re going.

Machine learning models that are specific, but way more contextual and understand images

and video and data in ways that we can’t, but can be mapped to concepts that we as humans

think about.

Chris Lacinak: 71:22

And somewhat related, kind of pulling several of these strings together, like the question

around humans in the loop, like we’ve done a lot of work with the Library of Congress and Indiana University, that AMP Project kind of had at its core that humans in the loop

as far as these workflows go.

And some of that was quantitative.

It was about, for instance, taking the output in a given workflow, taking the output of

speech to text, reviewing it by a human, editing, correcting, and then feeding it back sort

of thing.

Some of it’s qualitative.

It’s about ethics.

There are some sensitive collections that need to be reviewed and make sure that they’re

described properly and accordingly and things.

And I guess I wonder, do you think about that in the work that you’re doing?

One, it sounds like some of what you just said makes it sound like the quantitative

aspect of that is becoming less and less important as things improve dramatically.

But I wonder, do you think about humans in the loop with regard to what Wasabi offers,

or do you think about that as something that’s up to the user post-Wasabi processing to manage

themselves?

Aaron Edell: 72:31

No, I think about it all the time.

In fact, one of the bigger initiatives that we have, and we are still working on it very much, is a frictionless human in the loop process with your data.

So in spite of what I just said, I still think that you need to be able to teach it things

based on your data and correct it, and it should learn.

We do that with faces today, for example.

That’s a really good example of this, but it’s solved.

Where we want to take it is some of the other things you mentioned.

So improving proper noun and proper name detection, improving the way it detects certain objects

and things in your data, because maybe you’re NASCAR or something, and you just have a very

specific content with objects that are, in the broader perspective, kind of strange,

but in your perspective are very set and usually the same or something like that.

You should be able to use your own data and say, “Yeah, that’s what this is.

This is a tire.

This is this car.”

And we actually do have it in the system.

We’ve just disabled it for now because I want to make it so seamless that you don’t even

really know what you’re … You don’t even really think about it as training machine

learning.

Just like … I really love the Apple Photos example.

They just do such a good job with faces.

I don’t know if you have an iPhone.

I’m sure Android does the same thing.

Just go in your photos and it’s like, “Hey, who is this guy?

Who is that?”

Brilliant.

It should be very similar.

“What is this?

I don’t know what this is.

Tell me what this is.”

So I think about that a lot.

I definitely see … There is just no better arbiter for accuracy in machine learning and

data sets than humans, ironically.

You have to, as a human, make some decisions.

For example, back in: 2016 

I bet I could train a classification engine to tell if a news article was fake news or

not fake news.”

ake news was a big problem in: 2016

I went about to try and train it.

Basically that meant creating a data set of fake news and not fake news.

I wrote a lengthy blog post about the details, so I won’t reiterate it here.

What I ended up figuring out was that, as a human, I have to decide what is fake news.

How do I … Is it satire?

Is it factually incorrect information?

There’s all these subcategories.

I just had to figure out where do I draw the line.

The machine learning ended up working best was when I drew the line in the data set had

bias.

What I was really doing was training a bias detection system.

So it was able to tell if this article was written in a biased way or an unbiased way

and rank it.

That journey for me was really telling about how data sets get made to train these machine

learning systems in the first place.

You really cannot mess up.

This is where the human in the loop problem or question can become a problem and you have

to think about.

If I am surfacing, “Hey, what is this logo?” and you get it wrong and the next guy gets

it right five times, you’ve caused a problem in your machine learning because you now have

a dirty data set.

So you need to think about that.

How do I keep it clean?

How do I check that this work that’s been done is actually accurate?

That’s part of the reason why we’re spending so much time thinking about it is we want

to get that experience right.

Chris Lacinak: 76:26

So that’s on the horizon, it sounds like.

That’s great. Look forward to seeing that.

And users of Wasabi AiR, you have, as we mentioned, a user interface within Wasabi’s GUI, but

is there APIs that can push this out to other systems?

If people generate the metadata in Wasabi AiR, can they push it to their DAM?

Aaron Edell: 76:49

Absolutely.

In fact, we’re in the talks with several MAM systems right now. I think that IBC, which is in September, will be able to announce some of them, but we want

people to do that.

The vision for Wasabi AiR and for Curio prior to the acquisition was always that this is

a sort of data platform with APIs.

In fact, our whole UI consumes our own APIs.

That was really important for us and that was a wise decision that was made before I

came back to GrayMeta because at the end of the day, you know this, in the DAM world,

in the MAM world in particular, man, you can go in a lot of directions with a MAM.

You can get bogged down in the tiny features and all of the requests that customers want.

And I think that’s why so many MAMs today are kind of like rubber band balls.

They have a lot of features and they’re all different and they all have different buttons

and they can be very confusing.

It’s really hard to keep something simple when you’re sort of serving all of those use

cases and trying to build a thousand features, one for each customer.

I don’t want to be in that business.

So I think we’ve got a great tool that gets you what you need off the ground right away.

Some customers have described it as a great C-level tool as well.

We just need some insight into this archive for our managers or for these certain groups

of people.

But the people who use MAMs and DAMs and really use them, they should have access to the metadata

too.

And so they will.

Chris Lacinak: 78:27

Yeah.

Well, let’s talk, I think what I see when I look at Wasabi AiR is a blurring of the lines between what has been storage and DAM and MAM, but also between storage and other

storage providers that offer AI and ML tools.

Right?

So I’d like to, let’s touch on each of those for a minute.

Wasabi AiR brings to the table something that is in many ways, not new, right?

Google Cloud and AWS, they have a suite of tools that you can use to process your materials,

but it is new that you turn on the switch and it does it automatically.

You don’t have to go deploy this tool and that tool and put together workflows and things

like that.

Is that the main difference between, is that how you would describe the difference between

what Wasabi is doing today and what AWS is doing today?

Aaron Edell: 79:17

Absolutely.

Yes. I mean, I feel like I don’t even need to continue talking, but I will, because I think you described

it pretty perfectly.

We want it to be very simple and elegant and we kind of want to redefine what object storage

is.

What is, especially cloud object storage, like what criteria defines cloud object storage?

And having a metadata and an index that’s searchable, I think is, we’re hoping is going

to be the new definition because it is really hard to solve this other ways.

I mean, there are other similar tools, but yeah, if you use the hyperscalers, first of

all, it’s an API call.

You still have to process your video, transcode it, and in some cases, chop it up, post each

of those pieces, or in other cases, you can send the whole file, but I think it depends,

to an API endpoint, get back that metadata and then what, right?

Like it’s a JSON file.

And then, so if you want to view this metadata on a timeline and make it searchable, there’s

a whole stack you need to build with open search or some kind of search index incorporated.

You need to build a UI.

You have to process and collate all that metadata.

You have to keep track of where it came from, especially if you’re chopping stuff up into

segments.

And yeah, you end up building a MAM.

Chris Lacinak: 80:40

It’s complicated.

Aaron Edell: 80:41

Yeah, it’s complicated.

Exactly. I do think that the value of just being able to just turn it on, like here’s my storage,

press a button, and now I’ve got this insight.

And if I want, I can hit the API, get the metadata into my existing MAM, but I also

have an interface, a search bar, a Google search bar into my archive just without having

to do anything.

I like that.

I like that solution.

Chris Lacinak: 81:07

Yeah.

It makes a lot of sense. And I suspect that there will be others that follow suit, I imagine.

Aaron Edell: 81:16

Probably.

Chris Lacinak: 81:17

So tell me about the blurring of the lines between the dams of the world and Wasabi,

because you’re now, there is, this creates an overlap of sorts. How are you thinking about that?

What do you think it means to the evolving landscape of digital asset management?

Aaron Edell: 81:33

Yes.

It’s definitely a heady topic. And I think that the MAM world has always been a world that both fascinates me and terrifies

me at the same time.

When we were at Front Porch Digital, for example, we integrated with all the MAMs that existed

at the time.

And I remember going to various customer sites and they would show me their MAMs and I was

just like, “Oh my God, this is so complicated.

I don’t know how do you use this?

There must be all kinds of training and everything.”

And they were very expensive.

Very, very, very, very, very, very expensive to implement.

We had our own, we built our own MAM light.

We always called it a MAM light called DIVA Director.

And this is, Diva Director is kind of where I think I get my idea of what a MAM should

be from, but it’s not.

MAMs have a purpose.

There’s a whole world of moving files around, keeping track of high res and low res and

edits and all that, that I am willfully ignoring at this point because that is important.

And it is complicated and there are wonderful MAM tools out there to solve all that.

But when I think about these customers that I spent so much time with, the Library and

Archives of Canada, the Library of the United States Congress, the Fortunoff Archive, the

USC Shoah Foundation, all of these archives have a kind of somewhat finite archive.

Now there’s stuff that’s new, that’s born digital, and maybe they have parts of what

they do that, if you think about like, I don’t know, NBC Universal are always making new

stuff, but they also have an archive.

And the people who are thinking about and maintain the archive have kind of different

use cases from other people.

So when I think about blurring the lines, I really think about the customer.

Like what do they need?

When they wake up and they go to work, what do they have to do with their fingers and

their hands and their brains on their computer?

And if it’s, you know, manage an archive, be the person who can fulfill requests for

content, help other business units find things.

I think an application like Wasabi AiR is probably sufficient.

Now there’s always new, there’s always features and things that can be added and improvements,

but I don’t want to take it beyond that.

Like I don’t want to go further into the MAM and DAM world because I think that those existing

systems are way better than anything we could build for those purposes.

Chris Lacinak: 84:16

So it sounds, yeah, I mean, you look at a lot of dams, you know, there’s complex permission

structures and a lot of implementation of governance and things like that, that Wasabi AiR doesn’t do.

So in those cases, it sounds like Wasabi AiR could serve the purposes of some folks who

don’t need a dam or mam otherwise.

And in other cases, Wasabi Air is populating those dams or mams to help them, give them

the handholds, the metadata for improving search and discovery within their own systems.

Aaron Edell: 84:46

Exactly.

It’s exactly, it’s a source of more metadata and it’s sort of a window into your objects that maybe your other MAMS don’t have.

The other important thing too, is if you flip it, if you think about like S3, right?

If I have, and we’ve had customers who have had S3 buckets with hundreds of millions of

objects in them.

If you go into the AWS console, into the S3 console, there’s no search bar, right?

That’s not part of object storage, you know, because it’s a separate concept.

I mean, it’s, you know, and you have to solve it with technology.

You can’t just search your object storage with no indices or anything like that, that

otherwise it’d take a million years.

So I feel like that’s where we sit.

We are saying Wasabi AiR, Wasabi object storage now has a search bar.

That’s it.

Chris Lacinak: 85:43

We focused heavily on audio and video today. Does Wasabi AiR also work with PDFs, Word documents, images, just the same?

Aaron Edell: 85:52

It does. Okay. It does.

And it’s a good point because those open up, being able to process that opens up whole

other worlds, you know, that we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about, but we will,

we’re going to start.

Because, you know, and video and audio too is not just limited to media and entertainment

as well.

I like to think of, for example, law firms and, you know, maybe there’s a case and there’s

discovery and they get a huge dump of data.

And that data might include security camera footage of a pool gate or, you know, video

or interviews and depositions and not just all the PDF.

And I think, you know, if you were opposing console and you wanted to, you know, give

these, this law firm a really hard time, send them boxes of documents and, you know, you

can’t search boxes and boxes of documents, right?

There’s no insight into that.

Or say, oh yeah, I’ll scan it for you.

You scan it and you send them PDFs, but they’re not, they’re just pictures, still not searchable.

So I think making PDF searchable, making Word docs searchable, pulling out, you know, images

that might be embedded in these things, processing those with object detection and logo recognition

and all sorts is a very valuable space that Wasabi Air does today.

You just got to put it in the bucket.

Chris Lacinak: 87:14

Well, Aaron, it has been so fun talking to you today, geeking out.

Just it’s really exciting. And your career path and your recent accomplishments have been just, you know, game changing, I

think.

Thank you for sharing your insights and being so generous with your time today.

I do have one final question for you that I ask all the guests on the DAM Right podcast,

which is what is the last song you added to your favorites playlist?

Aaron Edell: 87:43

Oh boy.

You know, I have to admit something that’s going to be, that’s going to divide your audience in an extraordinary way, which is that I actually own a Cybertruck.

I’m also a child of the eighties.

So the whole Cybertruck aesthetic really pleases me.

In fact, if you were to just crack open my brain and dive inside, it’s like basically

would be the interior of the Cybertruck.

And the music that would be playing is the kind of a whole genre that I’ve only recently

discovered because of the truck is sort of eighties synth wave.

So I’ve recently added to my favorites, some very obscure eighties synth wave music that

I could look up.

Chris Lacinak: 88:25

Yeah, please.

Please do. We have a soundtrack where I add all of these songs to a playlist that we share.

Aaron Edell: 88:33

So recently I added a song called Haunted by a group called Power Glove.

Chris Lacinak: 88:40

Okay. Awesome.

Aaron Edell: 88:41

And the Power Glove has a space in it. It’s Power Glove. 

Chris Lacinak: 88:45

Good to know.

Aaron Edell: 88:46

Because there’s also a band called Power Glove that doesn’t have a space.

Chris Lacinak: 88:51

Good to know.

We learned yet another thing right at the tail end of the podcast. Awesome.

Well, Aaron, thank you so much.

I’m very grateful for your time and your insights today.

I really appreciate it.

Aaron Edell: 89:01

It’s my pleasure.

Chris Lacinak: 89:02

Do you have feedback or requests for the DAM Right podcast?

Hit me up and let me know at [email protected]. Looking for amazing and free resources to help you on your DAM journey?

Let the best DAM consultants in the business help you out.

Visit weareavp.com/free-resources.

And finally, stay up to date with the latest and greatest from me and the DAM Right podcast

by following me on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/clacinak.

Manage Your DAM Expectations: A Guide to Successful Implementation

In the world of digital asset management (DAM), the journey of implementation can often feel overwhelming. However, with the right approach and mindset, organizations can navigate this process smoothly. This guide explores key insights on managing expectations during a DAM implementation, drawing parallels to the experience of moving into a new home.

Understanding the Need for a DAM System

Every successful DAM implementation begins with understanding the reasons behind the need for a new system. Organizations often face several pain points, leading them to seek a more efficient solution. Here are some common reasons organizations consider moving to or adopting a new DAM system:

• Centralization of Assets: Staff frequently struggle to find images or videos scattered across various platforms like Dropbox, Google Drive, and email. A DAM system centralizes these assets, making retrieval easier and faster.
• Control Over Asset Usage: Misuse of assets is a significant concern. Organizations often find their images on social media or websites without proper permissions. A DAM system helps establish control over how assets are used.
• Unlocking Hidden Treasures: Many organizations have digitized assets that remain underutilized. A DAM system can help make these assets available for broader use.

Deciding What You Need

Once the reasons for adopting a DAM system are clear, the next step is to define what is needed from the system. Organizations should identify three to five key differentiators or deal breakers when evaluating potential DAM solutions. Here are some considerations:

• Budget: Always a crucial factor, understanding the financial implications will guide your decisions.
• Technical Requirements: Determine whether you need on-premise hosting or prefer a vendor-hosted solution.
• Format Compatibility: Ensure the DAM can handle specific file formats essential for your operations, such as InDesign files.
• Functional Needs: Identify critical functionalities, like full-text search capabilities, that the system must support.

Planning and Scoping Your MVP

Creating a clear plan and defining a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) are essential steps before implementing a DAM system. Unlike moving into a new home, where the process is somewhat familiar, DAM implementation can be murky for many organizations. Here are common pitfalls to avoid:

• Resource Allocation: Organizations often underestimate the internal resources required for implementation, sometimes needing one person to focus full-time on the migration process.
• Major Migration Planning: If moving a large volume of data, thorough planning is critical. Transferring data from multiple systems can be complex and time-consuming.
• Over-Ambition: Organizations sometimes aim to do too much before going live. Focusing on core features that work well is essential to avoid extending timelines unnecessarily.

Maintenance, Enhancements, and Repairs

Just like maintaining a house, a DAM system requires ongoing care. After implementation, it’s essential to ensure that the system remains organized and functional. Here are tips for effective maintenance:

• Daily Maintenance: Regularly check and tidy up the system to ensure it operates efficiently.
• Ownership and Oversight: Assign someone to oversee the DAM, particularly in the initial months after launch, to address any issues promptly.
• Resource Allocation: As the DAM system grows in popularity, be prepared to allocate more resources to maintain its success.

Don’t Go It Alone

Implementing a DAM system is not a solitary journey. Just as you would seek help from a realtor or lawyer when buying a home, organizations should consider enlisting experts in DAM. Here’s how to find the right support:

• Consultants and Specialists: Engage professionals who have experience in DAM implementation to guide your organization through the process.
• Communication Teams: If you aim to promote the DAM widely, consider involving internal communications teams to help socialize and promote the system.
• Expert Organizations: Partner with firms that have expertise in metadata, taxonomy, and asset management best practices to ensure a smoother implementation.

Conclusion

Implementing a DAM system can be a transformative experience for organizations, but it requires careful planning, resource allocation, and ongoing maintenance. By understanding the reasons for adoption, defining needs, and seeking expert help, organizations can navigate the complexities of DAM implementation successfully. Remember, just like moving into a new home, the journey may have its challenges, but the rewards are well worth the effort.

For further insights and resources on DAM implementation, consider exploring specialized DAM consultants and their offerings.

Transcript

Chris Lacinak: 00:00

Hello, welcome to DAM Right.

I’m your host, Chris Lacinak. Today, we’re gonna try something a little different.

We’re gonna do a short episode

that’s about 10 minutes instead of 60 to 90,

and I’d love to know how you feel about it.

Let me know at [email protected].

Today’s episode is an interview with Kara Van Malssen,

who you know if you’re a listener of the show.

If not, I’ll say quickly that Kara is a Partner

and Managing Director at AVP,

a thought leader in the DAMosphere,

and an all-around wonderful person.

The interviewer is former AVP Senior Consultant,

Kerri Willette.

Since doing this interview, Kerri has moved on

and is now doing awesome work, no doubt, at Dropbox.

Kerri is a super talent and pure delight of a human being.

Since we’re keeping this short,

I’ll just quickly say that I really love

how Kara makes the analogy between DAM implementation

and moving into a new home.

She grounds the topic of DAM implementation,

making it both fun and relatable.

I know you’ll enjoy it.

Speaking of which, please go like, follow, or subscribe

on your platform of choice.

And remember, DAM right,

because it’s too important to get wrong.

Kerri Willette: 01:07

We’re here today, we’re gonna talk about

some things that were inspired by the article that you wrote for Henry Stewart’s publication

in the Journal of Digital Media Management,

I think it was volume seven.

That article subsequently evolved into a blog post

that I know you wrote after relocating.

And the blog post is called “Manage Your DAM Expectations.

Or How Getting a DAM is Like Buying and Owning a Home.”

All right, so tip one,

there’s usually a good reason for doing it.

Kara Van Malssen: 01:39

Yeah, so we had an opportunity in another city,

my husband got a job offer. So within five months, we had sold a house,

moved, bought a house, and moved again.

It was quite a lot.

Kerri Willette: 01:52

So what are some of the good reasons

that you’ve heard from organizations who are looking to move to or switch

or get a new DAM system for the first time?

Kara Van Malssen: 02:02

Yeah, so it usually falls into a few different buckets.

Like a lot of times it’s around pain points that they’re having.

So it might be things like,

staff’s trying to find images or videos

and they’re rummaging through Dropbox and Google Drive

and email and hard drives and who knows where,

trying to find what they’re looking for.

And it takes forever and they don’t find it.

So centralizing the assets is one good reason.

Another one we see a lot is maybe misuse of assets

where you’ve got people putting images on social media

that they shouldn’t be using or on the website

that they don’t have permission to use for that purpose.

And so trying to kind of get some control

around the usage of the assets

is another reason we see a lot.

And then another reason might just be

to kind of open up like a new treasure trove of assets

that was previously sort of hidden.

Like maybe you digitized a whole bunch of stuff

and you wanna make that available.

So that’s another good reason.

Kerri Willette: 03:06

So the next tip in your post,

you have to decide what you will need. How do you feel like organizations can answer the question

of what they need in a DAM system?

Kara Van Malssen: 03:16

You’ve gotta figure out what those three to five

or four to six like key differentiator things are or the real deal breakers.

And one of those is always gonna be the budget,

but the other things are unique to you.

Maybe it’s technical things

like you need to host this on-premise

or you need to host it in your own

Amazon Web Services account

or maybe you want the vendor to host it for you.

So those might be some of those considerations

or maybe they’re things like format requirements.

Like you want specific support for InDesign files,

for instance.

Or maybe it’s functional things

like you really need full-text search of documents.

Like that’s critical.

So you don’t wanna look at systems that don’t have that.

It’s like that’s one of your deal breakers,

things like that.

So you’ve gotta kind of figure out what are those top fives

that you really need to have in the DAM

and you can use that to sort of narrow down

the candidate solutions.

And then when you start to evaluate those,

you can really look for the kind of nuance differences

between them and how they actually help you achieve

the goals that you have in mind.

Kerri Willette: 04:28

Yeah, that makes sense.

So tip three in your blog post talks about making a plan and clearly scoping what you call a minimum viable product

or MVP version of what you need.

And you would do that before implementing a DAMS.

We all know that moving requires a lot of planning,

but what are some areas you’ve seen organizations

that you’ve worked with most often not plan well

for implementing a DAM?

Kara Van Malssen: 04:57

There’s a big difference here between moving a house

and moving into a DAM. You kind of know what’s involved

in the moving house situation.

You know, it’s gonna be like a lot of packing

and organizing and then unpacking and organizing.

But with a DAM, a lot of people

haven’t really done this before.

So it’s a little murky,

like what are the things you need to do?

So what we see is, I think, three things that people,

where they might go wrong here.

So one is they’re not allocating enough resources internally

to the implementation and the migration.

And, you know, it’s probably gonna be like

one person’s full-time job for a while.

So just something to keep in mind.

Another is just not really planning

around major migrations.

If you’ve got a lot of data to move

from one system to another,

or from maybe ten systems

or ten different data stores to another,

it’s just, that’s a lot of work.

It takes time and planning.

And then the last one is kind of getting overly ambitious,

maybe not realizing that you’re doing it,

but, you know, trying to kind of do everything

before you go live.

And maybe that’s including like custom integrations,

maybe custom development on top of the

kind of out of the box features of the system.

It’s like if you got a contractor

and you decided to gut renovate the house

before you moved in,

you better expect that’s gonna take you some time.

So you’re not getting in that house really anytime soon.

But this is an organization,

there’s politics, there’s budget,

there’s like, you know, expectations.

And if the thing drags on for too long

before it gets launched,

that can really damage the reputation of this program.

It can kind of lose political will.

So it’s important to kind of scope something

that’s realistic to just get it off the ground

and get those core features working really well.

So things like just making the search work,

the browse work,

making sure the assets are well organized,

making sure they’re well described and tagged,

that people can easily access them when they should

and they can’t access them when they shouldn’t.

So roll out those key features,

get it in the hands of people

who are gonna give you really good feedback

and gonna start with it.

And then you can get those additional things over time.

Kerri Willette: 07:18

Great.

Tip four, maintenance, enhancement and repairs come with the territory.

So Kara, I happen to know

that you recently discovered a gas leak in your new house.

And luckily you were able to get it repaired really quickly,

but it definitely, I think, brings home your point

about allocating resources for future maintenance

and how that relates to home buying for sure.

So how does that relate to your experiences

helping organizations deploy their DAM systems?

Kara Van Malssen: 07:49

Yeah, it’s like with the house,

you’ve kind of got a gamut of kind of home maintenance and repair and improvement that you’re doing.

Like you’re gonna be cleaning every day,

tidying it up, cleaning the kitchen.

You’re gonna be kind of repairing those things that break

and then you’re gonna be making improvements over time.

It’s really the same thing with a DAM.

You’ve gotta have kind of somebody in there

who’s just making sure everything’s tidy and neat

so that the thing continues to work well for the users.

You’d have to make sure that there’s some ownership

and oversight of the DAM from the very beginning,

especially in those critical,

like first few months after launch.

And then over time,

you might find you even need more resources there

than you thought you would

because maybe it becomes really successful and that’s great,

but you’re probably gonna need to throw a bit more manpower

at it to make sure it continues to succeed.

Kerri Willette: 08:43

All right.

Don’t go it alone. What kind of experts, when it comes to DAM systems,

what kind of expert help might be useful?

Kara Van Malssen: 08:53

Yeah, so it’s like, if you’re getting a house,

you know, you’re probably gonna get a realtor, you’re gonna need a lawyer to help with the closing.

You’re gonna probably have a home inspector

come and check it out before you buy it.

Some of those things you might take on yourself,

but sometimes you’re gonna work with others.

And it’s sort of the same thing with a DAM.

A lot of people, I think,

just figure like, I can do this, let’s do this.

But if you’ve never had any experience implementing a DAM

and you kind of don’t know what that path forward looks like

or what the expectations might be

or where you might run into problems,

it can be really hard.

And if you are doing things like in a custom integration

with other applications,

you might need people like developers.

You know, if you’re really gonna be promoting this widely,

if you have a lot of users, you’re trying to get to adopt it

you might need like communications folks

maybe within your organization

to kind of help socialize it and promote it.

And also, you know, organizations like ours, AVP.

So we are experienced in this.

We have a lot of expertise in things like metadata,

taxonomy, search and navigation,

asset organization, management, best practices

and things like that.

So we’ve been down this road before.

So we can also help you kind of manage your expectations

a little bit and try to get to as much

of a painless launch as possible.

