Seth Maislin's blog

This was my first time at the Henry Stewart DAM conference, and it was an unexpected pleasure: Unexpected because I wasn’t originally slated to speak at the event at all, but was in fact pinch-hitting for Seth Earley. The pleasure was genuine, however. I found that the entire event had a cohesiveness that I rarely see at conferences of any size. With a single track of shorter-than-usual presentations and plenty of time for conversation, it seemed that all participants attended just about every event. Attendees were also generous with information, from confessions of pain points in their current business processes, to their known and possible solutions. I highly recommend this event.

Thematically, just about everyone was talking the challenges of using assets in multiple contexts and workflows. The keynote about integrating DAM with other technologies; the United Airlines rebranding case study that detailed perhaps the most significant enterprise-level challenges I’ve ever heard in my career; and conversations and demonstrations about ebooks, tablets, and social media all reflected the very real-world wrestling matches that we are experiencing today as media opportunities expand and our tools converge more closely around workflow. It was also clear that DAM needs are growing even more prominent than before, and no more so than during the Accidental Asset Manager panel.

What is possible with DAM today wasn’t even possible three years ago, or at least not without a lot of manual and hard-coded work. I expect DAM tools will continue evolve. Not only do I believe the integration with new tools and interfaces will grow stronger and more transparent, but DAM tools and best practices will exert their influence into other parts of the business. The industry has strong upward momentum, and I expect DAM work to become an even larger part of the conversation than it is now.

Last week, Seth Earley blogged about the inefficacy of social tagging, but there's one scenario in which social tagging will breathe new life into an esoteric, 200-year industry: book indexing.

I've written hundreds of book indexes, presided over the American Society for Indexing, managed an international indexing partnership, taught courses, established standards, built tools, and consulted with a lot of influential folks, so trust me when I tell you that it pains me to see this happening. I believe with every fiber of my professional being that the human work of subject indexing is and will continue to be superior in quality to every alternative ever imagined. Oh well.

There is just too much information to index by hand, period. Books, periodicals, websites, blogs, messages, and documents are being produced or transformed too quickly for humans to keep pace, regardless of training and tools. Perhaps in response, the use of search algorithms becomes ever more popular, while overly optimistic expectations of retrieval quality grows increasingly preposterous. A more realistic response would be an increase in subject indexers' fees -- after all, demand is outpacing supply at an astounding rate -- but indexers haven't experienced a rate increase since the 1990s. The truth is that editorial indexing and all smart hands-on tagging is disappearing in favor of automatic approximations. And it is a reasonable argument that the substandard tagging of millions of pages and documents is better than leaving most of them without any subject metadata whatsoever.

Thanks to my wife, I've been learning a little bit about systems engineering, a form of engineering that addresses the complex interactions of multiple systems. As she says, you need to consider systems engineering when the interrelationships between systems are as complicated as the systems themselves. For example, to reduce automotive traffic you need to research social behavior, road design, business, and the environment. To study ergonomics you need to study the human body, computer design, application design, and user efficiency needs. And don't get me started on the U.S. healthcare system.

The very first step of systems engineering is to understand the full scope. Ground transportation isn't about cars and trains, for example, but about the entire surface of the earth: population clusters, topography, climate, and distances. Taxonomy starts this way too, with facets like people, documentation types, product lines, and access levels.