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.