Kerri Willette: 10:14

Well, thanks, Kara.

This was really great. It was nice talking to you.

Kara Van Malssen: 10:18

Yeah, thanks, Kerri.

Appreciate it. (upbeat music)

AMPlifying Digital Assets: The Journey of the Audiovisual Metadata Platform

The digital landscape has transformed dramatically in the last decade. AI has reemerged as a powerful tool for asset description. This evolution has enabled previously hidden assets to be discovered and utilized. However, AI tools have often operated in isolation, limiting their full potential. This blog discusses the Audiovisual Metadata Platform (AMP) at Indiana University, a groundbreaking project creating meaningful metadata for digital assets.

Context and Genesis of AMP

Many organizations are digitizing their audiovisual collections. This highlighted the need for a unified platform. Indiana University, with Mellon Foundation funding, initiated the AMP project. Their goal was to help describe over 500,000 hours of audiovisual content and support other organizations facing similar challenges.

The Need for Metadata

Digitization efforts produce petabytes of digital files. Effective metadata is essential to make these collections accessible. AMP addresses this need by integrating AI tools and human expertise for efficient metadata generation.

The Role of AI in Metadata Creation

AI helps automate metadata generation, but integrating various AI tools into one workflow has been challenging. AMP was designed to combine these tools, incorporating human input for more accurate results.

Building Custom Workflows

AMP allows collection managers to build workflows combining automation and human review. This flexibility suits different types of collections, such as music, oral histories, or ethnographic content. Managers can tailor workflows to their collection’s needs.

The User Experience with AMP

Collection managers are the main users of AMP. They often face complex workflows. AMP simplifies this with an intuitive interface, making it easier to manage audiovisual collections.

Integrating Human Input

Human input remains essential in AI-driven workflows. AMP ensures that human expertise refines the metadata generated by AI tools, preventing AI from replacing traditional cataloging roles.

Ethical Considerations in AI

Ethical considerations are crucial in AI projects. AMP addresses issues like privacy and bias, ensuring responsible AI implementation in cultural heritage contexts.

Privacy Concerns

Archival collections often contain sensitive materials. AMP has privacy measures, especially for AI tools used in facial recognition. Collection managers control these tools, ensuring ethical responsibility.

Collaboration and Community Engagement

AMP is designed to be a collaborative platform. It aims to engage with institutions, sharing tools and insights for audiovisual metadata generation.

Partnerships and Testing

AMP has partnered with various institutions to test its functionalities. These collaborations provided valuable feedback, refining the platform to meet diverse user needs.

Future Directions for AMP

AMP’s journey continues as technology evolves. New AI tools like Whisper for speech-to-text transcription are being integrated.

Expanding Capabilities

AMP aims to enhance its metadata generation process with more functionalities. It seeks to improve existing workflows and incorporate advanced AI models for accuracy.

Conclusion

AMP represents a significant advancement in audiovisual metadata generation. By integrating AI and human expertise, it offers efficient management of digital assets. As it evolves, AMP will continue providing value to cultural heritage institutions.

Resources and Further Reading

• AMP Project Site
• Mellon Foundation
• BBC Transcript Editor
• INA Speech Segmenter
• Galaxy Project
• Kaldi ASR

The Importance of Broadcast Archives: Insights from Brecht Declercq

Broadcast archives are an invaluable resource for understanding the cultural, social, and political history of the 20th and early 21st centuries. In this blog post, we will explore the significance of these archives, the challenges they face, and the future of broadcast operations as we transition to a digital age.

Understanding Broadcast Archives

Imagine you are a future archaeologist trying to comprehend the lives of people from the early 1900s to the early 2000s. What would be the most robust source of information? While institutions like the Library of Congress and various landfills have their merits, broadcast collections produced by radio and television broadcasters are arguably the most comprehensive source. These collections hold stories that document the formation of nations, cultural shifts, and significant political events.

The Unique Role of Broadcasters

Broadcasting entities have amassed vast collections over the years, capturing the essence of their respective societies. Through a mix of entertainment, news, and cultural programming, they have created a historical record that includes comedy, drama, and sports. These archives are not just a collection of shows; they are a reflection of the times, offering insights into the prevailing attitudes and events of various eras.

Meet Brecht Declercq

Brecht Declercq is a leading expert in the field of broadcast archives and has served as the President of FIAT/IFTA, the International Federation of Television Archives. His extensive experience in the field has equipped him with invaluable insights into the challenges and opportunities facing broadcast archives today.

The Role of FIAT/IFTA

FIAT/IFTA is the world’s leading professional association for those engaged in the preservation and exploitation of broadcast archives. The organization focuses on creating and exchanging expert knowledge while promoting awareness of future media archiving. With membership spanning public broadcasters, commercial entities, and audiovisual archives, FIAT/IFTA aims to build a global community dedicated to preserving audiovisual heritage.

Surveying the Landscape

One of the organization’s key initiatives is conducting surveys to gauge the state of broadcast archives worldwide. These surveys provide crucial insights into the evolution of archiving practices and highlight the challenges faced by institutions across different regions. For instance, the “Where Are You on the Timeline?” survey allows members to assess their progress in digitization and other archival practices.

The State of Broadcast Archives Worldwide

While some regions enjoy advanced archival practices, others struggle with significant challenges. In wealthier countries, many broadcasters have completed digitization efforts, preserving their audiovisual heritage. However, in less affluent regions, many archives remain in a state of disrepair, risking the loss of critical historical documents.

The Impact of Economic Factors

The financial health of a country plays a significant role in the preservation of its broadcast archives. In economically disadvantaged areas, the degradation and obsolescence of audiovisual carriers are prevalent. This leads to a situation where important historical records may be lost forever, resulting in a gap in our understanding of history.

AI and the Future of Archiving

The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) has introduced new possibilities for managing broadcast archives. AI can enhance the efficiency of cataloging and metadata generation, making it easier to access and utilize archival materials. As the technology continues to evolve, it is likely that AI will play an increasingly prominent role in the archiving process.

Broadcast Archive Operations

Understanding how broadcast archives operate is essential for appreciating their value. Typically, a broadcast archive is divided into several key functions: acquisition, preservation, documentation, and access. Each of these areas plays a crucial role in ensuring that the collections remain relevant and accessible to future generations.

Staffing and Organization

The staffing structure within a broadcast archive can vary widely, depending on the size of the institution and the scope of its collection. For example, Brecht’s current organization, RSI, has a dedicated team of approximately forty staff members. In contrast, larger institutions may employ hundreds of individuals to manage their extensive collections.

Collaboration with Production Teams

Broadcast archives often work closely with production teams to ensure that valuable content is preserved. This collaboration may involve integrating archival processes with production asset management systems (PAM) and media asset management systems (MAM). By connecting these systems, archives can efficiently manage the flow of content from production to preservation.

The Shift to Streaming and On-Demand Services

The rise of streaming services has fundamentally changed the landscape of broadcasting. As audiences increasingly turn to on-demand content, the role of traditional broadcast archives is evolving. The lines between archives and streaming platforms are becoming blurred, with many archives now offering their collections through digital platforms.

Ethical Considerations in Archiving

As broadcast archives transition to digital platforms, ethical considerations come to the forefront. Archives must navigate the complexities of rights management while ensuring that historical content is accessible. This includes addressing potentially problematic content and providing context to users, allowing for a more comprehensive understanding of history.

Preserving History for Future Generations

Ultimately, the mission of broadcast archives is to preserve history for future generations. As Brecht points out, it is vital to acknowledge both the positive and negative aspects of history. By maintaining transparency and providing context, archives can ensure that their collections serve as valuable resources for education and reflection.

Conclusion

Broadcast archives are pivotal in shaping our understanding of history and culture. As we navigate the challenges of digitization, AI, and the transition to streaming services, the importance of these archives cannot be overstated. With leaders like Brecht Declercq at the helm of organizations like FIAT/IFTA, the future of broadcast archives looks promising as they continue to adapt and evolve in the digital age.

For more insights on this topic and to stay updated on the latest developments in broadcast archiving, consider following FIAT/IFTA and engaging with the broader community of media archivists.

Transcript

Chris Lacinak: 00:00

Imagine you’re a future archaeologist trying to understand humans from the early 1900s through the early 2000s. What do you think the most robust, compelling, comprehensive source for obtaining that understanding might be? If I were you, I might be thinking the Library of Congress or landfills perhaps. And in truth, both of those do hold portions of the collections I’m thinking of, but that’s not what I’m going for. I think there’s a strong argument to say that broadcast collections produced and/or held by broadcasting entities across the world is the answer to this question. Radio and television broadcasters have held a unique place in the hearts of people around the globe over the past century and more. In their mission to entertain, document, and inform, they have amassed some of the largest and most important collections throughout the world. Each collection providing deep insights into the time and place in which they were broadcast. Broadcast collections hold the stories of the forming of countries and governments. They hold documentary evidence of culture and politics. They store the comedy, the drama, and the sports that captivated the audiences they reached. Leveraging the power of audio, film, and video, there is arguably no greater record of humanity for this period than the culmination of these broadcast collections.

I’m delighted to have Brecht Declercq join me on the episode today.

Brecht has served on the board of FIAT-IFTA for seven years. In English, this stands for the International Federation of Television Archives, and they are self-described as the world’s leading professional association for those engaged in the preservation and exploitation of broadcast archives. Brecht has served as the president of the organization for the past four years, giving him in-depth knowledge on the state of affairs with regard to broadcasting entities throughout the world. Brecht has also worked with and in broadcast archives for his entire career. Currently, Brecht serves as the head of archives for RSI. The Italian-speaking Swiss public broadcaster. Brecht’s experiences and insights are so interesting and valuable, and I’m excited to be able to share his thoughts and voice with the DAM Right listeners. Remember, DAM Right, because it’s too important to get wrong.

Brecht Declercq, welcome to the DAM Right podcast.

It’s an honor to have you here today. I wanted to have you on the podcast to get a peek inside of radio and television broadcast archives, and you bring a lot to the table there for a variety of reasons. You have worked on and in radio and television archives, and you have been the president of FIAT-IFTA for years now. So I’m really excited for you to bring a sneak peek inside of radio and television archives for our listeners that have not had the opportunity to work within those archives. So thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.

Brecht Declercq: 02:52

It’s a pleasure. So I’d love to start off with getting some insight into your background, and I’d like to maybe pinpoint, is there one thing from your past, your history, that you bring to the table that you think really informs your approach and how you work today?

Brecht Declercq: 03:12

Well, yeah, it’s of course a difficult question because I’ve been active in this field since 20 years. And I think if you’d ask me like, okay, what was that decisive moment in which you said, okay, this is kind of a career that I could make, that I could feel well in, that decisive moment was in fact in 2010 when I attended for the first time a big international conference. It was in 2010, the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives together with the Association of Moving Image Archivists in the US organized their conference, joint conference in Philadelphia. And that was four days of very immersive encounters, I would say, immersive experiences, attending all these presentations, meeting all these passionate people. And I was very lucky to be there because I had submitted a proposal without even asking my boss. And that was the moment in which I said to myself, sometimes it’s better to ask to be forgiven than to ask for permission. And that’s the one lesson that I drew from that experience. And it was so motivating that it kept on thriving based on those four days only in the US for quite a few years.

Chris Lacinak: 04:39

And if I remember right, you and I first met at that conference, I believe.

Brecht Declercq: 04:44

Yeah, that’s true. It’s actually a quite ironic anecdote, I would say. I was speaking about a workflow to migrate the content of DAT tapes, digital audio tapes. And I remember the room was packed and I was very proud of that. It was not a big room, definitely not with maybe 30, 40 people sitting in that room. And you asked me a question at the end of my presentation, and you were asking whether I had ever heard of interstitial errors. And I was so ashamed at that moment that I had to say no, me standing in front of that audience and say, okay, this guy is asking me one question and I don’t even know how to answer it. But then you reassured me and you said, don’t worry, many people in this room won’t have heard about it. So yeah, that was our first meeting, Chris.

Chris Lacinak: 05:34

An advantageous moment, yes. And I remember you being very, I remember your energy. You were very energetic, very into the, I mean, as was I, but I just remember that about you that you and I spoke afterwards and you were very into the conference and super energetic about it. It’s funny to think back quite a while ago. So we later came to meet again when you were at an organization, and my lazy American accent will always get this wrong forever. I’ve said this word a million times, but so you’ll have to forgive it, give me. meemoo was an organization when we started working together, it was called VIAA. But I’d love to, if you could talk about the work that you did there and what was unique about that initiative and that work.

Brecht Declercq: 06:23

Yeah, I think I’ve explained VIAA, now called meemoo, several times around the globe. And I think it can best be explained by pointing to the pain, the pain that meemoo was solving or is still solving. And that is that the audiovisual heritage of many countries is spread amongst a variety of institutions like libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, commercial broadcasters, smaller and bigger ones. And if you thoroughly think about it, and if your national government decides to take a responsibility in that, because that’s not always the case throughout, over the globe, then this comes a very cumbersome duty, I would say. And it can, there is a risk that it becomes a very expensive one. And there is also a need to do it in a very professional way. And that is actually the, meemoo is the answer of the Flemish community, so the Dutch speaking northern part of Belgium to the questions of obsolescence, of degradation of audiovisual carriers and of the increased demand to audiovisual heritage. So what they decided to do is set up, with a government subsidy, of course, set up large scale digitization projects for audiovisual heritage, collecting in fact, all those tapes and cassettes and films, et cetera, et cetera, that were present at so many institutions. We started off in 2013 with around 40 institutions, about 10 broadcasters and 30 libraries, archives, museums. And by now they are at, I think almost 180 of them. And I am proud to say that when I left meemoo about one and a half year ago, about 80% of that whole volume estimated at around 600,000 to 650,000 objects is digitized. So there is still some stuff to be done, mainly film, but that is done. And it was not only about digitization. meemoo also provided sustainable digital storage, because also that can be a cumbersome task for say a small museum or a small library with just a few hundreds of audiovisual carriers. So they provided also that kind of professional storage. You could call it a public cloud. You could somewhat compare it to that. And then they also said, what is the value of all this material if we don’t valorize it not in a financial way, but in a, I always refer to the return on society. So they decided to set up, for example, an educational platform, shortening almost literally the distance between the archival vault and the classroom to let’s call it a few weeks, maybe a few months in some cases, a few days in an extreme case, so that teachers can use those materials in the classroom. And it is indeed a unique construction, but because I so thoroughly believed in it, I still keep on spreading that word because on a, let’s say on a daily basis, I’m confronted with the situation of audiovisual heritage these days in the world. And the number one basic question for so many archives is how are we going to fund our functioning? How can we provide certainty? How can we approach, can we tackle all these huge challenges without certainty about our funding, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that if you manage to convince a government of a very efficient way of dealing with this thing, and you then provide the Flemish example that many governments can be interested in, we’ve seen that in India, for example, and we’ve seen that as well in New Zealand. Those are the only other countries where they, I wouldn’t say copied the Flemish example, but rather got inspired by it.

Chris Lacinak: 10:44

Yeah. Well, it’s certainly, it is one of the most masterful, comprehensive, I think, digital transformations that I’ve seen in that it addresses such a variety of cultural heritage, material types, content. It addresses digital preservation, digital asset management, and as you said, like the outreach engagement to classrooms and to the public and tons of metrics and tracking around that and to measure success. And it’s really a phenomenal initiative, I guess is the word. I’m not sure if initiative is the right word or not, but program, entity, whatever, the effort has been, I think, really phenomenal. So I appreciate you filling us in about that. And we’ll share a link in the show notes to the organization so people can go and check that work out.

Brecht Declercq: 11:36

Yeah. The nice thing about the approach is also, I want to stress is that a lot of the information and the knowledge that they created while doing all this, they’re sharing it for free and in an English version as well on their website. I really want to stress this because it was one of the goals to stress their experience even beyond the Flemish borders, positively deciding to translate stuff also into English and thereby contributing to the spread of this kind of knowledge throughout the globe.

Chris Lacinak: 12:00

Yeah. Well, I wanted to ask you to talk about that because I think it does inform, it’s an important part of your background and kind of the context that you come from. Could you talk a bit about what you’ve done since being at meemoo? Well as I said, one and a half year ago, I decided to leave meemoo, not because I wasn’t having a good time, I was having a great time. I was absolutely having a great time, but it’s always been on my mind to take a challenge abroad. I am Belgian, but I always have had this international outlook. And then a vacancy came up here in Switzerland at RSI. And I kind of know this organization since a while. In 2011, the World Conference of the International Federation of Television Archives, of which I am now the president, took place in Turin in Italy. And I went there by car because some people will know that I have this kind of passion for everything that’s Italian in my spare time. And I went there by car. And when driving back, I came in contact with the Head of Archives here at RSI. And the road from Turin to Belgium actually crosses the town where I’m now living. So I decided to make a stopover and to visit that same RSI. And I was stunned by what I saw because the reason that I stopped was that I wanted to see a very nice innovation, in my opinion, that was a robot, a robot to digitize their video cassette collection, a three-dimensional robot refurbished from the car industry. You know, those orange ones you always see in footage. They had refurbished that and that machine had an autonomy of five days. So for five days, it could continue to digitize tapes, clean tapes, get them out, et cetera, et cetera. And I found that a marvelous innovation. And I wanted to see that. But when I arrived here at RSI, they wanted to show me something else. And that was their speech to text fully integrated with their documentation processes. So we are talking about an artificial intelligence that was already implemented almost 50 years ago. Yeah. They started off with that in 2009. So on not one, but two levels, they were like, yeah, as far as I know, on a global scale, there were forerunners. And I said like, that must be a marvelous organization to be able to work there. So I decided to apply and I’m now Head of Archives. So Head of Archives, meaning that all the archival departments, whether it’s a radio archive is a television archive are under my responsibility here in Italian speaking Switzerland.

Chris Lacinak: 15:04

I want to come back to RSI later, but I want to sidestep and talk about FIAT/IFTA for a bit first. You’ve touched on the organization and what you’ve just said, but I love it. Can you tell us a bit more about what’s the mission of the organization? What’s the makeup of the organization? And tell us a bit more about how the organization works.

Brecht Declercq: 15:26

Yeah. First of all, FIAT/IFTA stands for, it’s a double abbreviation, International Federation of Television Archives, Fédération Internationale des Archives de Télévision. So the French, French.

Chris Lacinak: 15:36

That sounds much better that way.

Brecht Declercq: 15:40

Okay. Well, formally our mission is FIAT/IFTA actively creates and exchanges expert knowledge and promotes and raises awareness of future media archiving by building and maintaining an international network and its broader community, organizing events, developing trusted resources, and taking challenging initiatives for those engaged in the field of media archives. I have to admit that I’d read that. So I don’t know it by heart. So yeah, that’s actually what we’re doing. We’re trying to form a global community for all those engaged in media archive. So our membership typically consists of around 40 to 50% public broadcasters, 10, 15% of commercial broadcasters, and then 10, 15% of very active, what I would call national audio visual archives or national archives and national libraries that are involved in the preservation of audio visual heritage in their country as well. And then evermore, we also have members of the industry. They have a special membership called supporting membership. And then we have organizations like a broad plethora of members, such as FIFA, the International Football Association, the New York Times for a while was a member of ours and several others. So it goes into several directions, but I would say the stronghold is really, or the real focus is really media archives, traditionally television, but evermore venturing into radio and video at large, all these kinds of things. Yeah.

Chris Lacinak: 17:27

And when you say the industry, what do you mean when you refer to the industry? Yeah. Good question. I’d say companies like AVP or all kinds of services and goods providers. Yeah. Service provider digitization companies, but consultants, software developers, evermore also companies in the field of artificial intelligence, MAM and DAM, obviously, they’re very closely connected to our community. So yeah, that’s what I mean with the industry.

Chris Lacinak: 18:05

So you’ve given us a picture of, that it’s a global organization. Can you offer some sort of breakdown of members?

Brecht Declercq: 18:12

Yeah. As I said, our stronghold and our historical background is mainly in Europe, that’s for sure. So we’re talking about, yeah, once again, 40, 50% European members. But I want to stress that amongst our founding members were also American companies, American broadcasters, such as NBC, CNN. Later on, we also got CBC Radio Canada, for example, as a member. In Latin America, we’re also in the realm of public broadcasting, but also commercial broadcaster, for example, Globo, the Globo Group, which is the largest commercial broadcaster of Latin America is a member of ours. Then if you go to Africa, you typically, once again, are with public broadcasters, the South African Public Broadcasting Organization, for example. And if we look at, yeah, the Middle East, then you’re Al-Arabiya, Al-Jazeera. Towards the other parts of Asia, the Japanese public broadcaster was one of our early members, ABC in Australia. So we really have a global outlook, but I do want to recognize that we are mainly Eurocentric, I regret to say, because the ambition is to be global.

Chris Lacinak: 19:38

It still sounds like, I mean, I have attended FIAT/IFTA conferences and they definitely are attended by participants worldwide. They feel very global. So I appreciate the transparent Eurocentric admission there, but I would say that probably FIAT/IFTA is doing a lot better than a lot of organizations in global representation. I know that you have done surveys in the past, in your time, I think even before you were president, you were involved in a working group that did some surveys to the FIAT/IFTA membership. And I think since you’ve been president, you’ve done some of these. I want to ask you to go into all of them, but I wonder, are there any that were particularly interesting in their findings and would you be willing to share maybe what the questions, what was the gist of the questions and what were the findings?

Brecht Declercq: 20:32

It’s true that we do love surveys as an instrument because it’s interesting towards our members and also towards our broader stakeholder group. And a survey that we do on an annual basis is called, “Where are you on the timeline?” And that really says it all in the sense that we’re doing it now this year, probably for the 15th consecutive time. And it’s a really short survey. It’s six or seven questions. I should check that. I’ve run it personally for three or four years. It really asks three, sorry, five, six, seven questions in a very concise way. And it allows the respondents to respond with a multiple choice. So they just pick the answer that fits or that describes their situation best. And the answers are formulated in a progressive way. So you just indicate what stage you are in, in what we consider it when we drafted this survey, a logical evolution of things. And that survey really allows us to see and to monitor the evolution that our members and beyond, because responding is not restricted to our membership, what level, what stage that archives are in. And we’ve seen things evolving up until the point where we are even saying now, like we should add extra options to our scale because things have evolved so much. And we see so many archives reaching those final stages that we had foreseen, I would say so many years ago, that we really have to extend that survey again. So that timeline survey is really a nice quote, but there have been others. We have been doing surveys about media asset management systems, for example, about metadata creation and the way how organizations create their metadata and how they look at that and the evolutions they expect there. So yeah. And sometimes we also give it a regional focus and that’s also very enlightening because that’s when our members really say like, okay, this allows me to compare, but really with comparable situations. So yeah.

Chris Lacinak: 23:03

I want to come back to the regional focus later. That’s an interesting point. I’d like to ask, I guess, in the surveys you’ve done, maybe, we’re about halfway in between the FIAT/IFTA World Conference, it was in October, so we’re about halfway to the next one and halfway past the last one. But between the conference, what you see happening in the conference and between those surveys, could you give us some sort of summary about what you see? And of course, it’s a large body of members. So any insights that you could share about what’s the state of affairs related to broadcast archives across the world?

Brecht Declercq: 23:45

Yeah. It’s hard to answer that question in a mono-directional way.

Chris Lacinak: 23:53

It’s a very unfair question. Yes.

Brecht Declercq: 23:56

Yeah. On a global scale, the situation is very different. I’ve been privileged enough to travel the world and to see broadcasters archives on every continent. And the situation can be very different, even within one region. It often depends on the, well, let’s say it like it is, the financial and budgetary wealth of a certain country. But apart from that, the evolutions that I’ve seen throughout the years, and people who are a bit longer active in this field will definitely recognize that, is that real wave of digitization that has conquered our field, I would say. And digitization, not only in terms of the digitization of working methods and the whole environment in which media is produced, but also in terms of archival digitization. So already in the mid 2000s, there were some alarm bells going on everywhere in the world, like, okay, this is happening. And then around 2010, 2013, if I’m not mistaken, a few very prominent audiovisual archivists in the world, I always quote Richard Wright from the BBC and Mike Casey from Indiana University there, they were warning and they were saying, beware, dear colleagues, because somewhere around 2023, 2028, to digitize large quantities of magnetic media, either audio or video, will become practically unaffordable. Not impossible in the sense that technically machines will stay around, some machines will stay around. If you have a huge collection and several hundreds of thousands of these audiovisual carriers, such as radio and television stations typically have, then things might become unaffordable. It’s going to cost so much money to have those carriers digitized that you’re not going to be able to pay it anymore. And actually that wave is now, I would say, coming to an end in some parts of the world. There are several broadcasters in the FIAT/IFTA membership, for example, that have finished digitization. My own employer here in Switzerland at RSI, we have practically finished almost everything. I think we’re at 98% or so. We’re just thinking of re-digitizing some film material, but that’s it. But there are indeed many broadcasters still in the world that haven’t digitized everything yet. I was in Tunisia a few weeks ago and I hesitate to say this because I don’t want to blame anybody, but we have to look reality straight in the eyes. And reality is that we are losing that battle. We are losing that battle and it’s important to be aware of that. In the poorer parts of the world, what Mike Casey, I already mentioned his name, what Mike Casey has called degralescence, this portmanteau concept of degradation and obsolescence is striking and it’s striking first in the poorest parts of the world. I thought first it was a coincidence, but when I started thinking about it, it wasn’t. In the last two days, I received two notifications, two emails from broadcasters and I won’t mention their name because that doesn’t make any sense, but from poorer parts of the world asking whether I considered it possible in their country to have two inch open reel video tapes digitized and my clear and honest answer was no, not even in your neighboring countries. So yeah, that degralescence is striking. We are coming at that point now that was predicted so many years ago by so many people. So that’s an important evolution that I want to point to. Another one, and it’s partially overlapping now, is that AI wave. It’s undeniably so. It has been for long predicted. It has been predicted for so long in the broadcast world. As I said, as early as the early 2000s, we were all talking about it. The world was buzzing like there is this new technology that’s going to take over the documentalist’s job. And then the strange thing is that we had to wait for it so long that some in the media archiving world already started to doubt. They said like, “Isn’t it all rumors? Isn’t it all like fake news almost?” And my answer, my personal answer was always like, it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when. And if you’re seeing now how quickly things are going, I am still convinced that broadcast archives were amongst the first parts of the media industry that adopted artificial intelligence first. And we were very aware of what was coming, but then still we were surprised by the speed that it actually made throughout the last, let’s say, two years after the launch of ChatGPT and DALL-E, everything changed, of course. So that’s that other wave that I’ve seen coming. Yeah, I do.

Chris Lacinak: 29:57

You’re right. I remember early mid 2000s, a lot of hype around AI and just major disappointment on the execution and delivery of the promise. And it did take a while. Yeah, it took 10, 15 years before it came back with something that was impressive enough to grab people’s attention. Although we did see lots of organizations doing smaller, interesting kind of proof of concepts along the way. I want to go back to, you touched on, and this touches on, you talked about the regional nature of your surveys and things. You talked about how countries with less resources are suffering, kind of the lack of digitization. Can you help people understand what’s lost if these materials are lost to degradation and obsolescence? What, you know, across the globe as you look, what are some things that we miss out on both regionally but globally in our understanding of the world that goes along with the media that’s lost?

Brecht Declercq: 31:04

Yeah, that’s a very good question. But because I, every now and then I have to give that answer to make people aware. But I’m going to give you a very, very simple answer. Let’s have a look at the, let’s focus for a second on Africa. The African wave of independence, so that started off around the mid-50s in Ghana, it was Kwame Nkrumah, which was an African leader of, a great charismatic leader. And I’m not going to tell the whole story of the independence of Ghana, but my point is that’s where it all started off and it continued up until the 70s, that wave of independence. But that is also the era in which broadcasting, television production was actually switching gradually from film recording onto video recording. So that era is the era in which, from which we have the oldest videotapes. Also in those countries, you have to be aware that the countries that those African countries became independent of were mainly, as we know, European, Western European countries, France, Great Britain, Belgium, my own country. And those television systems in those countries had been installed by those colonizers. So they were also the ones that provided technology and that decided about the technology and that was videotape evermore. And after that independence, of course, those broadcasters, those public broadcasters, they became independent institutions under the wings of their governments, of course. And they are still now preserving their archives. But once again, I’m not blaming anyone here, I’m just describing a few facts. In many African countries that became independent in the 50s, 60s, 70s, those archives are in a dreadful state. So what these archives are losing and what their countries are losing is the audio visual documentation of their birth.

Chris Lacinak: 33:25

Wow.

Brecht Declercq: 33:26

So take a second to think about that. Take a second to take the American Declaration of Independence. Can you imagine that you would say, “Ah, sorry, we can’t read it anymore.” That’s what happening now in Africa, now as we speak. That’s what happening. And then take this on a global scale and then I would say like, “Okay, let’s make a little comparison.” Try to imagine today’s world and the importance of audio visual media and try to be aware that also throughout the course of the 20th century, many, many historical evolutions were documented on radio and television. Television and radio were amongst the most popular media and the most influential media in the 20th century. You cannot explain the rise to power of Adolf Hitler without acknowledging the role of radio. So try to imagine that we would lose that kind of heritage. Try to imagine that we’d have to explain history without having access to radio and television as historical sources. It would simply be impossible. And then now I quit, I rest my case.

Chris Lacinak: 34:44

Yeah, wow. Well, you can imagine. So, I mean, just to kind of reiterate and follow up on what you just said, the fast forward, 50, 100 years, I would say even with the presence of archives, it can be difficult to represent the true narrative of history. But the source material is there, right? Imagine the picture you’ve just painted. In many cases across the world, the source material is lost. Just what a major shaping of the historical narrative takes place from that could, and I would say it’s probably likely to misrepresent what’s happened historically across the globe. That’s major. You make a very good case.

Brecht Declercq: 35:36

Can I point to one simple example as well? Just a very small state on the globe, it’s called Timor-Leste, Portuguese for Eastern Timor. It’s a small island close to Indonesia. And that country became independent in the 90s. And there was a, if I’m not mistaken, it’s a French German cameraman called Max Stahl, and he documented all that was going on in the independence war, because that country has become independent from Indonesia. Now filming there, that cameraman has filmed a lot of the violence of the Indonesian army throughout that war of independence. That archive in itself is documenting the birth of Timor-Leste in the 90s. Luckily, that archive was saved at some point, also thanks to the intervention of INA, the French National Audiovisual Institute. But that is another example of a country that could have lost the documentation of its birth, paired with, let’s say it like it is, crimes against humanity during that war of independence. So, it demonstrates once again that unique documentational role of not only of media corporations of course, but also of audiovisual heritage in general.

Chris Lacinak: 37:10

Do you have feedback or requests for the DAM Right podcast? Hit me up and let me know at [email protected]. Looking for amazing and free resources to help you on your DAM journey? Let the best DAM consultants in the business help you out. Visit weareavp.com/free-resources. Stay up to date with the latest and greatest from me and the DAM Right podcast by following me on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/clacinak. I want to shift away from this specific topic, but stay in the general theme of kind of differences and discrepancies across the globe. And I’m going to maybe just focus in a bit on, well, I’ll ask you to paint a picture for us, but maybe we can use kind of Europe versus the United States as a place to focus in on in particular, which is, I think a lot of people, if you haven’t been in the field, you may not recognize just how different broadcast operations look in various countries. And here I think of both the commercial versus the non-commercial nature, the public kind of government backed broadcasters versus commercial broadcasters. Can you paint a picture for people what some of those differences look like and how they operate, how they’re funded and what the meaning there is?

Brecht Declercq: 38:39

Yeah, it’s true what you say, that there is often a very big difference between, I would say, profit driven and non-profit organization in that respect. For what I see or what I know from my daily experience, I haven’t worked for a commercial broadcaster yet, but what I know is firsthand, testimonial by people who work there is that typically a commercial broadcaster has less of that heritage perspective. And that’s okay, that’s perfectly legitimate, I’m not saying that they should. But when you are in a public broadcaster, there is this double perspective always, there is always this double perspective between on the one hand, and this is something they have in common with commercial broadcasters, broadcasters archives are always there in the first place to support their own production, their own production departments. And that’s what they typically cater for, I would say. But at the same time, there is always this perspective of a contribution to society. A public broadcaster’s archive is always supposed to help external customers as well. And external customers that often don’t have a commercial perspective at all, libraries, museums, whether they want to access those archives in a small kind of way, just asking for one or two tapes or one or two clips or so, or whether they want to use it really on a structural scale to open it up towards the whole educational world and the whole school system, etc., etc. And as a public broadcast archivist, you can barely, you can’t barely say no to that kind of requests. And it’s not an intention either. I mean, I always say like, without use, a broadcaster’s archive, a broadcaster’s, a public broadcaster’s archive, their shelves are empty, if you understand what I mean. This kind of what I call a heritage perspective, contributing with the archives to the society’s needs without the requirement of earning money with that, that is a perspective that is always present in a public broadcaster’s archive. In a commercial broadcaster’s archive, and I’ve seen that several times, that kind of perspective is absent or close to absent. And that gives them the liberty to take decisions with their archive that I, as an historian, sometimes regret. But you can barely blame them for that because in many countries, there is no such thing as what is called a legal deposit, the legal obligation to deposit a copy of what you have broadcasted to some kind of institution that then preserves it and in the longer run, respecting copyright, et cetera, et cetera, in the longer run gives access to it, such as it happens with books. So many countries in the world have a legal deposit for books or any kind of written publication. So little countries in the world have a legal deposit when it comes to audio visual publications and especially radio and television broadcasts. And that’s the difference in the perspective that I see so often. It doesn’t exclude that some commercial broadcasters do have that heritage perspective as well in certain parts of the world and I really respect them deeply for that because they are often not obliged to do so. On the contrary, the driver that they often have much more is a profit-driven driver. So they often really consider their archives as a source of income. And once again, that’s perfectly legitimate, but this is a whole completely different perspective. For them, it’s a way to valorize in a financial way what they have. It’s really assets in the true sense of the word, on condition of course, that they’re findable and that they have the rights to exploit them in a financial way, of course. But it’s a completely different perspective. And just as a side note, in FIAT/IFTA we bring those two together so you can imagine how difficult it can be to unite those two perspectives sometimes.

Chris Lacinak: 43:28

I feel like I have seen instances of broadcast archives that are not commercial also trying to valorize their archives in order to create a more sustainable kind of business model, even when it is a government-based institution. Is that right? Have you seen that as well? Yeah, that’s correct. That’s absolutely correct. Let’s not deny that. Many public broadcasters’ financing is public financing is under heavy pressure in many countries which you see is currently, for example, in Slovakia, the government is threatening heavily the financing, the funding of public broadcasting. And so public broadcasters do all they can to mitigate that kind of effects by searching for other sources of revenue and selling or licensing archival materials are for many broadcasters one of their many ways to counter those effects. And that for me doesn’t necessarily mean that it is a big source of revenue. We have to be honest about that. There are not many public broadcasters archives that can fund, I would say not even two or three full-time equivalents on an annual basis with what they sell in terms of footage. That’s something to keep in mind. There is no, in my opinion, there is no sustainable financing model for public broadcasting based on the licensing of footage or archival material. I’m very sorry for those who believe in that, but I don’t.

Chris Lacinak: 45:19

Yeah, that was years ago there was a concept I was running with around cost of inaction, which was kind of, you know, looking at the traditional return on investment. And because I had within organizations of all types, broadcasters, non-broadcasters, universities, you know, all sorts, this concept that usually executives in the organization would hold around, how can we see a return on investment on our archives? And it just, it never calculated out to be advantageous. And it seemed to always lack a holistic perspective on what the true value was. If you, you know, it wasn’t, it didn’t just come down to dollars. And while that’s obviously important, funding is a critical issue that when you look at it alone, it never seemed to do the issue real justice. And some of the things you talked about earlier really paint a picture about the value of these archives.

Brecht Declercq: 46:17

Yeah, if I can just intervene because I want to add a perspective. In 2013, there was a research by the Danish public broadcasters archive. And what they did was for one week, seven consecutive days, 24/7, they recorded the full broadcasting, the full broadcasting schedule on their two main channels. And they measured the duration of all the content that was being broadcasted. And they make the distinction between broadcasted for the first time or not broadcasted for the first time. They came to the conclusion that 75% of the broadcasting schedule, the duration of the broadcasting time was not filled with content that was broadcasted for the first time. And they said, this means that this content has passed through the archive, 75% of that broadcasting time. And if you take a look from that perspective, you could say it’s probably not an exact calculation, but you could think like if we’d have to fill all that time with new productions or with acquired stuff, broadcasting would probably cost us three to four times as much.

Chris Lacinak: 47:45

That’s interesting. Right.

Brecht Declercq: 47:48

It’s an interesting perspective because you never get to think about things that way. But yeah, and it’s not exact, of course, that measurement, but it switches your mindset.

Chris Lacinak: 47:59

Yeah, absolutely. That’s a good framing. Well, I want to jump into, we’ve talked kind of up high, I’d like to jump into what does a broadcast television archive look like? And we’ve just talked about all the disparities and differences. So obviously I want to lean on your personal experience here. Can you offer some insights into, for someone who maybe has worked in digital asset management, has worked in archives, but has never worked in a radio and television archive. And here you’ve had the experience, at meemoo you saw all sorts of organizations. So broadcast was just one source. There was lots of others. But you do have some unique perspective here. Can you give us some insights into what is a radio and television broadcast archive look like? How’s it staffed, organized, those sorts of things?

Brecht Declercq: 48:55

Yeah, let’s first start off by saying that the size of the country usually does not necessarily coincide with the size of the broadcasters or the size of the broadcasters archive. The determining factor is how many channels they have had throughout their history. That typically describes the size of the collection, if we talk about that. So typically in any kind of country for a long while, you’ve had like for a while, one channel, then a second one, then a third one, and four to five, and then some regional channels, et cetera, et cetera. And then television came in the fifties and they started with one channel, they added a second, sometimes a third or a fourth, et cetera, et cetera. And then you’re venturing into the 21st century. And typically that created up until, let’s say the end of the nineties, the start of the 21st century, that created collections about say 400,000 to 500,000 hours of film and videotape. And often taking into account that a lot has been lost, 200,000 to 300,000 of hours of radio or broadcasted radio content, taking into account as well that typically the music programs are not being preserved because their content is not considered unique. So there you have an idea about the size of those collections. And then take into account that in the 21st century, when the MAM systems came up, television and radio archives were much better prepared and much better able to preserve everything that they were broadcasting. So then you’re really talking about an explosion of content. And these days, it’s absolutely no exception that you come into a broadcaster’s archive and you meet say collections of more than a million hours of television content, six, seven, 800,000 of hours of radio broadcast content. And then when it comes to the structure of these archives, once again, up until I would say the nineties, the early 2000s, many, many broadcasters, public broadcasters and also commercial ones had a distinction between their, if they were making radio as well, it was a distinction between television and radio and they had separate archives. That also had historical backgrounds. And I could talk about that for ages, but I’m not gonna do that. But in the 2000s, many of those radio and television archives, they merged within one organization. They became one up until a certain extent, of course, because there were some differences in the processes. And well, what they do is I tend to keep things clear and to say like their typical activities are situated in acquisition and preservation. Yeah, well, the broad domain of acquisition and preservation. And then they intend to invest a lot of their resources also in documentation and cataloging, a lot of their resources, because those processes were the most labor intensive typically, and also therefore the most expensive. And then a third domain of activities is in access and valorization, either internally by delivering their content to their own production environments or by selling footage sales and or by developing all kinds of platforms or websites to which the larger audience or specific target groups within society can access those archives. And there’s a difference, as I said earlier on, between the public and the commercial broadcasters.

Chris Lacinak: 53:01

Yeah.

Brecht Declercq: 53:02

So that gives you an idea. And then maybe what you said about the number of staff. Well, it strongly depends. It strongly depends. Here at RSI, I have a team of about 40. But the General Secretary of FIAT/IFTA, Virginia Bazán, she is now head of archives at the Spanish public broadcaster, RTVE. And if I’m not mistaken, her staff is between 350 and 400 people. So yeah.

Chris Lacinak: 53:32

I want to come back to staff and kind of what your staff does, but I want to touch on something. As you were talking, I just had the thought we were talking about differences and types of archives. I just want to say in my experience, I mean, you’re talking about preservation and archiving as a role within the organizations you’ve been in, and those have been public broadcasters. I would say that there is a big difference I’ve seen between broadcasters in that it sounds like I’m going to guess that the organizations you have worked for have had a mandate or a mission of some sort to preserve and archive. In other broadcasters we’ve worked with, they may or may not have a mandate, but they might have a very strong business case. They have content that they can monetize and it’s very popular content. And so they have a business case to preserve an archive, even if they don’t have a mandate, which has implications because for the stuff that is less popular or less monetizable, then that tends to get lesser treatment. So a mandate would typically cover things that are both popular and non-popular. So there are implications to having a business case without a mandate. And then there are organizations that we have run across many of who don’t have a mandate and don’t have a really strong business case whose collections have either been thrown in dumpsters or saved from dumpsters by a university or some other entity that sees the cultural value and grabs it because they see it, even if the organization that created it doesn’t. So I just want to point out that difference across different organizations.

Brecht Declercq: 55:12

Yeah, you’re absolutely right. You’re absolutely right in that. Yeah, definitely. It’s an observation that I’ve made as well. And there are some regional differences in the world as well there, I think.

Chris Lacinak: 55:24

Let’s come back to the staffing. For your organization that has 40, I think you said 40, four zero, right?

Brecht Declercq: 55:30

Yes.

Chris Lacinak: 55:31

Okay. Can you just describe some of the, like, what are some of the roles and responsibilities tasks? I guess I wonder, how does it bump up against, how does your operation bump up against kind of the production side of the operation? And then on the other side, like on the distribution, publishing, access side, what’s the division of roles and responsibilities on what you all do? And I guess maybe one thing to focus on in particular would be like description. Like how much metadata and description is there on the way in? How much do you guys do? And then how much is there done post?

Brecht Declercq: 56:04

Yeah, that’s a very good question because exactly that point that you’re talking to is in, it’s currently, that’s my feeling, it’s being revolutionized by AI amongst others. And a typical situation I would say in a broadcaster’s archive currently is that there is a production, let’s limit ourselves to television only for now, because radio is somewhat parallel there, but you have a production platform and several production systems and post-production systems circulating around a, what you would call a PAM system, a production asset management system. And then from the archives part, connected, often connected to that PAM, you have a MAM, a media asset management system. And those two are often connected to each other and that situation might differ from organization to organization, depending on how they look at things and where they situate their archive exactly at the right in the middle of the production process or at the end of the chain of production. That is still a point of debate with many broadcasters archives. So typically what you see is that broadcasters archives try to connect their systems in such a way that as many descriptive, administrative, and technical metadata are inherited by the archival databases coming from all kinds of production systems. And so they connect these systems to each other through APIs and other kinds of protocols, I would say. And then they try that way to limit the manual work that still has to be done by the documentalists. That is a typical situation. But as I said, it’s in full evolution there because what is jumping in is AI. And so what we have seen throughout the history is that four big groups of metadata creation have grown, I would say. And those are like the old school manual work by documentalists that has been around for 80 years, say. Then inheritance by true production systems, inheritance, what I just described, like connecting PAM and MAM systems and inheriting as much metadata as possible. And then a third group, which is kind of a bit off the radar these days, but nevertheless interesting is what we used to call user generated metadata. The metadata that users that are involved in documentation processes via any kind of project, for example, could create and then deliver to the archive, but also in conscious ways of doing that. And I tend to call that consumer generated metadata. The fact that you watch a clip for only 5 seconds and not for 10 seconds is what I would call an interesting consumer generated metadata for the archive. It all has to do with media companies being data driven these days. And the fourth way of generating metadata is the broad world of AI, what I would call automatically generated metadata in some way. Now, what I had been thinking 10 years ago is that those four groups would always be combined and they’re covering up for their weaknesses and strengths and finally result in a fully filled up archival database. What I’m seeing now is that the quality of the results of artificial intelligence algorithms is increasing so quickly and the cost of, for example, connecting MAM systems and PAM systems and all kinds of systems that could provide metadata, that cost is so high that is quickly being overhauled by the evolution of AI algorithms. Also because all those several systems within a broadcaster, within a media production, they all have what I call asynchronous life cycles. Their technologies evolve in their own way and many, many broadcasters, they call upon the service of external providers or they tend to use a plethora of systems and to make them communicate to each other has become impossible. And then all of a sudden AI is there as well and obtains results that are nearly as good and often cheaper.

Chris Lacinak: 61:26

Could you put some more clarity? I just want to talk a bit more on the, you talked about PAM and for listeners, I’ve heard PAM recently, but on the CPG, consumer product side for product asset management. So this is not that, this is production asset management, which is… In the kind of production and post part of the organization. And you mentioned MAM, I wonder in your experience, where have MAM and DAM lived in an organization and how does that interact? How does the archive interact with that?

Brecht Declercq: 62:02

That’s a good question as well, because when I first contributed to the development of a MAM system that was in 2006, 2007, when I was working for the Flemish public broadcaster VRT, the reasoning was that a MAM system would be the, I would say the spinal cord of media production and the archives main database at the same time. So the theoretical background to that, and I wish to refer to one author in particular, that’s Annemieke de Jong from the Netherlands Sound and Vision, Netherlands Institute for Sound, but she did a lot of work around this. And she said like, what we see is that the archive evolves from being at the end of the production chain into the center of the production chain. And she was right, her theoretical thesis was absolutely correct. But still that didn’t really happen. I don’t know why, it’s hard to say why it didn’t happen completely as she predicted. But I do think that many broadcasters have been bringing in the expertise of audiovisual archivists into the center of their production environment because they acutely became aware of the importance of, yeah, I can’t describe it with other words than managing their assets. And whether you do it with the aim to, I would say store them for the longterm or store them to be reused the day after, I would almost say, what’s the difference?

Chris Lacinak: 63:52

The practices are the same.

Brecht Declercq: 63:54

Yeah. Yeah, you could add, for the archivist, you could then come up with the whole story of digital preservation and longterm preservation, tens of years, et cetera, et cetera. That’s a world in itself, I would say. But often, and this is also what makes broadcasters archives a bit particular, often that kind of subjects, that kind of challenges are tackled by the IT departments. Strangely enough, because radio and television archives, they have been also logistics guys and gals, but the whole digital logistics part is now covered by IT engineers that are not working anymore for the archives department.

Chris Lacinak: 64:44

And what I’ve seen in broadcast operations too, I mean, you have, of course, scheduling systems, which are their own kind of asset management components. My view is that the landscapes within broadcast operations with regard to digital asset management are typically more complex than in, say, a corporate archive or a corporate entity where you have some very specific spots you tend to see DAM, MAM, PAM, those sorts of things. I want to shift a bit towards talking about as broadcast operations or broadcasters move more towards on-demand and streaming as being the primary driver, I’ll say. What are the implications of that to the archives within these organizations? Are there implications there?

Brecht Declercq: 65:39

Yeah, definitely. I think this is also an evolution to which I think many archivists have been looking forward because it stresses the importance of the archive. And on an annual basis, I contribute to the call for papers of the FIAT/IFTA World Conference. And this year, and it’s not the first time, I really pushed to have one theme in this call for papers that is like OTT platforms, over-the-top platforms or streaming platforms or archival catalogs. What’s the difference? That to me is an intriguing question. We are evolving ever more with broadcasting, with television towards a world, and it might even be more the case in the US than it is already over here in Europe. We are evolving ever more into a situation where linear broadcasting is becoming a marginal thing. And I even foresee within a few years the closing down of television stations. The general director of the BBC has announced that there won’t be a linear broadcasting by the BBC anymore by 2030. I think that’s realistic. And then the question becomes what those broadcasters, if you can still call them that, those media companies are offering is content, right? It’s content on any kind of platform. And what the archive has been offering is content as well. It might not be content that is recently produced. It might be content that has been produced a bit earlier, but the border between the two is ever more getting irrelevant. And I remember illustrating that evolution towards people who inquired with me about it, by saying like, for you, when does the archive begin? If you have to count back from now, from one second ago, you’re listening to the radio, watching television, when does the archive begin? And most people then say like, hmm, maybe one year ago or 10 years ago. Then my answer is, how can you reasonably sustain such an answer? It doesn’t make sense. It for me, the archives begin tomorrow because in our archive, as we speak, the interview with the Pope that I just referred to was already in our archive a month before it was spread worldwide. So we already have stuff in our archive that is like not even yet broadcasted. So it’s coming ever more together. The lines are really blurring there.

Chris Lacinak: 68:45

So does linear broadcasting then gets replaced by platforms for watching and listening to content and the linear component, I guess, the kind of curation gets replaced, I guess, by recommendation engines and things like that, that seem to look at the behavior of the consumer and tries to feed them content they think they’ll be interested in. Is that what the future looks like, you think, for broadcasts?

Brecht Declercq: 69:14

Yeah, I don’t think I’m saying revolutionary things if I agree with you. Yeah, that’s how I look at things. And then the question for the archivists, but also for the person responsible for filling those platforms could be like, what kind of things from our huge catalog of recently produced or long time ago produced stuff are we going to publish today? I mean, I want to illustrate this with a very, in my opinion, a very interesting evolution. So in France, the archive of the public broadcaster and of so many other broadcasters is managed by the Institut National d’Audiovisuel, a French National Audiovisual Institute, which is one of the biggest audiovisual archives in the world. And they have decided to call themselves since last year, a media heritage company. They have their own streaming platform. They are, I would say, as much a streaming platform as Netflix is. That says it all to me. It says it all. They’ve just evolved into something Netflix like or something Disney like.

Chris Lacinak: 70:39

What are the ethical considerations here? I mean, do you just open up the archive entirely? How does rights play into that? How does content that this station may want to put some sort of moderation or context around that’s historic and maybe problematic in some ways? What do you think that looks like?

Brecht Declercq: 91:02

That’s also a very intriguing and very interesting question. I’m really aware of the sensitivity of this subject just because our broadcasting history, our media history is almost, it’s touching for many people is touching upon almost what I would call their identity. And that once again proves between brackets how influential television has been throughout its history. If people find their favorite programs from their favorite channels that have been broadcasted so many years ago and that colored their youth, if they find that so important, well, that shows how impactful television in particular, but radio also have been. But this might be also a bit of a European standpoint, but I think in Europe, our answer, although it took us some time to learn to deal with this, but I think we recognize, I’m really careful choosing my words here. I think we recognize that broadcaster’s archives are undeniably reflecting their own history and the history of human conceptions and human ideas throughout history. And if we want to look history in the eyes, we also have to look into the eyes of the more painful parts of our history. And let’s make no mistake, for example, the use of language evolves with humanity. And I always say, who knows which kinds of words that we pronounce now without asking ourselves any question, which words will be considered in 50 years from now, very problematic. We don’t know that yet and the people who pronounce those words 50 years ago, they in some cases have been unrespectful also. There are some words that were a hundred years ago already insulting and still they were used 50 years ago, but they have been used. And as an historian, it’s my opinion that you cannot falsify history. What you can do as an archivist is point to those problematic episodes of your own history and say, look, what we are showing you here is not intended as a source of entertainment, not necessarily. Please consider it as an historical document as well that was made in an era with certain values, applicable editorial values, editorial guidelines applied in the era of production. And today we adhere different norms. And if you think that this would be insulting to you, we’re warning you already that this might occur, but we’re not going to hide it because it is our own history and it’s a difficult part of our history now today, but it’s there. And you could then argue like, do you have to publish it in such a public way? Shouldn’t you just keep it on a sidetrack that is only accessible for historians or so? That’s a different discourse as well.

Chris Lacinak: 74:50

When you say, I just want to clarify, when you say you can’t falsify history, I take that to mean that what you’re saying is you can’t hide the ugly parts away and just show one part that would be a falsifying of history. Is that the right interpretation of what you just said?

Brecht Declercq: 75:08

Yeah, correct. Correct. And I realize how problematic this might be, but it’s the historian speaking here. And yeah, it’s a debate that is not yet finished. And I see it also on OTT and streaming platforms all over the globe that broadcasters and media companies tend to consider this question in a different way. And it also has to do with how they interpret their own role. I find it perfectly legitimate that a company like Disney says, look, our streaming platform is not intended as an historical source. And it’s intended as a form of entertainment. Those historians who would want to watch the original things, because for them, for their historical profession, it’s important that they can access authentic sources. For them, we have other ways to show them. What I mean is it depends of your mission.

Chris Lacinak: 76:18

Yeah, I know that’s a very interesting kind of dissection of you’ve got. Because it would be easy to look at broadcast all as under the entertainment umbrella. I think that’s probably how most people would think of it. And so it’s interesting to just kind of put that point on there to say that in some cases it’s in the mission of the organization, that there’s a historical documentation component, perspective, lens, and then there’s an entertainment perspective or lens. And those are two different animals that may get treated in two different ways. Yeah. Well, let’s wrap up here. You’ve been very generous with your time. And before we started, you said you’ve got more work to do today. It’s already late where you are. So I don’t want to keep it too much longer. But maybe could you tell the listeners when the next Fiat IFTTT conference is and where it is?

Brecht Declercq: 77:15

The next FIAT/IFTA World Conference takes place from the 15th to the 18th of October in Bucharest, Romania, hosted by the public broadcaster of Romania, TVR.

Chris Lacinak: 77:24

That sounds like an interesting and fun destination to go to as well as a great conference.

Brecht Declercq: 77:30

Yeah, definitely.

Chris Lacinak: 77:30

And I’ll share a link in the show notes to the conference or into the FIAT/IFTA site so folks can find that if they’re interested in finding out more. I’m going to wrap this with a question that I ask all of our DAM Right guests, which is, what is the last song that you added to your favorites playlist? Feel free to look at your phone.

Brecht Declercq: 77:57

And now this can be a very shameful moment.

Chris Lacinak: 78:00

It lets us…

Brecht Declercq: 78:02

Okay, no, it’s not so shameful. It’s not so shameful. It’s “The Way It Is” by Bruce Hornsby and The Range.

Chris Lacinak: 78:08

All right, a classic, classic song.

Brecht Declercq: 78:10

And also you could say it’s an archival… It has been archivally reused. Several times.

Chris Lacinak: 78:20

What was the circumstance? Did it come up on shuffle or something? You’re like, “Oh, I have to add this to my liked list.” Or did you seek it out because you remembered it? How did it come to end up on your favorites playlist?

Brecht Declercq: 78:32

Yeah, it’s got a great melody in my opinion. But it’s, you know, that piano. I’m always intrigued by how musicians come to that kind of genius melodies, you know? And that, no, it was just pure coincidence. I was driving in the car and said like, “Oh, I want to hear that song.” And then I said like, “Let’s add it to my favorites list.”

Chris Lacinak: 78:54

Yeah, that is a great song. Great. Well, Brecht, I really appreciate your time and all the super interesting and valuable insights you’ve shared today. I thank you very much. Thanks for your service to FIAT/IFTA II as the President. And yeah, I just, I think the listeners are going to really love this episode and we’ll get a lot out of it. So thank you.

Brecht Declercq: 79:18

It’s been really a pleasure to talk with you, Chris.

Chris Lacinak: 79:21

Do you have feedback or requests for the DAM Right Podcast? Hit me up and let me know. Visit [email protected]. Looking for amazing and free resources to help you on your DAM journey? Let the best DAM consultants in the business help you out. Visit weareavp.com/free-resources. Stay up to date with the latest and greatest from me and the Damn Right Podcast by following me on LinkedIn at linkedIn.com/in/clacinak.

The Evolution of Digital Asset Management in Museums

In recent years, museums have transformed from traditional institutions housing physical artifacts to dynamic centers of digital engagement. The shift towards digitization has become essential for museums worldwide, allowing them to democratize access and enhance their outreach. This blog explores the evolution of digital asset management (DAM) within the museum context, highlighting its importance, challenges, and future directions.

The Historical Context of Museums and Digitization

Museums have long served as custodians of cultural heritage, showcasing artifacts and providing educational experiences. However, access to these physical collections has often been limited to those who can visit in person. This exclusivity has prompted museums to focus on digitizing their collections, making them accessible to a broader audience.

Digitization not only serves the purpose of preservation but also enhances the visibility of collections. By creating digital representations, museums can share their artifacts with individuals who may never have the opportunity to visit in person. This shift has been particularly significant in recent decades as technology has advanced, enabling more efficient digitization processes.

The Role of Digital Asset Management

Digital asset management has emerged as a cornerstone of effective digitization strategies in museums. It involves the systematic organization, storage, and retrieval of digital assets, ensuring that they are easily accessible to both museum staff and the public.

Without a robust DAM system, museums would struggle to manage the vast amounts of digital content generated from their collections. Effective DAM allows for seamless integration of digital assets into various platforms, supporting marketing efforts, educational initiatives, and public engagement.

Key Components of Digital Asset Management

• Storage and Organization: Proper storage solutions are essential for preserving digital assets. Museums must evaluate their storage needs regularly, considering factors such as data growth and technological advancements.
• Metadata Management: Metadata is crucial for making digital assets discoverable. It includes information about the content, context, and rights associated with each asset, allowing users to search and retrieve items effectively.
• Access and Distribution: Museums must consider how their digital assets will be accessed. This includes creating user-friendly interfaces for both internal staff and the public, ensuring that content is easily navigable.
• Preservation: Digital preservation involves maintaining the integrity and accessibility of digital assets over time. This requires establishing protocols for data backup, format migration, and disaster recovery.

Challenges in Digital Asset Management

While the benefits of digital asset management are clear, museums face several challenges in implementing effective DAM systems. One significant hurdle is the need for ongoing funding and resources to support digitization efforts.

Additionally, as museums expand their digital collections, they must navigate issues related to copyright and intellectual property. Ensuring that digital assets are properly attributed and that rights are cleared can be a complex process, requiring collaboration between various departments.

Another challenge lies in the evolving nature of technology. As digital formats and platforms change, museums must stay current with best practices for digital preservation and access. This requires continuous training and adaptation on the part of staff.

The Future of Digital Asset Management in Museums

The future of digital asset management in museums looks promising, with several trends emerging that will shape its evolution. One significant trend is the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning into DAM systems. These technologies can streamline processes such as metadata generation and content tagging, making it easier for museums to manage large volumes of digital assets.

Additionally, the push for accessibility will continue to drive advancements in DAM. Museums are increasingly recognizing the importance of providing content in multiple languages and formats to reach a diverse audience. This focus on inclusivity will help museums fulfill their mission of disseminating knowledge to as many people as possible.

Collaboration and Partnerships

Collaboration between museums and other cultural institutions will also play a vital role in the future of digital asset management. By sharing resources and expertise, museums can enhance their digitization efforts and create more comprehensive digital collections.

For example, the partnership between the Smithsonian Institution and the Getty on the Johnson Publishing Company archive project exemplifies how collaborative efforts can yield significant results. By pooling resources and expertise, these organizations can ensure the preservation and accessibility of an important cultural archive.

Conclusion

The evolution of digital asset management in museums has been a transformative journey, enabling these institutions to adapt to the digital age and expand their reach. As museums continue to embrace digitization, effective DAM systems will be essential for managing, preserving, and sharing their collections. By overcoming challenges and leveraging emerging technologies, museums can ensure that their digital assets remain accessible and relevant for generations to come.

In this ever-changing landscape, the commitment to democratizing access to cultural heritage will remain at the forefront of museum missions, reaffirming the vital role that digital asset management plays in achieving these goals.

Transcript

Chris Lacinak: 00:00

Hi, welcome to DAM Right, Winning at Digital Asset Management. I’m your host, Chris Lacinak. Traditionally, museums have been places that are filled with physical objects. Places that we visit in person in order to discover, engage with, and experience what they have to offer. The mission for most museums, and this was true centuries ago as it is today, includes sentiments around disseminating information and knowledge as far and wide as possible. To share the holdings of the museum with as many people in the world as they can reach. The physical nature of most museums has meant that only the most privileged have been able to engage in this experience. And so, over the past decades, museums have focused intensely on digitization of physical collections and the creation of digital experiences that help democratize access to collections, breaking down those barriers that have limited their ability to fulfill their mission. And let’s be honest, museums also have other incentives. There is a close relationship between their ability to capture and engage an audience and the notoriety of their brand, as well as their ability to raise funds. The continued relevancy and importance of a museum is innately tied to the ability to thrive in the digital age through creating compelling digital experiences that reach into classrooms as well as living rooms. Digital asset management is a cornerstone of realizing this path to relevancy. Without effective digital asset management, digital exhibitions, digital supplements, marketing efforts, and more would not be as successful or even possible. My guest today is Isabel Meyer. Isabel is the Director of Digital Platforms at the Smithsonian Institution and has served as the leader of the Smithsonian’s digital asset management operation for over two decades. The Smithsonian is the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex, at 21 museums and a national zoo. As you might imagine, the scale of current and future digital assets, simply put, is massive. As a pioneer in the field of digital asset management, Isabel has expertly helmed the ship for the Smithsonian in her more than two decades on the job. As you’ll hear in this episode, this is no small feat. It’s a privilege to have someone with Isabel’s expertise, experience, and perspectives on the DAM Right podcast. I know you’ll love hearing from her, so let’s jump in. And remember, DAM Right, because it’s too important to get wrong. Isabel Meyer, I am so honored to have you on the DAM Right podcast. Thank you for joining me today. I really appreciate it. It’s just spectacular to have you here. Thank you. I would like to start by just having you reflect a little bit about the path that you’ve taken in your career and kind of think about, you know, if there’s one thing about your past, about the path that you took, the journey you took in your career that kind of defines how you work today, what your approach is, what you think might be unique about the way that you approach your work and digital asset management. Is there anything in there that you think, you know, in your past that you really bring to the table today in that regard?

Isabel Meyer: 02:58

Well, first of all, thank you, Chris, for inviting me to do this podcast. It caused me to go back and reflect on several things, you know, that I’ve done and that I’m working on. So starting with your question, it’s like the Beatles song, “It’s Been a Long and Winding Road” that has brought me to this door of digital asset management. And yeah, I started my career very early on and I started working, you know, one of my early positions was with Honeywell Federal Systems when they were in the computer business. And at Honeywell Federal Systems, I learned a lot about operating systems, file systems, and networks, and that sort of gave me a really strong foundation in IT. I then went on to work as a consultant for the State Department on machine-readable visas and passports, which was my first introduction to imaging because it was, you know, capturing images for passports and for visas and developing those workflows. And that was a really fun and exciting job because it took me all over the world, but I had a teenage daughter and I would be gone for six, seven, eight weeks at a time, hopping through different countries. So not very conducive to being a parent of a teenage girl. So I left, reluctantly left that position and took a position with Sallie Mae. And if you’re familiar with Sallie Mae, it is a student loan processing, it’s a financial company. And I joined Sallie Mae on a big project where Sallie Mae was developing a system and a platform for digitizing and storing loan applications. So loan applications, large scale, lots of paper, right? So high-speed scanners, processing through tagging. And that system eventually is what became, was purchased by, a group of people that were at Sallie Mae left the company and took the software and developed what was, what is now a digital asset management system. So that probably was really the turning point for me as to little, I didn’t realize that, that it was going to be my future career with digital asset management. I left Sallie Mae because the team recruited me to join them. This was at, in the late 1990s, early 2000s, the dot-com boom was going on and we all thought we were going to get rich. However, it was premature, right? So the, it was not an easy sell for that platform. And then the dot-com bust happened in the early, late nineties, 2000s, capital dried up. And all of a sudden, yeah, they sold the company. I had no job. I did not like being in that position. So that’s when I started looking around for, well, you know, what could I do next? And I knew that I liked working with rich media, which was, that’s what it was called at the time, images, audio, video. So I applied for a position at the Smithsonian.

Chris Lacinak: 07:02

Wow. Can you, are you able to say what platform that turned into the work that you were working on at Sallie Mae?

Isabel Meyer: 07:09

Yes. So it became, the company was called Artesia. The platform was called Artesia, which then during when that capital dried up, that, that product was then sold and acquired by Open Text, which is the platform that is now, you know, the, that I now work on at the Smithsonian. And little, little did I know that when I joined the Smithsonian, they had not yet acquired it. I, that wasn’t my position. I ended up working, joining the Smithsonian, working on facility systems, facility assets, which had nothing to do with media assets.

Chris Lacinak: 07:49

Interesting. Like architectural things, engineering things, that sort of stuff? 

Isabel Meyer: 07:52

Like HVAC systems, chillers, you know, the systems that maintain our facilities. And then when the Smithsonian acquired or purchased a digital asset management system and decided to use it as an enterprise platform, then someone realized that, oh, you know, I think that’s what Isabel used to do.

Chris Lacinak: 08:20

Yeah. That’s fascinating. I love hearing about your entrance. Life is funny like that, isn’t it? It just, it, it, it leads you in all sorts of directions you don’t anticipate.

Isabel Meyer: 08:30

It certainly does. So I tell people it’s like, you know, when a door opens, don’t think too hard, just walk through it because you never know where it’s going to take you.

Chris Lacinak: 08:39

Yeah.

Isabel Meyer: 08:40

And usually it’s, you know, it’s fun.

Chris Lacinak: 09:08

If I were going to listen to what you just said and kind of come up with an answer to the question I asked about what’s, you know, what’s the one thing you bring with you? I mean, you have been involved in digital asset management since its founding, essentially, in the nascent stages of digital asset management. So that provides such a unique insight into the digital asset management world that we know today, I would think. That’s fascinating. The I wonder, you know, if it’s not too big of an ask, I’d love to hear you reflect a bit on having been involved in digital asset management since the nineties, like what, what would you say are, you know, your, your reflections on like how DAM has evolved over that period of time to today? If you can think back to when you started and what now you’re doing today.

Isabel Meyer: 09:35

I think that the evolution has been monumental, right? It has just changed quite dramatically. I think it’s as I mentioned earlier, earlier, it was at the time it was viewed as a nice to have digital asset management was a software and an application that was nice to have not a must have. So it was a tough sell. It was not easy to implement. And it wasn’t really understood. It was mostly viewed as a file storage, right? System. That’s where you stored files. And up until recently, I think a lot of, even at the Smithsonian, it was considered as, you know, a storage platform. Where it has evolved to now is now at the Smithsonian. And I think at other organizations and other companies, it’s a core part of a digital ecosystem where it’s not only just a storage platform, but it is also, you know, organizing, searching, transforming, integrated with other platforms and an important part of the distribution channel for, you know, getting your media and your content out in a sustainable controlled way that is reliable. So it’s, and it’s going to continue to evolve, right? It’s amazing.

Chris Lacinak: 11:05

Yeah. I would guess it’s a lot more fun today than it was then. It was probably a lot more work to do what you wanted to do and probably with a lot less exciting results.

Isabel Meyer: 11:20

It’s a lot of fun. It is a lot of work. You know, it does keep me up at night sometimes. And as I frequently tell my friends, I’m frequently exhausted, but I am never bored.

Chris Lacinak: 11:38

It’s not a small kind of footnote to what you just said, if I understood right, that you have been using OpenText as your DAM platform at the Smithsonian since you joined. Is that an accurate statement?

Isabel Meyer: 11:52

Not, I joined this, I’ve been at the Smithsonian, oh my God, 20 years now. Unbelievable. And then I took over what is now our DAMS in 2008. Okay. So yeah. So I took it on in 2008. The Smithsonian acquired it as a pilot in about 2005 by four units that did early on, they recognized that they needed a way of organizing their digital assets. And those four units were Natural History, the Center for Folklife, Culture and Heritage, the Zoo and American Indian, the National Museum of the American Indian. So those four units pulled some money and set it up as a pilot system.

Chris Lacinak: 12:39

Yeah, that’s pretty…

Isabel Meyer: 12:41

Before I took it over.

Chris Lacinak: 12:42

It’s pretty remarkable. It’s just about 20 years coming up on almost a 20 year anniversary of getting that. I’ve seen organizations change DAM systems every five years. I mean, just as a kind of point of reference and not to say that’s the right thing or wrong thing, not trying to point fingers, but just to say that it’s pretty remarkable that you’ve been able to leverage a platform for almost 20 years. You’ve been in the role not quite that long, but almost. Can you give us some insights, some wisdom here? How have you been able to leverage a platform to meet, obviously has to be just an ever expanding growth in user expectations and needs and all requirements and all sorts of things. So any insights you can share around how you’ve been able to make that work?

Isabel Meyer: 13:28

Well, one of the things that I recognized when I took on the project was that if we were going to be an enterprise system that was going to serve the entire Smithsonian, it had to be a platform that was not going to be customized. Its core mission was to be a digital repository. The Smithsonian has various other systems for managing collections, managing archives, managing libraries, some which are commercial products, some of which are custom built. And those systems hold a lot of the metadata and the information about our collections and our archives. So I did not intend for the DAMS to replace those systems, but to be a partner, a supplement to integrate. And the other piece that I think has led to the growth is recognizing that we had to partner with the units, with the Smithsonian community that created the assets, that managed the assets, that understood their collections. It’s quite a variety of content. So over the years, it’s become a, I view it as a collaborative partnership with the units. They identify their requirements. We listen and we try to meet those needs and build tools around our DAMS that do not touch core product. I think that’s one of the mistakes that a lot of organizations and communities make is if they customize a product and then try to build it to suit very specific needs, when it comes time to upgrade, it becomes very difficult because they either have to redo all those customizations or pay someone to develop, redevelop those customizations. So we’ve avoided doing any customizations.

Chris Lacinak: 15:42

And it sounds like that’s worked well. Do you think there’s a, have you seen a downside to that strategic approach or?

Isabel Meyer: 15:48

Not yet. You know, we sometimes get requests for something specific. And again, my, I’ll look at it. Is this something that is going to meet the needs of most of our communities? Most of our user communities, if it’s just a, like a one-off, I’ve had to say no, we can’t, we can’t do that because we can’t sustain it. We sustain it. We’re a very small team. And so, so far we’ve been able to develop platforms and tools around the DAMS and build integrations into systems. So knock on wood, it’s, it’s, it’s still paid off.

Chris Lacinak: 16:32

Well, that’s interesting. I mean, absolutely. It’s a strategic choice. I’ve seen other organizations do quite the opposite. And again, I’m not going to say what’s right or wrong, but that’s an interesting observation from, it sounds like, you know, it’s worked well. So thanks for sharing that. You mentioned you have a small team. Can you paint a picture for us of your operation, how many team members you have, where it sits in the organization? What does that look like?

Isabel Meyer: 16:59

So first of all, the Smithsonian is, is, as you probably are aware, many of your listeners probably are aware, it’s, it’s quite big, right? A lot of people are familiar with our museums on the mall. So we’re actually 21 museums and the zoo. We have, you know, the, the number that is frequently quoted on our official publications is we have 157.2 million objects and specimens, you know, but that’s a static number and we acquire things every day. So, you know, that’s sort of like a really anyone’s guess, right? That’s a really rough estimate. We have 2.3 million library volumes and over 148,000 feet, cubic feet of archives. We also have research centers that, you know, globally and we’re over 6,000 employees. We have 644 owned facilities. These are buildings that the Smithsonian owns and 31 lease facilities. So it’s a big organization. We sit under the office of the Chief Information Officer, which is the IT branch of the Smithsonian. And you know, my, my team is now called Digital Platforms. It used to be just, I just managed the digital asset management system, but about two years ago the OCIO formed a new group called digital platforms with that brought together the collection systems that are supported by OCIO, the archive systems that are supported by OCIO, the, the DAMS, our web development team and our enterprise data access network, which is the architecture and the platform that delivers content to the public and to, to our museums. So we fit under that, that umbrella of the office of the Chief Information Officer. The team that manages and supports the DAMS is, I should know the count, right? There’s five full-time staff and also we’re supported by a few contractors that have, that are part of our full-time staff. However I think one of the things is because we’re part of the IT organization, we do have a data center and in the data center is there, there’s the staff that support our servers, our databases, our network and we rely on those people a lot.

Chris Lacinak: 19:48

So there’s some maybe blurring of the lines in that you have quite a bit of support around the infrastructure side, but the DAM team is small. I mean, if you described, if you laid out the scale that you just laid out, that many museums, zoo, all the facilities, all that stuff, and you just said, take a guess, you know, throw a dart at a dart board at how big the team is. I bet many people would be in the several dozens, not, not expecting under 10, I wouldn’t think for sure. So that’s pretty phenomenal.

Isabel Meyer: 20:14

It’s a small team and they’re, they’re, you know, they’re amazing. They I tell them they’re, we’re small, but mighty. They work very well together. And just like the system is integrated right now, digital platforms is also becoming more integrated. I say, I say it’s all connected, right? All of the digital ecosystem platforms and systems, they’re all connected and the teams have to be connected. Right. So.

Chris Lacinak: 20:44

And how does the DAM like interface with relate to, you know, many of the museums have their own libraries and archives, if not all of them. There’s the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives there’s right. There’s lots of, all the research data. I mean, the amount of research data that the Smithsonian produces is kind of staggering. It’s phenomenal. It’s one of the largest research institutions in the world. Does how do you think about the scope of what the DAM holds, who they serve related to the entirety of what the Smithsonian generates with data and the amount of users and stakeholders that there are?

Isabel Meyer: 21:23

Well, that’s what makes it so fascinating and so interesting. We are available as a system that can be used by the entire Smithsonian. Now for scientific data, that the scientific data is separate. That doesn’t fall under digital platforms. There’s a scientific research group that handles the, all the scientific data. But we handle just about everything else, images, audio, video, from content from the archives, content from the collection system. So it’s our biggest collection of holdings in our digital asset management system are what we call the digital surrogates. So these are the digital representations and images of our collection items. And we have the digital images of our archives. So we support the archives and all of the archives across the Smithsonian and the DAMS is integrated with ArchivesSpace, which is the primary platform that’s used at the Smithsonian for managing archive collections, as well as some custom archives. The archives of American art has a custom developed system to manage the archive, but their image in their media content is in DAMS.

Chris Lacinak: 22:51

And so, I mean, if you look at some maybe larger corporations, for instance, there’s going to be a mandate, there’s going to be governance stuff around. Everybody has to use these assets, you know, has to use the DAM for their assets and some things around that. My sense is that’s not the case with the Smithsonian. I’m curious, the folks that choose to participate in utilization of the DAM, is that like an inside out sort of thing where you and your DAM team are going and doing outreach to let people know about the service that’s available to them? And some say, yeah, that sounds great. And others may do their own thing. Or are people, you know, knocking down your door to get in the DAM? What’s that look like as far as how you’re engaging across this gigantic organization?

Isabel Meyer: 23:32

It’s a little bit of both, right? So when we first started the DAMS, I tell everybody it was like a, you know, I felt like a salesperson, you know, little Demo Dolly going around with my laptop or, you know, talking to the units and explaining to them, you know, what digital asset management was and what services, what we could provide for them. Initially, there was some reluctance, not a lot of trust in handing over my wonderful digital content to a system that was managed by the IT organization that was really not part of the museums, right? So we had to develop and establish that trust first. As the system matured, and people started understanding more what it could provide, and it became more of a resource, we don’t have that issue anymore. So quite frequently, the units come to us when they have collections that they need to digitize or content or a new format. And they’ll come and say, “Can you help us with this?” We still reach out to the units. I recently took a team to the Cooper Hewitt in New York, that’s our Smithsonian Design Museum, to sort of spend two days sharing information about what services we can provide, including digital asset management. They’re very familiar with it to some level. But again, things change. So a lot of functionality has grown. And also to find out from them, it’s a two-way communication, right? What can we help you with? What are you planning? What’s coming down the pike in the next year that we can offer, that we can help with?

Chris Lacinak: 25:30

Right. And how do you, with the size of your team, I’d love to talk a little bit more about the division of roles and responsibilities. What are the people on your team doing versus what a particular museum who’s maybe depositing content and using the system? What are the roles and responsibilities of the people on your team versus the stakeholders that you’re serving?

Isabel Meyer: 25:53

So first of all, the people at the museums, libraries, and archives, they create the content, right? So they either– they’re digitizing their materials. They either do it through contractors or through our digitization program office that also supports digitization projects. Or sometimes they acquire things that are– collections that are donated that are already in digital format. They go through and they select what it is that they want to keep, what do they want to store, what’s important to them, what do they want to reuse. They also do the research on clearing any rights that they might have that they need to research, as well as what metadata, right, do they want to store. A lot of that metadata is stored in the collection information system, right? The provenance of the collection, the descriptions, the materials, all of that. Then as they start digitizing those materials and they start ingesting those into the DAMS, they’ll work with my team to map what metadata do they want to store. What are the rights, right? So because we do security policies with collections. Do we have a security policy that can already be applied or do we need to develop a new one? And we work with them on that, identifying what’s the metadata, what are the security policies, is this something that’s available for the public, right? So that it gets properly tagged and it goes into that automated workflow. So it’s definitely a partnership.

Chris Lacinak: 27:40

It sounds almost like you’re a– you play a consultative role to help them figure out how to configure the system to meet their needs. And they’re providing the media, the metadata, the content. Okay, that makes sense. So is it essentially a self-service system or is it mediated access or how does that get managed?

Isabel Meyer: 27:58

Again, that’s also a little bit of both, right? So self-service in that we have set up automation as much as we possibly can. That’s the only way that we can support and scale to the level that we do. So for ingest, we have hot folders set up, we set up configurations for the units, they drop their content, and that process runs every 15 minutes, just loading whatever gets deposited. We load thousands per day. So that’s pretty much self-service, right? They know, we train them on how to do that. We give them the tools and then they take over from there and they load their content. They’ll let us know in advance if it’s a large collection, because we also manage storage. And then it gets ingested and it goes into the workflow. They tag it correctly, it falls into if it needs to be delivered, it goes through our internal delivery service that then creates the derivatives and makes them available. There are cases and this is one of the fun, fun parts. So we also have digital artworks, accessioned, born digital art that does not exist in the physical format. It is physical in that it’s a digital file. Again, referring back to the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, where when they acquire certain works and they’ll reach out to us and say, “We have this. We acquired the first, we’re acquiring the first interactive website that is actually an artwork and we want to preserve it. We want to exhibit it. We’re not sure how to do that. Can you work with us?” And we did. We put together a team of people from my team and from the web development team, from Eden to talk about how could we support this artwork that was comprised of web source code, images, millions of images.

Chris Lacinak: 30:18

Yeah, very, very interesting. That’s fun, fun stuff to dig into. Do you have feedback or requests for the DAM Right podcast? Hit me up and let me know at [email protected]. Looking for amazing and free resources to help you on your DAM journey? Let the best DAM consultants in the business help you out. Visit weareavp.com/free-resources. And stay up to date with the latest and greatest from me and the DAM Right podcast by following me on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/clacinak. You mentioned preserving. I happen to know that the role of the digital asset management system over the years and its relationship to playing the role of digital preservation has evolved and shifted. Could you describe a little bit about the role of the digital asset management system related to digital preservation? 

Isabel Meyer: 31:15

Well, it started as a digital asset management system, right? And one of the things that we also recognized early on was the value and the cost of digitizing this content. So it sort of became, we did not have a digital preservation system at the time. So I started looking at the digital preservation standards, ISO 16363.

Chris Lacinak: 31:44

That’s right. That’s right.

Isabel Meyer: 31:48

And the OAIS model for digital preservation and started sort of categorize what can we achieve, what some things I knew we were doing and some things I knew we needed to improve on. So we went through an assessment of our DAMS and against the standard and use that to communicate with the unit that we did have the architecture to do digital preservation. And I think that’s something that I brought with me from Sallie Mae, right? And Sallie Mae, preserving financial documents for every 18th of a penny, when it’s volume, it counts. So preserving money, building up those backups, building up that data integrity, keeping track of all that and knowing that you can retrieve it at any time was crucial. So I sort of applied those same standards to our DAMS, right? So setting up all of that infrastructure, the replication, the disaster recovery, the backups, the analysis of the formats, the migration, and all into our digital collections so that we, in essence, then became also a preservation platform.

Chris Lacinak: 33:29

Yeah. So thinking about that, the implications to storage are huge because a lot of DAMs might be used for lower resolution proxies and things for access and things that might make its way out onto the web and stuff, as opposed to the highest resolution versions of those things. And just because you are fulfilling the role of digital preservation, I assume that that means you have some very, very large high resolution files of all kinds of types. And it makes me wonder, just from a pragmatic perspective, how the heck do you budget what your storage is going to be on an annual basis? Because I imagine you just painted a picture for how giant, how many objects and all this stuff. And it sounds like the mode of engagement is pretty flexible. You might have someone knock on your door tomorrow that wants to ingest petabytes, right? And maybe you did, and maybe you didn’t budget for that. How do you manage that aspect of it?

Isabel Meyer: 34:28

Very carefully. So I do an analysis of storage every year. And this is one of the areas where, again, I rely on our partners in IT. We have a– Lan Fan is amazing. She’s our data scientist. She’s a computer scientist. And she works with me very closely on evaluating storage platforms. We have migrated storage three times now. So we’re currently on a Qumulo platform. Our repository is at 4.1 petabytes, which is actually 8.2 petabytes. Because we replicate everything onto a disaster recovery pack. So I will start looking. I’ll look at what has our usage been in the past year? How much has it grown? Looking ahead to what projects– what have the units told me that they’re going to digitize that I know are going to come? And where do I need to add more? Then I contact Lan. And I tell her, we might need to acquire more storage. And she’s an excellent negotiator. So she does the research to find out what’s the best platform, what’s out there. She keeps track of what are the current storage technologies. And then we go from there. So storage is probably our largest budget item for the DAMS at the moment.

Chris Lacinak: 36:14

So it’s a conversation. It’s an ongoing conversation, it sounds like. And you just have to be flexible around it.

Isabel Meyer: 36:19

Ongoing conversation.

Chris Lacinak: 36:21

Who do you think of your users being? Is it the units? Is it the public? Is it some mixture of a variety of folks? Who are your users?

Isabel Meyer: 36:28

Yes, yes, and yes. So I think of it maybe as users versus consumers. So the users are the museum staff. It could be the archivists, it’s the curators, the registrars, the collection managers, librarians. Then there’s the web developers, our PR, the people that manage our social content that can access. So we have different levels of users. There’s what we call the power users that are the digital managers at the units that are quite familiar with the system and do the ingest and are familiar with the integrations. And then there’s the read-only users that just want to come in and search to see what’s available that I may want to use in a press release or a website or whatever. It’s available for them to use. Then there’s what gets delivered out to the public. Those are the consumers. If you, we have an open access platform website that makes our content available to the public. It’s with absolutely no restriction. It’s under CC0 rights, which means you can download it. You can do whatever you want with it. All of that content, the images that are available through open access come from our DAMS. So there’s two sides.

Chris Lacinak: 38:21

That’s an expansive set of use cases you’re solving. Because my next question was going to be like, what problems are you solving for them? But you just talked about marketing. You talked about archives. So you had this preservation and access use case. You talked about public. That’s pretty tremendous. So it just seems like in every way you look at this, it’s broad and deep. Talking about the work that you do, which is just again, huge kudos to you for being able to grow this program into what it is today and have it be so successful. That’s amazing.

Isabel Meyer: 38:56

Thank you.

Chris Lacinak: 38:57

How do you think about the mission goals, objectives of your operation? What are you looking at that’s giving you some sense of where you’re going, when you’ve been successful, how successful you’ve been? What answers those sorts of questions for your DAM operation?

Isabel Meyer: 39:19

The Smithsonian’s mission is the increase and diffusion of knowledge. So that is our core. And everyone that is a member of the Smithsonian that works at the Smithsonian holds that very, very dear. That’s our mission. Our 2022-27 strategic plan states, and I’m going to quote this so I don’t get it wrong. “Our content will reach people across the world on topics relevant to their lives through the lens of art, history, and science with the Smithsonian serving as an interpretive guide.” The plan has five focus areas. One is digital. And that focus area is that the goal is to ensure that every home and classroom has access to SI digital content. The second one is nimble. Work together to build a reliable and effective Smithsonian institution. The third one is be a trusted source. Fourth one is science. Harness our expertise to elevate science in the global discourse. And the fifth one is education. To build and enrich a natural culture of learning, engaging with educational systems nationwide. I love this strategic plan. I love it because it almost seems like it was written with digital asset management at its core.

Chris Lacinak: 40:51

It sure does.

Isabel Meyer: 40:53

Our digital content, make it available. Work together to be more nimble. We have to work together. We’re working with our units. We’re working across OCIO. We’re working across digital platforms within the teams to become more nimble. And being a trusted source, that is what we strive for, is to be a trusted source both to our internal community and to our external users.

Chris Lacinak: 41:28

Yeah.

Isabel Meyer: 41:30

So I’m so glad you asked that question.

Chris Lacinak: 41:32

So it’s really couched. Yeah. I mean, so boy, you don’t have to do much work to get from the strategic plan of the Smithsonian to how that ties into your operation and work. That’s nice when that alignment happens naturally like that.

Isabel Meyer: 41:48

It’s very nice. And it’s also, that alignment also signifies the support from the top. Right. Yeah. All the way from our secretary all the way down. It’s recognizing the importance of digital and the role that it plays in the digital Smithsonian.

Chris Lacinak: 42:11

Right. So that paints a very nice picture for today. Has that alignment always been there? How have you engaged over the years leadership in a time when maybe they weren’t super into, I mean, I’m sure that a lot of what you described is kind of evergreen, the spirit of, I mean, that is what museums do, right? They’re about getting kind of people, but maybe it didn’t quite paint quite such a rosy picture how it tied into digital asset management. How have you engaged leadership and kept them, shown them that this is a worthwhile value proposition to stay in the forefront in the years you’ve been doing this?

Isabel Meyer: 42:49

I think in the early years, the Smithsonian has always been very focused on physical collections, on museum visitors, our physical collections, our research. I would say that probably in the last five years, the recognition of the value of digital content has definitely grown. So we, within the OCIO, I think one of the very fortunate, and I’m very grateful for things that we have is the support of our CIO, right? Our CIO, Deron Burba, has always recognized the importance of our digital asset management system and it has really been instrumental in helping in providing the funding and in communicating to upper management what the need is. So those communications at those levels, I rely on Deron to relay that information and he relies on me to keep him informed and provide him the information that he needs.

Chris Lacinak: 44:11

So it’s a good team of folks that are working in unison there. I wonder if you could give some insight to people who have never had the opportunity to work in a museum, don’t know what that looks like. What’s the difference, do you think? What’s unique about digital asset management in a museum environment versus maybe a digital asset management in a corporate environment or a nonprofit or something like that? Is that too unfair of a question to ask? Do you have insights into that?

Isabel Meyer: 44:42

I think one of the surprising things that someone might discover is that even though the goals or the motivation of corporations or nonprofits and museums are different, the motivation in a corporation obviously is profit. You want to make money and the way, especially with digital asset management, the way you make money is you have a brand and you want to ensure the integrity of that brand. Nonprofits you’re providing a benefit or a service to a specific population to serve a public need. Museums are very similar. I think people would be probably surprised to learn that museums have a brand. The Smithsonian Institution has a brand. We’re very proud of that brand and we’re very protective of that brand. So in a similar way, ensuring that what gets out there is representative of our brand and is trustworthy is about the same as a corporation. Even though the motivation is different, we’re not in it for profit. We’re in it for the public good.

Chris Lacinak: 46:10

I wanted to ask you about a recent project that the Smithsonian has engaged in with the Getty, the Johnson Publishing Company Project. I wonder if you could tell us about that, maybe some of the origins of that and what’s happening with that.

Isabel Meyer: 46:27

That’s another really fun, just amazing project and opportunity that we have that we’re involved with and I’m very proud to be involved with. So first of all, the Johnson Publishing Corporation or Company was founded in 1942 in the city of Chicago. And until 2005, it was a privately held company that produced iconic magazines like Ebony and Jet that were publications and radio and television programs that featured African-American or Black American life and culture. So they had amassed quite an archive of content, of images, photography, negatives, audio video recordings that represented African-American life in contemporary in the 21st century, 20th century. So the archive was acquired when the company was going out of business, went out of business and it was at risk of being broken up. It was acquired through a consortium of the Ford Foundation, the J Paul Getty Trust and the MacArthur Foundation and the Mellon Foundation. So they acquired the archive in full, in its entirety. Then ownership of that archive was transferred to be shared between the Getty and the Smithsonian. So this is the first time, I’m pretty safe to say that as each organization that we’ve had to share a collection of this magnitude and size and both from the preservation aspects and from the interpretive aspects of the collection, of the archive. So the archive has more than four and a half million photo negatives, over 9,000 audio visual recordings and other various items. So what we first had to do was put together a team to look at how were we going to digitize, manage, preserve this amazing archive. And it took us several years to figure that out. So we assembled what we call best of breed. So which organization could manage the archive metadata the best? Which organization could do the digital asset management? Which organization could do the interpretation, the distribution? How are we going to make this archive available to the public? What’s the best way? So there’s ArchivesSpace under the Getty. The Getty has the archive metadata and system for that. The Smithsonian is doing the digitization and the digital asset management system at the Smithsonian is going to be the preservation system for the digitized content. The delivery goes out through our enterprise data access network to be shared between both organizations and we’re working through all that process right now. But it’s a beautiful archive. It’s been a really interesting project, working with the Getty, where even though we’re two museums we’re different cultures, right? The Smithsonian, yep. So we’re very different cultures. So even adapting at the people level, how do we all work together, has been a great learning experience.

Chris Lacinak: 50:43

And is that under the auspices of any particular museum at the Smithsonian or is this done at the institutional level?

Isabel Meyer: 50:50

No, it’s at the National Museum of African American History and Culture is actually the museum that is going to hold the physical archive.

Chris Lacinak: 21:01

Very cool. Yeah, that is an amazing and important collection.

Isabel Meyer: 51:06

So I’m glad you asked that question because yeah, it’s not the Smithsonian, it’s that specific museum that is working on that.

Chris Lacinak: 51:14

Do you imagine that there’s more of this down the line? I’m not asking you to give us any confidential information or anything, but I’m just wondering, it’s just interesting that the two organizations collaborated in that way. I haven’t seen that in many cases.

Isabel Meyer: 51:27

No, I think this is the first for both of us. And while there isn’t anything specific, I would like to think that what we’re implementing and what we’re learning from this shared collection and collaboration with the Getty will pave the way for other similar type projects where we can share collections with other institutions or cultural heritage organizations. So I think it’s going to open new doors that we haven’t really explored yet.

Chris Lacinak: 52:03

If you were going to look 10 years into the future, what’s your vision for what the DAM and the DAM operation looks like? 

Isabel Meyer: 52:14

10 years into the future is like two, even five years. It’s a little overwhelming, right? I know how much content has exploded, digital content in the past five years alone. So thinking five years as to what it’s going to look like, some of the things that we’re doing now, I never envisioned even like two or three years ago that we would be doing, or that we would be even discussing. Obviously I think the artificial intelligence and machine learning is going to come into play. But where I actually think the big growth opportunity is, is in accessibility and communications. And by communications, I mean translation of content into different languages, right? If we want to share more of our content, being able to support different languages and accessibility to expand that access is crucial. So I think that’s sort of, I think in five years, I would like to think that we have automated flows to make our content accessible, to solve and making that content available to that community. And also to serving in other languages, in Spanish, Chinese.

Chris Lacinak: 54:00

Yeah. That sounds very much in alignment with the strategic kind of plan you read earlier. So that makes sense. I’m going to shift here to our final question, which I ask all of our guests on the DAM Right Podcast, which is totally unrelated to digital asset management, which is, what is the last song that you liked or added to your favorites playlist?

Isabel Meyer: 54:25

My taste in music is pretty eclectic.

Chris Lacinak: 54:29

Great. Love that.

Isabel Meyer: 54:31

So I don’t really have a playlist. I sort of create play radio stations, I create them depending upon what my mood is or what I like. So I love dance. So tango music is one of my go-tos. And I recently found myself listening to a piece by Astor Piazzolla called Oblivion, which I think it’s just absolutely gorgeous.

Chris Lacinak: 55:04

Great.

Isabel Meyer: 55:05

And I was recently, I just got back from Texas for the Eclipse.

Chris Lacinak: 55:10

Oh, cool. Right.

Isabel Meyer: 55:13

Yeah. So that was cool, even though it was cloudy. But since I was in Texas, and I don’t keep up with popular music very much, but I decided that I wanted to listen to Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter album. I think that’s what it’s called. And thinking I don’t really know that much about country music, I don’t listen to it that much, but it’s all very popular. So maybe I should listen to it and see. I was so surprised that Blackbird defined the song Blackbird by Paul McCartney. Because I would not have thought of that as country, which is not, but I understand why she included it in that album. And I thought it was just a beautiful rendition of that song. I mean, she did do a wonderful job with that album.

Chris Lacinak: 55:05

Yeah, she did. So I thought maybe you were going to say you tangoed underneath the eclipse, but that didn’t happen.

Isabel Meyer: 56:11

No, you know, I would have loved to have done that, actually. I’ll keep that in mind for the next one.

Chris Lacinak: 56:19

I have a visual that looks beautiful there.

Isabel Meyer: 56:21

Well, I’ll keep that in mind for the next one.

Chris Lacinak: 56:25

Yeah. Well, Isabel, you’re extremely busy. You’ve been very generous with your time. It’s been such fun and a real privilege to have you on the podcast. Thank you for giving me the time to talk today. And I really appreciate it. And it’s just been fantastic. Really, really love all the insights and contributions. So thank you.

Isabel Meyer

Well, thank you for the opportunity. It’s been my pleasure. And I hope it’s of benefit to your listeners.

Chris Lacinak: 56:50

Do you have feedback or requests for the DAM Right podcast? Hit me up and let me know at [email protected]. Looking for amazing and free resources to help you on your DAM journey? Let the best DAM consultants in the business help you out. Visit weareavp.com/free-resources. And stay up to date with the latest and greatest from me and the DAM Right podcast by following me on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/clacinak.

Recap of the Henry Stewart Creative Ops Conference 2024

Welcome to our recap of the Henry Stewart Creative Ops Conference, which recently took place on May 16th. The conference offered a wealth of knowledge across four tracks: creative operations, photo studio operations, design operations, and creative production. Both Kara Van Malssen and Chris Lacinak attended and are here to share their insights and key takeaways.

Overview of the Conference

The conference was packed with sessions that made it tough to choose which ones to attend. Kara opted to jump between various tracks, while Chris focused primarily on creative operations. This approach allowed them to gather diverse perspectives on the evolving landscape of creative operations.

Key Takeaways

1. Creatives Doing More with Less

A recurring theme at the conference was how creatives are adapting to do more with fewer resources. With increasing demands from stakeholders and evolving audience needs, many are forced to innovate within constraints. One notable example came from JJ Pagano of Paramount Pictures, who shared how they reduced the time taken to create content significantly through automation and AI. This shift has led to astounding efficiency gains.

2. Creating More from Less Content

The second takeaway highlighted the importance of creating more with less content. This idea again ties back to efficiency. Several panels discussed the need for a master creative asset that could be repurposed into various derivative forms. Nickelodeon shared how they adapted during the pandemic by repurposing existing content into new formats, such as puppet shows.

3. The Role of AI in Creative Processes

AI was a significant focus throughout the conference. Many speakers addressed the anxiety surrounding job security in light of AI advancements. However, there was also optimism about AI’s potential to streamline mundane tasks, allowing creatives to focus on more impactful work. Dax Alexander emphasized that AI is here to stay and that embracing it is essential for future success.

4. Change Management in Creative Operations

Change management emerged as another critical theme. Dax discussed the cultural shift necessary for adopting AI technologies, stressing the importance of leadership support and clear goals. The idea that change is not permanent resonated with many attendees, reinforcing the need for adaptability in a rapidly evolving industry.

5. The Relationship Between DAM and Creative Teams

Lastly, Tony Gill shed light on the often-fractured relationship between digital asset management (DAM) systems and creative teams. He pointed out that many enterprise DAM solutions do not cater to the speed and collaboration needs of creative operations. This mismatch can leave creatives feeling unsupported, relying on outdated methods to manage their workflows.

Final Thoughts

The conference was a resounding success, with engaging discussions and valuable insights. Both Kara and Chris appreciated the opportunity to connect with industry leaders and peers. The final session, which brought all the moderators together for a recap, was particularly well-received, fostering lively discussion and engagement among attendees.

In conclusion, the Henry Stewart Creative Ops Conference provided a platform for sharing ideas and strategies to navigate the challenges in creative operations today. It highlighted the importance of efficiency, adaptability, and collaboration in a world where creatives must do more with less.

Transcript

Chris Lacinak: 00:01

Kara Van Malssen, welcome back to the DAM Right podcast. Good to have you.

Kara Van Malssen: 00:06

Thank you, thanks for having me back again.

Chris Lacinak: 00:08

And we are here today to talk about a recap

of the Henry Stewart Creative Ops Conference, which the name is a bit deceptive

because it was more than just creative ops.

It was actually four tracks,

creative operations, photo studio operations,

design operations, and creative production.

We both went, this just happened this past week.

It was Thursday, right?

May 16th.

And we both went and it was, I’m not gonna lie,

it was hard to pick which sessions to go to.

We used different tactics there.

Although I had the all access pass,

I wasted it because I spent my whole day

in the creative operations that was chaired by

our friend Thomas Stilling.

And you took a bit different of a tactic.

You jumped around a bit more, right?

Kara Van Malssen: 01:02

I did.

I divided my time between creative operations, creative production and design operations.

So I caught a couple of presentations from each one

and I did unfortunately miss the photo studio operations.

So I don’t think we have anything from that event.

Chris Lacinak: 01:23

In order to frame this conversation,

you’ve given us a big head start here. You’ve just this morning kind of posted your five,

it’s kind of five variations on a theme,

five themes on LinkedIn.

People should definitely check that out.

But I thought we might use that as a way to just walk

through some of the takeaways and share our thoughts

on the conference.

Would you mind sharing your first takeaway?

Kara Van Malssen: 01:49

Yeah, the first thing that came to mind

is sort of a framing takeaway, which was creatives are having to do more with less.

There’s more channels, there’s evolving audience needs.

There’s more demand from stakeholders,

but there’s less budget, there’s less resources.

So there was definitely a theme about getting creative

with those constraints and those demands

and trying to figure out what to do about it.

So I saw that coming up over and over and over again.

Chris Lacinak: 02:24

Yeah, one specific thing I’ll call out,

John Pagano, JJ Pagano, he said people call him, from Paramount Pictures talked about,

they have in the creation of content,

they have gone from taking upwards of 60 minutes

to create two and a half minutes of content,

to taking eight to 10 minutes

to create eight minutes of content.

I thought that was just astounding.

I mean, wild, right?

That’s bonkers, that’s like a ridiculous increase

in efficiency, largely attributed to use

of both automation and AI.

So that was interesting, but yeah,

I think that speaks to what you’re talking about there.

And I just kind of threw out AI there.

I mean, in your interpretation of what you heard,

was that really kind of the linchpin

that that whole doing more with less was,

or were there other ways that that came up?

Kara Van Malssen: 03:18

No, it actually came up in a lot of other ways.

So maybe, we’ll definitely come to AI, ’cause that’s a huge 800 pound gorilla in the room,

in all the rooms.

But no, I think where I started my day

was with the folks from Nickelodeon,

talking about how they had to adapt during the pandemic.

And this is the folks that run their YouTube channel,

and many, many channels, I should say 24 channels,

I believe, globally.

So they had to shift immediately from,

we have no way to access our library,

we have no way to shoot talent in the studio,

we’ve all got to retreat to our apartments, what do we do?

So that was where it all began.

And so they started getting creative

with repurposing content into puppet form

and things like that.

So rather than having live actors, like using puppets

and things like that.

And they did talk about later innovations

in the ability to search and find and repurpose content

from their library,

and that being another way of doing more with less.

So not needing to shoot new content,

a new original material.

And that same theme came up again,

this was also in the same track on creative production.

There was a panel of producers,

and I think the topic was doing more with less.

And so that was just the whole theme.

And there were a lot of different things that came up,

but one recurring theme there was also similarly,

making one piece of content that can be repurposed

many, many times and take many derivative forms.

So that was coming up,

use of archival content again was coming up.

And I actually saw that in the third session

in the design operations room,

which was a presentation from the company Celtra,

which helps people kind of create using atomic content,

as they say, kind of very rapidly repurposed.

Now there’s AI layered into all this a little bit,

but the theme here was,

and even another group I was thinking of it was Hilton.

And they talked about something similar,

kind of a master content model with many derivative assets

and kind of derivative content pieces

from that one kind of highest level creative asset.

So does that resonate with what you heard?

Chris Lacinak: 05:57

Yeah, well, and actually,

as you talked about the Nickelodeon session, I mean, it’s funny because it was at the same time

as JJ Pagano’s from Paramount Pictures,

a similar deal, ’cause he was talking about,

I mean, it was all focused on their YouTube channels.

They have many YouTube channels.

The use of puppets, I mean, all those things,

actually, there was a lot of similar.

We hadn’t talked about that.

So it’s funny to hear that.

But in doing more with less,

I kind of went to like efficiency,

which you gotta ask, well, what’s the outcome?

Did the quality go way down?

Did they hurt their metrics?

Like, how good is it?

And one metric that he gave was that

between March,: 2023 

they went from 1.6 billion with a B

to 2.8 billion watch time minutes.

So not only did they get more efficient,

but they also saw much, much higher response rates

to the content they were putting out there.

But yeah, I did hear that routinely in all sorts of ways

about doing more with less.

Interestingly enough, actually, as I think about it,

even in kind of the,

there was a session on sustainability

as in environmental sustainability.

And they also talked about intentionally

doing more with less as a way of

addressing environmental sustainability to some extent.

They talked about a lot of things,

but that was one aspect of it.

So yeah, well, let’s jump into your second takeaway.

What was your second?

Kara Van Malssen: 07:27

Well, I think we’ve just bridged from one to two

because the first one was doing more with less. The second one is one of the ways they’re doing that

is to creating more with less content.

But that theme is just keeps coming into my mind

and hearing that over and over.

And what you said about the performance of the content

and of scaling and increasing at the same time

makes me think of another insight

from some of the speakers, which was that kind of,

the kind of master creative content

that sort of you create all these derivatives from,

if that’s being created using insight from measurement,

from predictive analytics or from,

to performance analytics to,

so you’re actually informing the new content creation

by what’s performing best out there

and sort of getting smarter.

So it’s not just repurposing for repurposing sake,

it’s actually kind of a work smarter,

not harder type of theme as well.

So were you hearing the same thing

in the sessions you were in?

Chris Lacinak: 08:32

Yeah, absolutely.

I was looking for the term in my notes that came up in the sustainability session

and I knew there was a specific term they use

and it was micro production.

So that was just about it,

asking like, do people really need to be here

at this production or how can we do production

in a way that utilizes as few people as necessary,

only the people required and things like that.

So, and they did reiterate multiple times

that that was not just about environmental

sustainability,

that there was also a bottom line aspect to that,

that was attractive when it came to the financials

of production and operations.

So should we jump to the third?

Kara Van Malssen: 09:11

As we hinted earlier, AI was a very big theme.

I think every session touched on it. I think at this point, if you’re in this type of community,

you cannot avoid talking about it

because one of the things,

trends we’re obviously seeing with Gen AI

is creative output or something that looks like it, right?

The ChatGPT can write, you have DALL-E Midjourney

creating images, video content, et cetera.

And so there’s this, obviously an important concern

is the AI coming for our jobs as creatives.

And so that was sort of touched on by,

I think every speaker that I saw in some way, shape or form.

Chris Lacinak: 09:59

It sure was. It was a big theme for sure. 

Kara Van Malssen: 10:03

Yeah, so you saw the same thing.

Chris Lacinak: 10:05

Yeah, I mean, I think,

and we talked a little bit about this. There were kind of two competing narratives

or counter perspectives.

One was, is AI gonna take our job?

The other one was, boy, isn’t it great?

AI is saving us from having to do all of the mundane work

that is not creative, is not impactful, but has to be done.

So it was interesting, there was that sentiment that

what AI and automation, which I just wanna say quickly,

it’s kind of a pet peeve of mine,

how AI and automation are conflated so much.

They’re very different things.

So let’s be clear about that.

But they are often talked about as being synonymous.

But in this case, I do mean both.

It was talked about,

both of these things were talked about.

Isn’t it great that they can save us so much time

so that we can now do the most impactful work?

I would have loved to have heard some more details

about that, like I love the concept.

I don’t disagree with that.

But I think where the tension still lies is

how exactly will that play out and how true is that?

I think to alleviate some of the folks

that are concerned about, is AI gonna take our jobs?

But I don’t know, what do you think?

Kara Van Malssen: 11:20

Well, your two kind of views on that,

I saw kind of a through line to them, which was the answer to the question,

will, is AI coming for our jobs is no,

it’s coming for the tedious parts

that you never were good at

and never got around to in the first place

or struggled to do, which is your point about automation.

And there was some conflating there.

But I think what people were saying is,

use AI to help with automation.

Automation isn’t just AI driven, obviously.

So there are ways to insert AI tools

to help with certain automation tasks.

And so that was the theme I was picking up on there.

I think a few examples were given

of what the practical uses of those things are,

things like kind of automating delivery

of something once it’s created

and pushing it out to these various places,

things like that, just kind of a little fiddly bit stuff.

I think what Celtra again is doing

to kind of very rapidly take large volumes

of modular assets and then quickly repurposing them

into many, many, many, many different assets

that can be pushed out to lots of different channels

is another example of, I think there’s AI in there,

kind of mixed into that sauce.

So things like that,

that kind of getting more done faster type of track

was coming, that was the kind of thing

that it was being pushed.

But I thought there was one really interesting takeaway.

I can’t remember who said this now,

but they said just be aware that even using AI

for automation will still result in more assets,

more output, more content.

So it’s not like just using AI for automation

is just getting the same stuff done faster.

And if we avoid having it do creative,

then we won’t increase our output, but actually we will.

So I thought that was a really interesting takeaway too.

Chris Lacinak: 13:39

Yeah, there are two kind of quotes or moments

that come to mind for me. One is I thought that the presentation

from Dax Alexander was great.

That was called “The Real Deal,

A Practical Roadmap to Harnessing AI in-house.”

So he’s from a company called Oliver.

And he talked about a lot of things.

He started off by saying,

“The reason we’re here is because it’s a f’ing mess,”

which that’s a good kind of sobering thought

to start with.

And he did that,

he had a slide of about a thousand different products

that fall into different categories when he said that.

So you felt it, you felt it when you looked at it.

But he had a really great framework that they use

around helping guide folks through the use of AI

and all sorts of criteria, what the tools do,

how they work, what the legal agreements around them,

licensing agreements are around them.

Actually, that was one of the biggest things

that came out of it for me,

is the legal stuff is the hairiest part, probably.

And so there’s a lot of analytical frameworks

around use of AI.

And in large corporate settings in particular,

where there’s a lot of probably nail-biting going on

about are people using a dark AI

that’s not been yet vetted and approved by the company.

But the other thing that was relative to that

was Guido Derkx, I believe was his name,

talked about, I mean, he kind of started his talk by saying,

he was sitting around with friends and had the realization,

we were just talking about the AI taking away

all of the mundane tasks that he had the realization,

wait, are we the robots, right?

We’re doing all of the mundane tasks,

all this really boring, systematic, non-creative work.

So that was an interesting and funny twist.

Kara Van Malssen: 15:41

Yeah, I think, so while Dax’s presentation

kind of is the jumping off point for my fourth takeaway, which his message, another one of his messages was,

AI is here to stay, embrace it, wrestle with it,

because you’re gonna need to figure this out.

So I thought his framework that you mentioned,

here’s a very practical kind of four step process

to adoption.

And he really emphasized the culture shift,

there’s resistance, there’s certain people who are,

embracing it, running, let’s go, let’s do this,

maybe recklessly perhaps.

So he’s also got a lot of caution, I think, in his approach.

And then there’s a lot of people, maybe the majority,

who are very apprehensive, nervous,

they don’t understand it,

and rightfully scared and confused.

So he did talk a lot about the culture piece being,

the number one driver,

and that you have to kind of bring people along

in really interesting ways.

But having time, whatever you’re trying to do with it,

to strategy, being a really key piece,

and then having leadership sponsorship

was also a big part of that.

And then his framework was sort of,

I think it was, define what are the goals

we’re trying to achieve here.

I select the right tools based on your use cases,

really get into what those are, pilot, and then scale.

And he had a lot of really interesting anecdotal stories

to share about how they do scale,

if they decide through a pilot, like,

okay, let’s adopt the tool,

how they scale it out to their like 5,000,

I believe, employees.

Chris Lacinak: 17:28

Yeah.

Kara Van Malssen: 17:29

So that was really interesting to hear about.

Chris Lacinak: 17:30

Yeah.

As a side note, that just made me think of the change management conversation.

I’ll just inject a couple of thoughts here.

So there was a session called Mastering Change Management.

There’s a few great things.

One is, there was a woman who worked

for Office of General Services,

Media Services in New York, Kate Schmieding,

rhymes with meeting, I remember that’s how

she introduced herself.

And she had a meeting,

she has a meeting with her staff once a week

called I Hate It Here,

which is in which all the staff members come

and they talk about the things they hate, which I thought,

and someone asked, how do you make that productive?

And she said, it’s not, that’s not what it’s about.

It’s about people being able to vent

and talk about the things that annoy them

and things like that.

So I thought that was just,

that got the room cracking up, that was hilarious.

And she was, I appreciated that contribution.

But the other thing that came out

of that change management meeting was,

or change management session was,

I love it, someone, you know,

some kind of one of the concluding thoughts,

it was also one of the opening thoughts is,

they try to remind their employees

that change is not permanent, it’s not forever.

And I thought, that’s an oxymoron, right?

But yeah, in Dax’s session,

that definitely came to light is,

how do you roll that out through a large organization?

Kara Van Malssen: 18:54

Yeah, and it sounded like, this is not a similar thing,

but they do have sort of a recurring meeting, like an office hours type of thing,

where they, you know, people can come

and it’s somebody that’s new to the technology

that’s actually running the session

and trying to teach it to colleagues.

And they’re, you know, struggling with that as well.

So it’s like, you know, they’re barely half a step ahead

of the other people coming.

So they’re kind of helping people learn together,

but they’ve got the SMEs sort of lurking in the wings

in case they need to jump in.

But that was kind of cool, just to kind of help,

you know, they’re helping each other along

through that process.

Chris Lacinak: 19:36

– Yeah, that is a great idea. It’s a good structure.

Kara Van Malssen: 19:39

– Yeah, I like that, I hate it here meeting too. I mean, that’s a totally different thing.

Chris Lacinak: 19:45

– Courageous exercise as the leader of an organization to engage in, I give her props for that. 

Kara Van Malssen: 19:50

– Yeah.

Chris Lacinak: 19:52

– So the other person who had a framework

and it’s related to your point number five, your takeaway number five was Tony Gill.

He also showed its framework that was,

I mean, we couldn’t see the details of these,

but on its face, it kind of looks similar

to what Dax showed in the sense that it had kind of red,

green, yellow areas of risk and things like that.

But what is your fifth point?

Kara Van Malssen: 20:10

– Well, my fifth point was kind of a message

for DAM professionals, for digital asset management practitioners,

because this group of folks are the ones that are,

the creative operations people are kind of orchestrating

the creation and reuse of the assets

that the digital asset management person is stewarding.

And a lot of the use cases of the creative teams

are not necessarily met by enterprise DAM.

So Tony sort of broke that out and said,

an enterprise DAM solution,

which he also kind of lumped with a marketing DAM,

which is a lot of times where it sits,

it’s very much more of a library kind of solution.

It’s search, browse, download, share, use,

disseminate, measure,

but with rights and security mixed in.

The needs of the creative groups are a lot more,

we need speed, we need edit, we need file lock,

we need version control, collaboration.

And these are all features that are in,

all of the features combined

are in digital asset management solutions,

but they’re not always done well

for the creative production groups.

And within an organization, there’s usually,

not usually, but often one DAM

and it’s the enterprise solution.

And so we’ve seen that with our clients,

that the creative groups are sort of still left out

in the cold, like fending with themselves

on hard drives and whatnot.

And it’s not well integrated into their workflows.

So I think his point was,

there’s been a fraught relationship there

and the DAM community should be looking at this closely

to think how can we kind of enable this creative reuse,

but by meeting the folks where they are.

So yeah, that was one of my key takeaways

from Tony’s talk that I thought was very interesting.

Chris Lacinak: 22:12

One of the questions he raised,

nd apparently at DAM New York: 2023

in the stump of the consultant session

for asking the best question,

was should work in process assets be stored in the DAM?

Apparently still a hot topic

’cause lots of people had lots of thoughts about that.

And he did a hand raise in the room

about who thinks they should, who thinks they shouldn’t,

and who’s in between.

But what were your thoughts on that?

Kara Van Malssen: 22:40

Well, I thought that was funny

because I’ve been on stump of the consultant panel one time at DAM LA.

I was not at the one that he won the thing for on the panel,

but I was in the audience.

And I remember thinking,

what would my answer to this question be?

And he had said that the panel

all either gave the response of yes, or it depends.

And I was like, yep, I would have been one of those,

it depends people.

And, ’cause I think it depends on the purpose

of the DAM system, who it’s serving,

what are the main use cases that it’s helping to enable?

And if your main use cases are spread out

and varied enough that it warrants more

of that library like approach and library system,

then that may be your right solution.

Maybe you don’t have creative production in house,

maybe that’s an ad agency partner.

So therefore that’s not necessarily a need.

But if you do have, especially video production in house,

there is often a need for a two system solution.

And I think he was also pointing to that,

like embrace this, this is,

there’s a photo studio or a video production,

PAM or MAM, so production asset management

or media asset management system,

that’s more gonna have those features

that he was describing, faster edit, version control,

file lock, collaboration, et cetera,

to service them through that edit process

and then push to the final deliverables

and kind of evergreen content to the enterprise DAM.

I think he was advocating for that kind of model.

And I thought that was a really good point.

And I’ve seen that work well in a lot of cases.

And therefore you have a home for work in progress

when it’s in that kind of PAM environment.

Chris Lacinak: 24:36

– That’s exactly where my head went with,

which is over the years in our work, I think here about organizations like HBO, for instance,

like they have a PAM and there is a new,

I’ve heard PAM more recently in reference

to what someone referred to as a product asset management

in addition to a PIM product.

But PAM as in production asset management,

this is an asset management system used for production

and post-production processes

for things that are work in process.

And the final state deliverables that come out of that

is what goes into a DAM that is used for distribution

and access and things like that.

So, and I sat with a group of folks at lunch

and I kind of posed that question

because everybody had been in Tony’s session.

So, and no one else there had heard

of a production asset management system before,

which I think, it may have to do more

with just folks that are more involved

in kind of media and entertainment workflows

where video production has driven that need.

It was so much more necessary to have a PAM

that was separate from the DAM

when you’re dealing with kind of really large file sizes

and maybe more complex operations

than compared to non-video workflows.

I don’t know, I wasn’t quite sure

why I was the only one at that table

that had had that experience.

But do you have any thoughts on that?

Kara Van Malssen: 26:04

– Well, I do think it’s from,

those who are familiar with it are either gonna be from media and entertainment,

production, bigger production companies,

or large enterprises that have had in-house video production.

And I do think this is rooted in the video space.

But Tony was also talking about photo studio.

Chris Lacinak: 26:26

– Yeah, that’s true.

Kara Van Malssen: 26:28

– Kind of PAM-like system.

So, that’s interesting as well. But yeah, we’ve done work with clients in the past

where we helped with PAM implementation.

Then there was a DAM.

Sometimes they call it MAM.

PAM MAM thing gets, I think, confusing.

There’s a little bit of a identity crisis

between those things.

So, some people might be like, “What’s a PAM?

“I’ve heard of MAM.”

So, I think there’s some acronym overload going on.

But it is still larger organizations

or very media-heavy organizations.

What I also thought was interesting related to this

was I was in a panel of producers,

and I asked the question,

“Okay, you’re talking about a lot of content reuse,

“repurposing, using archival, using library content.

“So, what can digital asset managers do

“to better support you?”

And they were like,

“We don’t know what you’re talking about.

“What’s that?”

It was basically their response.

Chris Lacinak: 27:30

– What’s that as in what? What’s “that” in that sentence?

Kara Van Malssen: 27:33

– What’s digital asset management?

A lot of these are from small production companies, independent filmmakers.

And they’re just like,

“I’m over here trying to deal with the files.

“And if you can help, can you teach me something?

“I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

So, it kind of made me realize

those who even know this concept

are in a privileged position to begin with

because you’re in a big company

that has supported this technology and infrastructure

and people that can enable that.

But a lot of people out there

are just winging it on their own.

They’re working in file sharing systems,

hard drives, small RAIDs.

They’re just trying to keep the files organized.

But them as a practice is not present

in many, many, many places.

So, that was also sort of an aha moment.

Like, “Oh yeah, this is not exist everywhere.”

Chris Lacinak: 28:26

– Right, well,

DAM operations exists in all of those scenarios, but whether they’re recognized as DAM operations

and how well they’re serving their users is another question.

Any other final takeaways before we sign off here?

Kara Van Malssen: 28:39

– No, I think it was a great event.

I enjoyed it a lot. And I’d love to go back.

I think it was some very good conversations.

It was extremely active.

The participation was, you know,

kind of, everyone was very engaged.

So, I thought that was wonderful.

Chris Lacinak: 29:00

– Yeah, I agree.

I think Henry Stewart did a great job putting it together. I think that the, all four consultants,

consultants, I think all four moderators,

some of which were consultants,

did a great job.

And we got, you know,

while I said that I sat in Thomas’s

creative operations stream all day,

there was a final session at the end of the day,

which I think was fantastic.

I think Henry Stewart should do this

anytime there’s multiple panels.

They brought all four facilitators,

moderators of those streams together

to kind of summarize, recap, engage with the audience.

And so we got to hear about and see from all of them.

And I thought they were all just fantastic.

Really did a really wonderful job.

And that was a really fun session.

I thought that was a great way to end it.

So, a big shout out and props to everybody involved

in that decision and actually making it happen.

Kara Van Malssen: 29:52

– Yeah, I think, yeah,

the Henry Stewart team deserves a round of applause. All of the moderators, obviously all the speakers.

But yeah, I second that,

the end of the day session where they brought

the moderators together.

And I think the audience was just so engaged at that point.

There were so many questions, the conversation kept flowing.

I think we went right past the time

where the drinks were supposed to start

and people were fine with that.

They were just like, let’s keep talking.

So I think that was wonderful.

Chris Lacinak: 30:19

– It’s a good sign. It’s a good sign.

Kara Van Malssen: 30:21

– It is.

Chris Lacinak: 30:22

– Great.

All right. Well, thanks so much for joining me today.

Thanks so much for the great takeaways.

And as I said, that’s a LinkedIn post

that folks can go check out too.

And yeah, it was fun.

Thanks, Kara.

Kara Van Malssen: 30:34

– It was fun.

Yeah, thank you. 

(upbeat music)

The Importance of Digital Preservation in the Entertainment Industry

Introduction to Digital Preservation

In the rapidly evolving landscape of the entertainment industry, digital preservation has emerged as a critical concern. As filmmakers and studios transition from traditional film to digital formats, the need to safeguard cinematic holdings becomes increasingly paramount. This article explores the multifaceted nature of digital preservation, its challenges, and the vital role it plays in preserving our cultural heritage.

The Evolution of Digital Preservation

The concept of digital preservation has evolved significantly over the past few decades. Initially focused on traditional photochemical films, the shift to digital media has prompted archivists to rethink their strategies. With the rise of digital technology in production, postproduction, and distribution, the preservation landscape has transformed dramatically.

Digital preservation encompasses not only the safeguarding of digital assets but also the management of physical materials. As the entertainment industry embraces digital formats, the responsibility of preserving these assets falls on creators, studios, and archivists alike.

Understanding Cinematic Holdings

Cinematic holdings refer to the collection of films, videos, and other moving image materials that studios and archives manage. This term encompasses a wide range of formats, including traditional film, digital video, and even newer media forms. As the definition of cinematic holdings evolves, so too does the approach to their preservation.

The challenge lies in maintaining the integrity of these assets while ensuring they remain accessible for future generations. Understanding what constitutes cinematic holdings is crucial for developing effective preservation strategies.

The Role of Digital Asset Management (DAM)

Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems play a pivotal role in the preservation of cinematic holdings. These systems facilitate the organization, storage, and retrieval of digital assets, ensuring that they remain accessible and usable over time. The integration of DAM with preservation workflows is essential for studios aiming to maintain their assets’ longevity.

Moreover, the relationship between DAM and digital preservation is symbiotic. While DAM focuses on the management of digital files, preservation ensures that these files are protected from degradation, corruption, or obsolescence.

Challenges in Digital Preservation

Despite the advancements in technology and methodology, digital preservation presents numerous challenges. One of the primary concerns is the rapid evolution of technology and formats. As new digital standards emerge, older formats may become obsolete, rendering archived materials inaccessible.

Additionally, digital files are susceptible to corruption over time, which can lead to data loss. The sheer volume of digital content produced today also complicates preservation efforts, as it requires significant storage and management resources.

Financial constraints further exacerbate these challenges. Many organizations struggle to allocate adequate budgets for preservation efforts, often prioritizing immediate business needs over long-term archival goals.

The Business of Digital Preservation

The relationship between business and digital preservation is complex. Studios and organizations must balance the need for preservation with the reality of financial constraints. While the long-term benefits of preserving assets are evident, securing funding for these initiatives can be challenging.

Moreover, the economic landscape of the entertainment industry, characterized by mergers and acquisitions, adds another layer of complexity. Rights holders may struggle to maintain control over their assets, leading to potential gaps in preservation efforts.

The Cultural Significance of Preservation

Beyond the financial implications, digital preservation holds immense cultural significance. Films and moving images are not merely entertainment; they are artifacts of our collective history and identity. Preserving these assets ensures that future generations can access and engage with our cultural heritage.

Organizations and studios must recognize their responsibility to safeguard these cultural treasures. This commitment to preservation transcends business interests, reflecting a broader societal obligation to protect our shared history.

The Academy Digital Preservation Forum

The Academy Digital Preservation Forum serves as a vital platform for fostering collaboration and knowledge-sharing among industry stakeholders. Formed under the auspices of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the forum aims to address the challenges and complexities of digital preservation.

By bringing together filmmakers, technologists, archivists, and other professionals, the forum seeks to promote best practices, raise awareness, and advocate for the importance of digital preservation within the entertainment industry.

Future Directions in Digital Preservation

Looking ahead, the future of digital preservation hinges on several key factors. First, there is a need for standardized practices across the industry. By establishing common protocols and workflows, organizations can streamline their preservation efforts and reduce confusion.

Second, collaboration among stakeholders is essential. The digital preservation landscape is vast, and no single entity can address all the challenges alone. By working together, studios, archivists, and technology providers can share insights and develop innovative solutions.

Finally, fostering a culture of awareness and advocacy is crucial. Educating decision-makers about the value of preservation and its long-term benefits can help secure funding and support for these initiatives.

Conclusion

Digital preservation is a multifaceted challenge that requires a concerted effort from all stakeholders within the entertainment industry. As we navigate the complexities of preserving our cinematic holdings, it is essential to recognize the cultural, financial, and technological dimensions of this endeavor. By embracing collaboration, advocating for best practices, and prioritizing preservation efforts, we can ensure that our rich cinematic heritage endures for generations to come.

Transcript

Chris Lacinak: 00:00

Hi, Chris Lacinak here, host of the DAM Right podcast.

Just a quick note before we get started to say that it would mean the world to me if you rated and subscribed to the podcast on your podcast platform of choice.

Thanks so much, I really appreciate it.

Welcome to the DAM Right podcast.

In AVP’s Operational Model for DAM Success, there are seven components.

Yes, one is technology, the most commonly discussed aspect of DAM.

However, I would argue that the most important component is people.

First and foremost, DAM’s value is in its ability to serve users.

Additionally, what are processes, measurement, governance, continuous improvement, and technology without skilled and talented people behind them?

The central component, and what I would argue is the second most important, is purpose.

Purpose is the fuel that keeps those skilled and talented people focused and driven to produce results and impact.

Today I’m joined by Andrea Kalas, a true pioneer in the field that brings humanity and purpose in abundance.

Andrea’s personal journey takes us from winding nitrate film in UCLA’s “dirty” Film and Television Archive, more on that later, to working on the cutting edge of digital asset management at Paramount Pictures, with stops along the way at DreamWorks, Discovery, and the British Film Institute.

Andrea’s background is not only fascinating, but offers a robust expression of digital asset management fully realized and evolved.

You’ll delight in hearing about Andrea’s personal journey.

But the reason I’ve asked Andrea to join me today is to talk about one of her latest ventures in which she’s serving as project co-chair for the Academy Digital Preservation Forum, formed under the auspices of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The mission of the forum in part reads, “With the ascent of digital technology in the production, post-production, distribution, and exhibition of motion pictures, and the concomitant decline in photochemical cinematography and practical disappearance of film projection, we want to engage with those with the greatest stake and influence to ensure that digital preservation is successfully achieved.

Filmmakers, studio executives, Academy members, archivists, operations professionals, technologists, and other practitioners charged with implementing digital preservation.”

Join us as we grapple with questions around defining the entertainment industry today, the business side of digital preservation, and whether we should trust the entertainment industry to take on the challenge of preserving cultural heritage.

And remember, DAM Right, because it’s too important to get wrong.

Andrea Kalas, welcome to the DAM Right podcast.

Thank you so much for being here today.

I really appreciate it.

Andrea Kalas: 02:33

It’s great to talk to you, Chris.

Chris Lacinak: 02:35

I’d love to start just by having you tell us about your background and the path that you’ve taken to get to where you are today.

Andrea Kalas: 02:43

Well, I think, you know, it really all starts with the UCLA Film and TV Archive.

When I was in graduate school at UCLA, I saw a little post on a board, a job board, saying that there was work study positions at the UCLA Film and TV Archive.

And I had come to UCLA to the grad program there knowing about film restoration that was just sort of beginning and knowing that the UCLA Film and TV Archive was there.

So I was excited that it was easy to just get a part-time job there while I was going to school.

And I remember I called and Jerry Golden, who’s a wonderful person still working in the field, was the guy hiring.

And he goes, “You know, this job isn’t, it’s not on the campus.

It’s out here in Hollywood, you know, and it’s a little dirty out here.”

And I was like, “Where do I sign?”

And that time at the UCLA Film and TV Archive was just pivotal for my career because it was, you know, there weren’t programs then.

There weren’t programs in, you know, moving image archiving at that point.

So there wasn’t an option for me to go to grad school in that.

But in a way I didn’t have to because I had people like Bob Gitt, you know, who we used to nickname the Pope of Preservation.

We had Martha Yee, who was incredibly important in figuring out how library science could be applied to moving image archiving.

Literally she was dealing with like early MARC cataloging software that was made for books.

So she was constantly figuring out how to put a square peg in a round hole for moving image materials.

And Eddie Richmond, who was the curator of the archive at that point, who was really figuring out how you manage an archive, how you deal with that.

And Bob Rosen, who was the head of the archive and really a visionary in so many ways in terms of how archives could really intervene in culture in a significant way, in history and the importance of that.

So to me that was incredibly fortunate that I was there at that moment with people who were figuring it out and figuring out how moving image archiving could actually work.

So that’s, you know, that made me really, in my opinion, made me a really good archival professional out of that experience working there.

So yeah, I started off as a work study student and my job was inspecting nitrate.

Nothing that a student would do now.

But it was great.

To me, I loved it, even though it was in these dirty vaults and opening cans, it was a little risky.

But I got to look at all the cans and see like, what is that?

What are these things?

Why don’t we know more about them?

Like that curiosity and the pleasure of archives, which is being near these assets.

And I realized, yep, I’m in it for the long term.

This is what I want.

This is what I want to do.

Chris Lacinak: 05:54

It sounds like you had an all-star team of colleagues there to help you really learn the trade and understand not just the technical stuff, but it sounds like also kind of the value.

Andrea Kalas: 06:03

And they were willing to take a risk on me.

They were willing to, you know, give me sort of more.

So I got offered a full-time job eventually there, you know, preserving newsreels, which was another incredible education because, you know, it was a small thing.

It was still figuring it out.

So I had to do everything from, you know, justifying why I would preserve one newsreel over another with, you know, complex justification.

Then I had to sit at a bench and wind through each newsreel and actually inspect and repair, take it to the lab, see it preserved, then gather all the information together for somebody to catalog it.

You know, so I had to do the whole soup to nuts.

And that was a great.

And the fact that I was just given the rope to do that and figure it out, obviously with everybody’s support and help, but that they gave me that responsibility was just fantastic.

So that was another great, you know, step forward.

Chris Lacinak: 07:02

Yeah, that’s a great start.

So where did you, what did your career look like after that?

Andrea Kalas: 07:06

So after I preserved newsreels for a while, I worked within the UCLA Film and TV Archives Research and Study Center and they had just opened it up.

And it was really the first time where, and a lot of archives were like this at this point, where it was fine to just preserve them and, you know, sort of keep the doors closed, but actually opening it up and providing people to have a place to actually research and watch and, you know, use the archives was relatively new.

And we were on a university campus where these materials could obviously be of great use to students, to researchers, to for classwork.

So we opened up the Research and Study Center and there I really started, and I already had an interest in technology and computers because, you know, universities were some of the first to get computers, you know, so we’re talking about mid 80s, late 80s here, right.

So early on.

And so I was already fascinated with them.

And so, you know, the idea that we could use computers to help with providing access to materials that’s carried, you’ll see that carried through my entire career.

And so we did this project where there was a communications professor who had taped news materials off the air for years.

So he had decades of these materials.

And the only thing that was there was like CBS News on March 2nd.

You know, that’s all the information we had about what was on the recordings.

So we did a project around because we taped a lot of stuff around Tiananmen Square.

We did a project where we actually took the closed caption broadcast signal off the tapes and dumped them into a database so that people could search over terms and things like that.

And and that’s something that’s very common today.

And we see that all the time.

It’s used in all sorts of different search technologies now.

But that was early on that we were sort of.

Chris Lacinak: 09:07

That was groundbreaking.

Andrea Kalas: 09:09

It was big.

Yeah.

So I did a presentation on that at the Association of Moving Image Archivists.

And there was a woman who named Karen Weber, who had been part of AMIA for a while.

And at that point in her career was working with the company CGI that made, you know, you know, visual effects, software and hardware.

And they were working with DreamWorks and they wanted to create a digital archive for animation.

And so she said, oh, this person has a kind of idea about how technology and archives can work together.

Let’s, you know, let’s recommend her for this this job at DreamWorks.

And so that’s that’s how that happened.

I went from UCLA to DreamWorks.

And it was that was another.

Chris Lacinak: 10:08

It had to be a pretty big cultural shift.

Andrea Kalas: 10:10

That was that was like, whoa.

Yeah.

I went from, yeah, just sort of university to Hollywood.

And and it was that was fascinating.

Absolutely amazing.

I mean, I was an archivist hired before there was anything to archive.

Yeah.

Right.

That’s, you know.

And so helping create a digital archive from nothing for animation was just was fantastic.

And I just you know, I just spent my time getting to know all about animation, which was fantastic to get to know and the complexities of that and getting to know the artists and how it worked and how animation worked and how that, you know, animation it was really sort of also almost production assset management.

Right.

They needed an archive during production.

But we were also figuring out how then to have these kind of off ramps from that into a more, you know, sort of long term repository.

And also I was looking at collecting up actual physical materials like all the backgrounds were painted, you know, so and they’re unbelievably beautiful.

But, you know, works of art, making sure that we, you know, handle those well and archive those well as well.

And also in those early days of DreamWorks and was DreamWorks was going to be this huge studio, right?

It was going to have it was a music area.

There was television.

There was so starting to actually become go outside of animation and build an archive for all of those things.

So so that was fantastic to be able to do that from scratch, from nothing.

Right.

Build it out of nothing when things can be ready when the materials actually came into our.

Yeah.

So and and and be around just amazing technologists, too, because animation’s always been on the forefront, certainly of entertainment technology.

You know, they’ve always been the ones who have been out there first figuring out file based workflows, figuring out, you know, I mean, you know, great stuff.

Like I remember, you know, we were going from physical ink and paint to digital ink and paint.

So that was being that was a transition that was happening while we were making a movie, which was amazing.

But one thing I remember so clearly was like when the you know, with physical ink and paint, you had to keep a cap on the number of colors you would use because you needed to have a set number of colors that everyone would consistently use.

You had to keep those paints the same color.

Right.

You couldn’t you know, and all of a sudden with digital ink and paint.

You could have this whole all sorts of different palettes that came out.

I remember the animators heads kind of exploding a little bit like, oh, wow, this is so different.

When technology was cool.

Right.

It’s like when technology was our friend, you know, it was really that era of, you know, the sort of expansiveness of how it could support, you know, creativity.

So that was so fun to be around.

Chris Lacinak: 13:23

Was there any production that you recall specifically while you were there that was in that transition point into this?

Andrea Kalas: 13:31

Yeah, it was the Prince of Egypt was the first big movie that we were working on.

Chris Lacinak: 13:36

Okay.

Andrea Kalas: 13:37

And it’s a beautiful, beautiful film if you ever get a chance to watch it.

You know, it’s basically it’s the Moses story.

It’s a Ten Commandments story, but in animation.

And you know, just I think that was what I, you know, remember so fondly about it is just the beauty of it and how how much artistry there was in watching that happen.

It didn’t turn out to be the most, you know, the most popular of the early DreamWorks animated films.

You know, Shrek came along closely thereafter.

That was a huge, huge moment.

Interesting.

Yeah.

But but Prince of Egypt was really a rallying point for everyone that worked there in the beginning and how, you know, because we were figuring out the entire pipeline, the workflow, everything as the movie was being made.

So and, you know, it really bonded that group of people, we’re still friends with a lot of those people to this day.

Yeah, it was such a unique, you know, environment.

And what was great for me was, and I think for everyone there was, you could talk to anyone.

You could walk into anybody’s office, any artist, any animator, any executive anywhere, any time.

And anybody would and everyone was really sort of collaborative.

In fact, there were no titles.

That was a big thing.

Interesting.

Early DreamWorks.

Yeah.

And so that was just great for somebody who was trying to just absorb as much information as possible.

Right.

Yeah.

It was a wonderful atmosphere for that.

Chris Lacinak: 15:09

It’s kind of it’s kind of mind blowing to think about, like, at that point in time, the difference in tools, infrastructure, like capabilities, like it’s pretty wild to think about that you were tackling, beginning to tackle those challenges at that point in time.

Different world, different world from today.

Andrea Kalas: 15:28

It wasn’t, it wasn’t.

I mean, I still deal with some of the same issues today.

You know, just sort of, I think, you know, what, what archives and animation have in common is that they have to have a lot of structure.

Right.

And that was where I, you know, sort of find a common core.

Right.

So when you build a pipeline for animation, you have to have a pretty strict file naming convention or, you know, for every sequence scene shot, you know, it because everyone shares and collaborates, goes through a number of departments.

So that tight structure is absolutely necessary for animation to work.

Right.

And so that’s very good for archives.

Yeah.

We like that.

Chris Lacinak: 16:15

And digital asset management.

Andrea Kalas: 16:16

We like structure because then we know what we’re, knowing what we have.

Yeah.

So that was, that was interesting, you know, meeting of the minds.

Chris Lacinak: 16:24

I see that.

And so where, from DreamWorks, what was the next step in your career there?

Andrea Kalas: 16:31

So one of the things I did at DreamWorks was we figured out that, you know, even though the movie takes three years, people need access to materials during that, like marketing and consumer products and things like that.

So these off ramps we created from production into archives also had different approval steps and things like that.

So that, and we actually built out an access portal for people that needed materials into the production.

Okay.

And then I gave another presentation at another Association of Moving Image Archivists conference about this concept of sort of in production archiving and Discovery saw that and they were interested in trying to expand on that because they had the same issue was more around making both a domestic and an international version of some of their big, big programs that that wasn’t enough time for them to do that.

So then I worked for Discovery for a little while and we did that.

We had actual video loggers on set, the logging, some of the videotapes that were being directly after they were shot, put them into a system so that the international people could have access to those materials and create their show.

And we were going to ramp that up a little further and then the bubble burst, right?

And so that program was sort of seen as a luxury rather than a necessity.

And so Discovery, so I sort of moved away from that a little bit and I worked sort of with their stock footage group and things like that.

But it wasn’t the sort of cool program I was hoping to do.

But we did some really great things.

Like we actually had a really early digital dailies system where people could, from their shoot, put this like postage stamp sized little video on the world wide web so that executives could take a look at it.

We had all sorts of bandwidth constraints and problems with that, you know, but we did some really great stuff just sort of experimenting with technology.

Chris Lacinak: 18:42

the dot com bust of the early: 2000

Andrea Kalas: 18:46

Yeah, the dot com.

Chris Lacinak: 18:48

So yeah, that was nascent stages of digital asset management as we know it today, right?

That was the early, I remember coming out to Hollywood and doing the early digital asset management conferences that now I think it’s a Lowes.

It was something else back then.

But anyway, yeah, that was a very exciting time.

Everybody was all psyched up about the possibilities.

Andrea Kalas: 19:06

Yeah.

And right.

And some of the tools for digital asset management were starting to come out.

The video logger we used was out there.

There were other tools that were just starting at that point.

So yeah, trying to understand where they were, you know, and they were really early and they just had some functionality, but trying to work with them.

It was an interesting time.

Chris Lacinak: 19:30

Wow.

Okay.

So UCLA, DreamWorks, Discovery, or Discover.

And then, not Discover, Discovery.

Discover is a credit card.

What next?

Andrea Kalas: 19:42

Then the British Film Institute.

So then I was just, you know, I found out that, you know, that was the position, head of preservation was coming open and that I might have a shot at it.

And that was fascinating to me, right?

To be able to work in such a huge archive, work in a European archive, work with an enormous collection.

So that was an opportunity I didn’t want to miss.

So after, you know, a long time of applying because I was American and it was a British job, I finally, I got that position.

And that was, that was an incredible, you know, that was like a, so here I was with all this high tech stuff, you know, and I go over to the BFI and it’s like, oh, okay, I’m going to go back a couple decades here.

You know, there’s a film lab, very analog.

There’s not much digital anything going on.

And so that was really my job was to transform from analog to digital an entire conservation center.

And that was great too.

It was wonderful.

It was, there were so many great colleagues to work with and try to figure out how to manage things and even retraining people and, you know, because people weren’t even, they weren’t even scanning film yet, right?

They had to get a film scanner.

It was all photochemical.

But it also brought, got me back to my experience from UCLA because I had to deal with photochemical film and photochemical preservation so that it was a great way of, and also I really loved getting back with, with film too.

I have a, you know, connection to movies, I think a little bit more than I do to TV.

But even though I love TV, I work with TV all the time.

I love TV, don’t get me wrong.

TV is great.

But I think it was just more, you know, it’s more interesting to me.

Yeah.

Chris lacinak: 21:45

So you were, you must have been the perfect candidate at that time to bring that mix of skills you had that in-depth hands-on film experience and all of the most modern digital technologies and stuff.

So yeah, I can imagine they looked at you and said, this is the perfect person to come and transform this operation.

That must have been fun.

Andrea Kalas: 22:03

It was a lot of fun.

And it was just incredibly, and not only working with amazing colleagues at the BFI, who I’m also still very close to and still call for, you know, like my colleague, Charles Farrell, who was much more in the, he was a television engineer.

And we used to have these debates all the time, you know, it was sort of film versus television, you know, because they used to be very separate technologically.

Now they’re not, right.

And so just sort of arguing over approaches of preservation, things like that.

They were great.

They were, they were good arguments.

And I still will call them up and argue with them.

Chris Lacinak: 22:44

Hopefully there’s some hellos before the argument starts.

Andrea Kalas: 22:48

Oh yeah, no, no, no.

We’re great, great, great, great friends.

Wonderful friends, you know, I respect him enormously.

So they’re always very, you know, fruitful, fruitful arguments.

That’s great.

So you know, and also just being in Europe was great too, because there were lots of, because that was before Brexit.

So the UK was still involved with, yeah, so with European initiatives.

And so for example, I got involved with, there was a European metadata standard for cinematographic works.

And so, you know, and so I got to be involved with that and worked with people from Germany, France, the Netherlands, you know, on putting together a metadata standard for film, which then got implemented and required by any EU funding and still stands today.

So that was great too, to be involved with those kinds of things and learn a lot from really, really smart people across Europe as well.

So it was not, it was both learning from colleagues in the UK and being involved with, you know, a sort of different approach to, or a rigorous approach, I would say.

Because European archives are really, their client is their government, right?

Because European films and television programs are often funded by the government, that, you know, there’s just, there’s sort of, there’s a closeness to the archives and their funding agencies from the government.

That means, in a way, additional rigor, right?

You have to prove that what you’re doing is really good.

They take it seriously.

So that was a great education as well, in being in that environment and how to really be rigorous about justifying what you’re doing with an archive, transparency about what you’re doing, you know, how to make sure that what you’re doing really makes sense and is both, you know, obviously costs are an issue, but also, you know, what you’re doing is absolutely the best or the right thing to do.

You know, people would research that intensely.

You know, we built a whole new vault while I was there.

And you know, and that was a 25 million pound, you know, investment.

To build a cold vault meant we went into, you know, intense, it was like a five year project of getting- 

Chris Lacinak: 25:28

Yeah, it’s a big deal.

Andrea Kalas: 25:29

Experts from around the world to say, “Why is this temperature and humidity the right one?”

Lots of different, so, but getting that, that’s what I really appreciated that exercise, because it gave me more expertise and it taught me how to be rigorous and do it well.

Chris Lacinak: 25:54

If we fast forward to today, can you talk a little bit about what you’re doing today?

Andrea Kalas: 25:58

So I came back and when I was, heard about the job at Paramount Pictures and I was always interested in working in a Hollywood studio.

I thought that would be, you know, and be the archivist for a Hollywood studio was always interesting to me.

And so when that job came up, I was definitely interested and came back to that.

And so, and I’ve been there for 15 years, which seems amazing to me.

And it’s just been an incredible experience because we had the support of an incredible executive team that also took it seriously.

So, you know, we, you know, we did a, launched a preservation program.

We built out a digital preservation infrastructure.

We’re now working really hard on how, you know, AI and ML can provide discovery to our assets.

So, you know, it just gave me the opportunity to do a really good job and have great colleagues too that are, have made the archive great.

The other great thing about Paramount Pictures archive is that everything’s under one roof.

Different studios will have an archive here, an archive there, but we have stills, props, costumes, music, all the film and tape all under one place.

And more recently, now that we are Paramount Global, I’ve also started taking on CBS archives and the Viacom brand archive.

So expanding that a little bit more.

So that’s why I’m hoarse.

It’s a lot of work.

But it’s all good.

It’s all great.

It’s all, you know, finding ways to preserve and make accessible all these incredible films and television programs.

Chris Lacinak: 27:52

You have digital asset management is in your title.

From this conversation, I would think that you probably like we do for this podcast and the work that we do use a pretty broad interpretation or definition of digital asset management to encompass digital asset, what people traditionally think of as digital asset management, but also digital preservation and digital collections management and those sorts of activities as well.

Is that right?

Andrea Kalas: 28:16

Yeah, I think digital asset management is in my title.

You know, and actually, you know, I sort of go back and forth between asset management and archives because it is sort of, you know, that’s the way to describe.

But I think within that phrase, digital asset management, I think what I interpret that is and I think that means is that you take seriously the fact that you have digital assets, whether it’s a moving image, an image, you know, a document, whatever it is, and you have thought very seriously about how you’re going to make sure that those are around and accessible to your clients.

You know, and your clients can be anybody, right, depending on what kind of organization you are.

An archive is never its own thing.

It always has a client.

My client now is the corporation, right?

The people that work for Paramount Global and all the business units, whether it’s Home Media or Marketing or Theatrical.

Those are my clients.

Right.

When I was in the BFI, my clients would have been the British public.

Right.

So, but every but you need to make sure that your digital asset management system is serving your clients.

So it’s so it’s digital preservation is part of that in in Paramount Pictures because we continue to distribute our films over and over and over and over again.

Right.

So we will hopefully be distributing Godfather for another hundred years.

Chris Lacinak: 29:53

Right.

So Paramount Pictures wants to leverage those assets for as long as possible.

Andrea Kalas: 29:57

We will.

Yeah.

So making sure that preservation is part of it is serving my clients as well as providing access.

So that’s you know, so yes, the the software, the hardware, the functionality, everything that goes into digital asset management is is driven by what what that archives role is within their organization.

Chris Lacinak: 30:18

I want to talk a little bit about you’ve got a theory.

I’ll call it a theory.

I don’t know if you would call it a theory around the relationship between library science and rocket science that I think would be interesting to interject here before we jump in.

Would you mind talking about that a little bit?

Andrea Kalas: 30:32

Yeah, because as we talked about earlier, my experience at UCLA Film and TV Archive and seeing the brilliant minds of Martha Yee and and her team to actually figure out how to create an inventory system for moving image archives and how to really categorize different types of materials.

I mean, this was, you know, this was before any of the protocols that are out there now that people can follow, right, that people do follow for making sure that they’re using the right metadata schema or thinking about what things are considered preservation assets versus reference assets.

None of that was there was no there was no blueprint for that.

And so being around that and knowing that that came from intense research into library science, you know, Martha Yee had a Ph.D. in library science and other things like that, that that that background of the people that first figured out that card catalogs were going to go away if we needed a computer based system and how to classify things and how to work things at this such an important part of the history of technology when it comes to digital asset management.

That you know, and I just think it gets doesn’t get as much love as it should.

So that’s why I talk about library science and rocket science must work together, because I think we we think about sort of the cool stuff, the latest, you know, video format or other sort of cool technology advances which are there, not not short shrifting them, but, you know, to just, you know, pay homage to incredibly hard work of lots of library scientists that have gone before us to to figure out how to build good digital asset management systems.

That’s what I that’s what I mean by that.

Chris Lacinak: 32:32

Thanks for that.

I want to maybe we can touch on terminology real quick.

You have used the term moving image.

We will talk about there’s there’s terminology used in the forums website around cinematic holdings.

We’ve talked about film, we’ve talked about video.

I’d like to parse those a little bit or maybe put some definition around them so that folks listening understand what we’re talking about.

So we talked about moving image, we’re talking about anything with a moving image, video or film.

Tell me tell me if you disagree with any of this.

Andrea Kalas: 33:05

Yeah, no, that’s right.

It’s a catch all for for anything that moves right 

Chris Lacinak: 33:09

So Association of Moving Image Archivists is a catch all for all of those things.

Andrea Kalas: 33:13

Right.

Chris Lacinak: 33:14

The one that I wanted to ask you about was cinematic holdings.

Should we think about that as all film?

Should we think about that as film only produced with the intention of being going through like cinema, commercial cinema sort of thing?

Or how do you think when you talk about cinematic holdings?

How do you think about that?

Andrea Kalas: 33:30

Good question.

I mean, I think, yeah, it is is your question is basically, does it mean that film is only it’s something that actually gets released in the theater?

And I think that’s increasingly not true anymore.

Right.

Because of streaming.

But also, for example.

One of the things that when I got to the BFI, that was amazing.

They had discovered was these early portrait photographers had gone to factory gates and other places where people would come in and set up a camera and then held up a sign said, come and see yourself on the screen later.

And then they would go to a church or a hall of some sort and show these back.

Now, that’s not a proper theater, but I would argue that cinema, you know, so it’s you know, yes, I do think that there is a you know, it’s getting closer and closer.

Like what is a what is the difference between a movie and a TV show now?

Very hard to differentiate.

So but I think that, you know, cinematic holdings still have relevance.

You know, there’s the obvious ones, feature films or films that were distributed in theaters.

And then there’s other things like documentaries or other things that were one piece that are filmic.

I mean, I think the you know, the work that I’ve done with the Academy is based on the fact that Academy is is about film.

It’s about cinema.

It doesn’t, you know, deal with television.

And so even though those those things are melding and becoming closer and closer together, I think there’s still there’s a difference.

Chris Lacinak: 35:13

Is it fair to say that to the extent that there is a distinction between film and cinematic holdings that the work of the Digital Preservation Forum is, you know, if not 100% than 99% relevant to anybody with film and other moving image holdings?

Or is that an inaccurate statement?

Andrea Kalas: 35:35

Yeah, I mean, we’re highly aware that, you know, especially when we’re dealing with digital preservation and the technology associated with it, that, you know, the kinds of things that we’re talking about could absolutely apply to things that were in episodes as well as a long form, right?

So nobody’s tried to fool themselves that it’s only about things that call themselves cinema.

But that’s what, you know, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is mostly focused on, right?

Right.

So that and that’s who’s sponsoring that.

But you know, there is, you know, there is, we’ve had several conversations with the Television Academy, right?

They have a similar group, a Science and Technology Council.

And so, you know, I could see, you know, one day where there’s a much more high collaboration between the two around digital preservation.

Because yeah, the concepts definitely overlap.

Chris Lacinak: 36:29

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Chris Lacinak: 36:58

I’ve kind of jumped the gun a bit because I’ve started to talk about the forum already.

Would you, I guess, let’s just say that you are the Project Co-Chair of the Academy Digital Preservation Forum.

Given the background we just heard, that makes all the sense in the world.

But maybe you could tell us a little bit about how you came to be the Co-Chair and tell us a bit about the work of the forum.

Andrea Kalas: 37:22

Yeah.

So I was on this when I got to be a member of the Academy, I was accepted as a member of the Science and Technology Council.

And one of the reasons I wanted to be part of that council was I wanted to advance the concept of digital preservation, have it taken more seriously.

lemma back in, I think it was: 2007

And it was the first step, but it also said that it was really expensive to do digital preservation and we weren’t ready yet.

And I thought we needed a better message.

So that was really my mission was to say, you know, actually, lots of people are working on digital preservation and it is possible and we need to make sure that we’re talking about it well.

And so that was really my mission by joining the Sci-Tech Council.

And so the committee, which I think was like Digital Preservation Committee or something like that, came up with the idea.

We were going to do a big event and then follow that up with a website, but then COVID happened and then we focused on the website first.

And so the website really is, it is a forum.

It is a place for people to go.

There is an area on the website where anyone can post anything, have discussions and things like that.

That is the purpose of it, to understand that there are real complexities when it comes to digital preservation, to have a place where people can watch some videos about different topics around digital preservation, to comment, to add new articles, to however they are, to have a place where whoever you are, even though it’s very much, you know, from sort of an Academy standpoint, so entertainment industry based, cinema based, still, I think it’s open enough for anybody that’s interested in digital preservation, especially moving images and digital preservation in general, to have a place to go and learn more and hopefully, you know, sort of talk amongst themselves, train each other on what the best practices are so that we can continue, you know, to have good digital preservation of so many movies that are created digitally, that are really great works of art that need that kind of attention.

Chris Lacinak: 39:55

that came out, I think it was: 2007

And I wonder if you could just give us a background around that.

So maybe tell us, you know, for folks that aren’t acquainted with film, maybe just explain a little bit more when you say photochemical, what you mean.

And then could you give us a brief history of like how that’s evolved and where we are today with the film versus digital on the preservation front?

Andrea Kalas: 40:53

You know, it’s interesting.

It takes me back to, you know, when I first worked at UCLA and we had this rallying cry, “Nitrate won’t wait,” right?

o deteriorate before the year: 2000

And so dutifully, many archives did put it on to acetate film, which then we discovered also deteriorates really quickly.

But you know, it’s interesting, like that time was film wasn’t really a trustworthy source in a way, you know, that could deteriorate, that was scary.

Fast forward to now where film is like, that’s the answer, right?

It’s still, people are now suspicious, very suspicious of digital.

And so I hear this all the time, like, why?

Just preserve it on film?

What’s your problem?

You know, that’s work, that’s the archival standard, that’s what we should do.

And you know, I just don’t think it’s that simple.

You know, there’s, for example, you know, audio, there’s not really that well, great of a way to preserve audio that’s digital onto some sort of photochemical format anymore, right?

That technology is starting to, it’s sunsetting.

Mag isn’t made anymore, it’s not there anymore.

There are things that are really inherently digital, like effects that need to be treated digitally.

And so I think that that feeling, it’s something that I always encounter and a lot of people will push back on that.

You know, I remember sitting in the room with the then president of the Academy, John Bailey, who said out loud, you know, isn’t digital preservation an oxymoron?

So there’s always been this very big concern that digital is not trustworthy for the long term, that, you know, it’s going to go into the ether and things like that.

And that’s the biggest, one of the biggest challenges for digital preservation.

How can you be a trustworthy guardian of assets in your asset management system?

And I know it’s something that all of us have to manage on an ongoing basis because it’s not, you know, I think there’s a perception that you put a piece of film on a shelf and everything’s fine.

Well, actually, that’s not necessarily true.

You still have to have a really good vault.

You have to maintain that vault.

You have to make sure that you re-can that film, possibly occasionally.

You have to have archivists to make sure your inventory is okay.

It’s not without its own maintenance.

Same with, and with digital, it is more complicated.

There’s a lot more, but it’s, I think it’s, it’s the unknown and not knowing and not enough people knowing how to really dig in and insist with their technology partners to put this functionality in, et cetera.

When we did our digital preservation infrastructure at Paramount, I had a lot of, again, good battles and arguments with the infrastructure team, the people that oversaw network and storage, because I wanted to know where within that storage system that asset lived within my digital asset management system.

And I wanted to set up annual health checks automatically.

And that involved people that dealt with infrastructure systems that were really opaque and asking them to make them more transparent inside a digital asset management system was something new to them.

So I think that’s part of it as well, is that it’s that understanding of what you need for digital asset management system to make it trustworthy, to make it robust.

I think the more people become educated by that, and frankly, the younger the colleagues are in this space, I think that will become more of a, and it already has, there’s already plenty of really smart people doing this in our field.

So I think that’s the, that may be the tension about photochemical versus digital, but it still exists.

It hasn’t, it’s still a concern and it still is there.

And you know, and this binary approach of either or is the other silly part of it, right?

I love film.

I built two great film vaults that are the best they can be so that I can preserve that original film.

I love seeing beautiful print made in ideal conditions.

You know, my passion and my affection for film is alive.

Just because I like digital preservation and also appreciate films that were made digitally doesn’t mean I started hating film.

And you know, so I think that’s the other thing is sometimes people, that either or thing is…

Chris Lacinak: 46:17

You have to hold two thoughts in your head at the same time.

Andrea Kalas: 46:20

Yeah, like, yeah, we can do that, you know?

And so I think it’s interesting.

And so it’s something that it’s just an ongoing, it’s awareness, it’s understanding, and I think it’s trust too.

Trust in archivists and institutions to handle digital objects well.

And maybe we need to do a better job at showing that it’s possible and it’s done every day across tons of industries.

You know, maybe that’s our job in this space to show we are trustworthy repository advocates.

Chris Lacinak: 47:02

So is Paramount Pictures an aberration in the entertainment industry as far as the embracing of digital preservation?

Or is that the norm these days?

Andrea Kalas: 47:11

Not at all, no.

And that’s one of the wonderful things about building up the site, the Academy Digital Preservation Forum, was I decided to, you know, as…

Wanted to build a site that was going to have content and who was going to be my sort of editorial board for that content, right?

And so I assembled people from Warner Brothers, Sony, Fox, now Disney, to be that group of people.

We called it the Curatorial Working Group.

And they’re all listed on the site.

So I would bring these topics to that group.

It was one of my…

The best parts of the pandemic, it was like every Friday we had these discussions about, you know, and it was this chance for us to really discuss these issues between ourselves and show that across that group, the sort of studio group, that there were a lot of really best practices.

There were a lot of things that people really take seriously about digital preservation.

So, you know, and that was…

So that’s what the site also represents, is that collective thinking and considered approach to digital preservation.

Chris Lacinak: 48:27

I can see that being useful for sure.

Let’s sidebar on another kind of terminological thing here.

I think I use the term entertainment industry.

How do you think about who the entertainment industry is today?

When I think about it from my perspective, yours obviously in it, as I’ll call myself an outsider, the blurring of lines between both the, you know, entertainment industry versus big tech, as well as just like the blooming of the entertainment industry across the globe, right?

We used to think of entertainment industry really being Hollywood centric.

Now there’s major cinematic industries throughout the world.

How do you think about who the entertainment industry is today?

Andrea Kalas: 49:14

I mean, first and foremost, I think that, you know, the sort of the traditional studios, the big studios have definitely been challenged by the streaming services, right?

By Netflix and Amazon and now Apple.

And so that’s the biggest challenge to that model, right?

And that’s, they are definitely part of the entertainment industry now.

So that is where that it’s definitely, that’s where our entertainment is funded and made and those, you know, that’s, that is, you know, sort of the biggest industry just in terms of sheer output, right?

That those streaming services have met the studios at that level.

You know, so that’s, that’s one part, but yes, there’s, there’s every country has, you know, some sort of entertainment industry of their own, right?

So that’s the other wider part is that, you know, we know more and more about, you know, international output than we ever had before, which is exciting, right?

We’re not, we’re not in a world where American entertainment industry is the only industry anymore.

So that’s, that’s the other part of the global.

And then beyond that, of course, there’s people that are creating entertainment every day with their cell phones, right?

You could say, you could argue that that sort of, you know, web 2.0, , 2.5, 3.0, whatever entertainment industry, right?

Of TikTok and Instagram and everything like that.

That’s arguably an industry in and of itself.

So so it’s, you know, yeah, it’s, it’s certainly not the big five studios making movies and everybody else has to bow down anymore at all.

You know, it’s changed massively.

Chris Lacinak: 50:59

Let me ask another question that kind of dives into maybe more of the traditional big five or, you know, traditional entertainment industry.

In my experience, what I’ve seen, and this is, I’m thinking here about kind of the distinction between rights holders and ownership versus who holds the physical materials or digital materials on their servers.

What I’ve seen is that through mergers and acquisitions, transfer and ownership of collections, that oftentimes the physical materials may have never actually gotten inventoried and moved.

So something that’s owned by one entity, A over here, who is leveraging their ownership, they’re licensing it out.

The physical materials or the digital files may live still at the previous entity who held it.

And it seems like in a lot of ways, those business, there’s just been a collegiality.

Hey, oh, we have this thing, you know, do you have it?

Can you send it to us?

That has made that okay.

It hasn’t been, you know, in the short term for the purpose of doing business, that seems to be okay.

But when you think about digital, well, preservation period, whether it be digital or physical, that seems problematic.

And I don’t know, you know, is that, is that problem so small as to be negligible or is that a larger problem that exists out there that has to be grappled with?

Andrea Kalas: 52:17

It’s really interesting because sometimes I think, okay, when the all world’s archives are digitized, right?

And perhaps they’re, you know, sort of available in the cloud or on some sort of on-prem server storage that, you know, you could really just hand the keys over, right?

You don’t have to move the assets anymore.

Right?

And yet we do, we do move, we do, you know, Paramount had Marvel for a while, you know, when Disney purchased Marvel, we went through an enormous project of, you know, identifying all inventory and moving all inventory digital and physical over to Disney, you know, I have a binder like this thick of everything we, you know, went through to do that.

So it does, it still does matter that where your holdings are, but to your point too of, you know, other material, different libraries owned by different companies.

It doesn’t make sense.

Paramount movies made between: 1929 

Paramount owns the Republic Library, you know, Warner Brothers has RKO, early MGM.

So there’s, you know, different library acquisitions make it a little more complicated too.

But yeah, I still, I think, you know, I’ve not worked with people.

I’ve always known that we get the materials when we need to distribute them.

I’ve not had that experience that you’re talking about.

Chris Lacinak: 53:45

I don’t want to start spreading rumors here.

Maybe I’m…

Andrea Kalas: 53:48

No, no, no, it’s fine.

I’m sure it happens.

It’s just not been my experience.

Chris Lacinak: 53:52

I guess that just made me think about like the, that this term about entities that have cinematic holdings may have cinematic holdings that, you know, in partial or in whole may or may not have rights to actually leverage, which brings in like the business angle.

Right.

And I guess I wonder, you’ve given us some great insights into the complexities around some of the technical things around digital preservation, but what the forum makes clear.

And I think what those digital dilemma made clear, and at the same time there was the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Digital Preservation, Digital Preservation, Sustainability and Access, something like that.

They all focused on the business side as being like, I think maybe the main driver.

And I wonder what’s your assessment of what the business complexity looks like with regard to digital preservation.

You’ve touched on it a bit, but can you give us in the same way you’ve given us some insights into the technical complexities, like what is the business side look like of digital preservation?

Andrea Kalas: 54:52

Well, so, you know, again, I look at what’s my role, right?

So my role as an archive for Paramount is to make sure that I’m preserving the materials for which we have what I call substantial rights.

That’s my phrase.

I made it up.

And so that means if there, we have rights worldwide in perpetuity, all media, then that’s a movie I’m going to preserve.

If we have rights in the US only, but it’s also forever, yeah, that’s worth it.

Because my company, you know, can benefit from that long-term holding of that physical, of that materials, right?

So we might acquire something for two years and distribute it, and then it goes back to a rights holder.

I’m not going to preserve that.

That’s somebody else’s property, right?

So it really is based on ownership.

And I do think, you know, and that’s where my focus is.

And I feel that’s an obligation of rights holders too, to look after the materials they preserve and restore, which doesn’t always happen.

You know, and there are, of course, not-for-profit archives that hold materials for which they don’t own the rights.

And that collaboration between rights owner and, you know, a non-profit archive is, you know, usually good, can be fraught, you know, that’s another part of this project as well.

I mean, we’re, Paramount gave the Library of Congress silent films back in the ’60s and ’70s because there was no concept of an archive, right?

And so, you know, that history plays into that, right?

When did we start actually caring about archives?

Maybe a little too late, right?

So those are complexities of the business too, where there wasn’t the funding, there wasn’t the interest in taking care of archives because the business wouldn’t take care of it.

That’s part of the equation as well.

Chris Lacinak: 56:55

From your perspective, what’s the bigger challenge, technology or finance or business?

Andrea Kalas: 57:02

I mean, I think no matter where you are, whether you’re in a studio or you’re in a not-for-profit archive, and I’ve worked in both, right?

You know, the phrase, “Everyone loves an archive until they have to pay for it,” applies, right?

So, you know, if you need the technology and you need to pay for the technology.

You need the vaults and you need to pay for the vaults.

You need the staff and you need to pay for the staff.

So figuring out how to make sure you’re making the best case for the archive is probably always the biggest challenge.

And when I talk to people in university classes, I say, “If you don’t like advocacy, you may want to pick another field.”

Right?

Because if you don’t feel like you’re, if you want to just sit somewhere and catalog something and everybody’s going to leave you alone, you know, that may be your perception of archiving.

But the reality is you constantly have to think, “Okay, let me, while I’m talking to this person, I’m going to collect this use case so that when I’m up against my finance person I can say, ‘This is why I’m doing this because this makes money or this helps our marketing or this does this.'”

You know, so you have to constantly be looking at, “All right, can we do it this way?

Can we do it this way?

Is this cheaper?

If we save some money here, can we spend it there?”

That always, always, always, that’s a big part of the archival project is making sure you’re speaking well about the importance of what you’re doing.

You know, I’m sure that my finance people are tired of hearing me saying, “Well, if we don’t have that asset, the revenue would be zero.”

Chris Lacinak: 58:51

Good argument.

Andrea Kalas: 58:52

I’m sure they’re sick of hearing me say that, right?

But that’s the, you know, no matter how you’re going to implement your archive strategy with technology or physical vaults or whatever it is, it’s about advocating for why you should do it.

Chris Lacinak: 59:09

That’s a perfect segue to the next question I have for you, which is kind of about the why.

You pointed out, you know, Paramount Pictures has an interest in preserving the Godfather because they want to monetize it 100 years from now too, right?

This is an asset that they want to continue to monetize, and that makes perfect sense.

But could you give us a fuller picture of the why?

Why is it important?

You know, and let’s just focus on the cinematic holdings of the organizations that are in the Digital Preservation Forum, as an example, and not that you speak on behalf of all of them.

But just in general, why is it important?

Other than the long-term monetization argument to preserve these holdings?

Andrea Kalas: 59:45

Look, I think anybody in any entertainment organization would recognize that there’s a cultural aspect to it too, that you do have within your holdings.

You know, I do think that movies are the greatest art form ever created.

You know, they have it all.

They have music, they have art, they have cinematography.

There’s, you know, I do think that there is an understanding that there’s a cultural responsibility even within a business, right?

That may be easier for a not-for-profit to talk about as part of their advocacy thing.

Within a business, that could be a little trickier, right?

Because they’re always just about the bottom line.

But I do think that there’s that part of it.

And I think that, you know, and one of the things I always sort of get called, you know, in on is historical aspects of the studio, right?

So that becomes relevant for marketing or for our corporate branding concepts or just generally talking about where Paramount Pictures comes from, where does it fit in the history of the entertainment industry?

You know, how these things happen.

And I think that part of it, and that’s something similar that you see across corporate archives generally, right?

Whether you work for Coca-Cola or Ford or, you know, there’s other, you know, big corporate archives that realize that that legacy of how they’ve built their business and the products or the things that they’ve created have enormous, you know, sort of relevance to their corporate brand and their corporate identity, but also are really interesting things to preserve among themselves, you know?

I remember seeing, you know, my colleague at Ford, you know, some of the incredible designs for cars that have been done by these amazing designers over the years.

And you know, fantastic.

Why would you throw that out?

It’s so important.

Yeah.

And I think people feel that way too within businesses to see that contribution that company made, that intervention in culture, that intervention in innovation is remembered.

So that’s another part of it.

Chris Lacinak: 62:02

Should we trust the entertainment industry to bear that burden or, you know, take that on to be the stewards of preserving these culturally important materials?

Andrea Kalas: 62:13

Yeah, no, I think it’s a good question.

You know, I think, you know, when I first started working at UCLA Film and TV Archive, you know, the studios were the baddies.

You know, they were the ones that let things not be taken care of.

I mean, UCLA Film and TV Archive was started because Paramount was getting rid of a lot of nitrate film because it was going to be illegal to keep it on the lot.

You know?

Chris Lacinak: 62:36

For those who don’t know, maybe we should tell people why that was.

You mentioned nitrate earlier.

Andrea Kalas: 62:41

k made, used very much before: 1950

Chris Lacinak: 63:02

That’s why it was not allowed on the lot.

Andrea Kalas: 63:05

It was a fire risk.

Right.

It was a fire risk.

So, and UCLA went and like literally picked up all the nitrate and took care of it.

So that’s how, you know, so that history of studios not caring is going to be with us forever.

Right.

I think, you know, we’ve definitely turned the tide on that and made it, you know, obviously there’s great restorations coming out of all the studios right now.

Every studio built has built vaults.

Every studio is now really engaged with digital preservation.

So I think there has definitely been a switch, major switch through those, from those days.

But you know, it’s a legacy that’s hard to beat.

Right.

It’s a legacy that is not proud.

As a result, you know, there’s a lot of silent films that are stored in the Santa Monica Bay, you know.

So that’s hard to get over.

Yeah.

And I think that’s the other reason for that.

Another sort of impetus of the Academy Digital Preservation Forum is let’s turn that on its head a little bit.

Chris Lacinak: 64:06

Yeah.

So the Academy clearly has taken on some responsibility by giving a home to the Digital Preservation Forum.

So is there a larger role for the Academy to play in the digital preservation or supporting or leading thought leadership of any sort?

Is the Forum the manifestation of that or is there something bigger, do you think?

Andrea Kalas: 64:27

I mean, the Academy is not a standards body, right?

So they’re not going to insist that the entertainment industry follow a particular model for digital preservation.

That’s just not their role.

They don’t see it as their role, you know.

And I can’t speak completely for the Academy, you know, I’m an Academy member that’s on the SciTech Council doing something I think is, you know, is important for film archives, right?

So and that’s great that the Academy lets its members do that, right?

They’re letting the members have a voice in some of the important issues of the day, whether it’s, you know, talking about diversity and inclusion.

Members are very important, you know, including that.

They’re giving them a voice that way.

Or whether it’s, you know, they had a big conference on AI and ML recently that crosses all the branches, giving them a voice.

So that’s what the Academy really does well, I think, is not insist on do it the Academy way, but say, we’ve got all these smart members.

They have a clue.

Let’s allow them to help by, you know, giving them that ability.

So that’s the role I think the Academy plays really well.

Chris Lacinak: 65:43

Who makes up the folks that are on the, I mean, the Forum itself, I think is open to, is it open to the public as far as who can engage on the Forum?

But there’s a working group or a group of contributors that are listed on the site under our team.

Who is the makeup of that group?

How did they, how did the group come to be formed?

And I guess just, I’m just trying to wonder, like, what are the skills, the expertise, the breadth of experience that is, that’s on the team there?

Andrea Kalas: 66:10

So mostly it’s what I talked about earlier, right?

When I decided that, you know, out of, so there’s a small working group that are SciTech Council members and others that are interested.

But you know, for that, that Curatorial Working Group I mentioned earlier, which are people from the different studios that are in roles similar to myself that meet regularly and talk about the issues of digital preservation and decide where we’re going and what things we want to tackle.

So that’s really what it is, is trying to collect up, you know, the people that are dealing, are on the front lines of this.

And have them be the people that are vetting ideas that would go to the Forum to what’s important to talk about, what should we do?

What video should we shoot next to put up there?

What’s critical about what we’re thinking about?

Chris Lacinak: 67:04

If you fast forwarded, you’re at a dinner with your colleagues on the Forum and you’re toasting to the successes of the Forum.

I guess, what’s your hopes, your dreams?

What have you accomplished at the point at which you say, yes, we’ve done it, you know, cheers.

What do you think the Forum can accomplish?

Andrea Kalas: 67:19

You know, I think, I still feel like we have a lot to do.

I feel like we’ve just started.

I feel like there’s, you know, there’s still a lot of, you know, I still, you know, I think people are still scratching their heads like, what is digital preservation?

I don’t get it.

You know, I don’t know if we’ve really answered this.

I feel like we still have loads of work to do.

I think there’s great stuff on the Forum for people to learn from, you know, but it’s complicated.

There’s not this one answer for digital preservation.

You just have to put this switch and you’re done.

Right.

And I think that’s, so a complex message is always a difficult one to get across.

Yeah.

Right.

And so, how we, you know, success for me would mean that digital asset management systems would have digital preservation baked into them no matter where they were.

They don’t right now.

Right.

That’d be great.

If you bought a digital asset management system off the shelf, you would always know you would have a protocol that would make sure your assets were preserved.

That would be success.

That would be one version of success for me.

Right.

Or that, you know, or everybody that’s ever making a moving image has a plan for how they’re going to make sure that those assets are replicated, that they are validated annually, that you can find them easily.

You know, that if everybody had a plan to do that, that would look like success.

I think we still have a long way to go.

Chris Lacinak: 68:44

Yeah.

And digital preservation, I think, is deceitful in the sense that it is so simple in many ways and so complicated in others.

Right.

I mean, the basics, the fundamentals on the technological side are pretty straightforward.

I think there’s some strong basic business arguments for why it makes sense.

You laid out many of those today.

There’s cultural reasons, but it does get really complex really quickly when you dive into the details.

So, yeah.

How important is it that the major players in, let’s say, the studios, the holders of cinematic collections, do essentially the same thing with regard to their outputs?

Obviously, they’re going to have different workflows.

There’s going to be different little nitty gritty details that are going to be different.

That doesn’t matter much.

But file format choices, maybe digitization technology.

How important is it that that’s similar or not?

Andrea Kalas: 69:42

I think the way that if people can do things in a more similar way, what’s helpful about that is it’s not as confusing.

For example, one of the things we’re working on right now is this concept of what’s called the picture preservation package.

Right?

So, at the end of a film, when you’re working with a post house, they output what would be called a digital intermediate.

Well, now there’s all sorts of different names for these different versions of digital intermediates.

NAMS, GAMS, consolidated archives, all these different kinds of things.

And so, both post production people who are finishing the film as well as the facilities where they’re being done, it’s like, “Oh, God.

Why can’t they decide on one thing?

There are all these different versions, and I have to make this for this studio and that for this studio and that.”

So, that’s confusing, and it could mean more mistakes are made or it’s not done well.

So, if there’s a similar process, I think that helps everybody.

Everybody can just point to it and go, “That’s what I want.

Please do that.”

And if we can also make that easy to be created by working with some of the software vendors that create the DIs, then it’s allowing people to make preservation assets a little easier and there’s more potential for them to be made.

So, I think that it’s not a standard.

It’s not insisting anything.

It’s just like, “Here’s something.

If we could all agree on this, make it up.”

Chris Lacinak: 71:19

You’ve just touched on something there that I think is interesting.

From my perspective, I work with lots of media and entertainment folks, but it’s not what I do all day, every day.

I work with a lot of different verticals.

So, what I see is that, I mean, you talked about vendors and that just made me think.

My observation has been that there is a closer collaboration between archives, digital assets, holders of content and digital assets and vendors in the media and entertainment world than there is other places.

I don’t know if you can comment on whether that’s true or not.

You’ve been in a variety of verticals too, but I guess I wonder, how do you see that relationship fostering the ultimate goal of digital preservation?

Chris Lacinak: 72:04

It’s like anything else within a business.

Sometimes you want to do it internally.

Sometimes you want to outsource it.

People outsource all sorts of different things.

Some people outsource their entire media supply chain to a company.

When they’re finished with it, they hand it over to somebody to make sure it gets out to all the different final clients that it needs to get out to.

Conform all the languages, they do all that work.

Other people don’t.

Other people do it in-house.

Certainly within feature film and television production, the post house is almost always an outside vendor.

They might have colorists that the director prefers.

It’s very important to maintain that relationship.

That integration between different vendors.

There’s certain things that it would be difficult for us to insource too.

People that do localization, they have linguists all over the world and things like that.

There’s some work that’s impossible for everybody to take in-house.

That’s constantly being looked at and revised.

Technology is a big part of that.

If you can do it simpler and there’s technology that makes things not as complicated as it used to be, it’s constantly going back and forth.

There’s also outsourcing of archives too.

People will have a vendor that will do digital preservation for them.

That’s another possibility.

Yeah, it’s part of the landscape generally, I would say.

Chris Lacinak: 73:57

They are an important stakeholder at the table in the conversation, it seems.

Andrea Kalas: 74:02

They are.

Yeah.

Chris Lacinak: 74:04

When I look at the list of folks that are on the Curatorial Working Group and you have folks listed as additional contributors, it seems like you’ve got …

We’ve touched on finance.

It seems like you’ve got people that are executives.

You’ve got people that are technology-centric.

I think it’s fair to say some vendors, I don’t know if that’s an accurate assessment or not, is that folks that are- 

Andrea Kalas: 74:23

Yeah, there’s not as many vendors as there could be.

That’s a discussion too.

It’s kind of tricky with the Academy because they don’t want to be shown as supporting one business over another.

That’s a tricky part.

If we had an event, which we’re talking about doing right now, and that would be definitely one topic that I would love to have is more people from post houses really having …

Because there’s really smart, great people with all sorts of great innovations going on all the time.

Yeah.

They’re part of the conversation, absolutely.

Chris Lacinak: 75:01

Switching a little bit, I guess I wonder, should people think about this being a US-centric thing or is this a global endeavor, the Forum that is?

Andrea Kalas: 75:10

I think because it’s the academy, it’s Los Angeles, because it’s traditionally tied to the studios, it’s definitely been US in its concept now.

Although we did have …

There are other members of the Academy that are now coming in.

On the group right now is somebody from India, somebody from the Netherlands.

That’s a bias, but it’s not exclusive.

Trying to get a wider perspective on it is absolutely essential.

Yeah, I would love to see …

That’s our biggest challenge right now is how do we get more involvement.

Right?

How do we …

We can’t invite everybody into a curatorial working group.

Right.

We want to focus them on the Forum, but how do we get people interested and engaged and active in that?

That’s what we set it up for, right?

So it could be wider.

It could be a broader group.

That’s partly why I’m doing this podcast, is to get the word out about it, because that’s why we want people.

We want everybody’s input.

We want to hear what we’re doing right, what we’re doing wrong.

What can we do better?

How can we …

What other issues are we not thinking about?

So we want that feedback.

Chris Lacinak: 76:32

Who should pay attention to the Forum?

It sounds like it’s not just folks with cinematic holdings, not just people in the US.

Who do you think that the content and the subject matter is relevant for?

Andrea Kalas: 76:44

I would love to see ultimately more people that own the purse strings for archives be much more aware of archives.

I would love to have the forum reach even up to that level.

That would be my ideal.

But I think, obviously, filmmakers, archivists are an obvious one.

We mentioned vendors like post-production houses.

I’d love to see them much more engaged with it.

Technologists, people who are building things, right?

It would be great if a cloud company came to us and said, “Hey, we’re thinking about how to do digital preservation in the cloud.

What do you think?”

That hasn’t happened yet.

I’d love to see that happen.

That’s where I think as broad a possible audience of stakeholders would be amazing.

Chris Lacinak: 77:40

Well it’s come to the time where I ask the final question that I ask all the guests on the DAM Right Podcast, which is, what’s the last song that you added to your favorites playlist?

Andrea Kalas: 77:54

Probably something from ’70s funk.

That’s really where I go all the time, or disco.

Chris Lacinak: 78:02

Give us one of your favorites.

We’ve got a podcast playlist that is assembles as all of these.

Just give us one of your favorites.

Andrea Kalas: 78:08

All right.

Let’s see.

Gloria Gaynor, “I Will Survive.”

Chris Lacinak: 78:14

All right.

Love it.

That’s a very suitable song.

Love that.

That should be the theme song.

Andrea Kalas: 78:19

In the realm of preservation, right?

Chris Lacinak: 78:21

I love that.

Well, Andrea, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today.

It’s been fascinating.

I could talk for two more hours.

I want to just dive into just your career path.

That’s fascinating.

That’s so cool.

I love it that you joined me today.

I really appreciate all the insights and just everything you brought to the table.

Thank you.

Andrea Kalas: 78:42

It was a pleasure talking to you, Chris.

Thanks for your time.

Chris Lacinak: 78:44

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