Digital asset management

Earley & Associates recently announced a webinar series on Content in Context: Why Dynamic Content and Content Choreography is Critical to Information Management. Since you may be asking yourself, “what is content choreography?” we thought we’d share the history of the term and what we mean by it.

Back in March of 2011, a major global high tech company engaged Earley & Associates to work on the redesign of a major website, site search, metadata and all new web CMS and DAM infrastructure. It was an enormous undertaking, headed by Marketing and involving brand managers, the SEO team, content authors, creative agencies, a systems integrator, a user experience design agency, technical consultants, and the IT department. The existing sites were to migrate from traditional navigation, search and single page content to a totally new paradigm of dynamic content collections, where user context would be driven by the search experience more than by navigation or site depth. With personalization. And in multiple languages. Taxonomy and metadata would play an important role in each of these areas, but just how well the whole system was going to hang together (“If we do not hang together, we shall all hang separately...”) was a real concern, and the very reason we’d been called in as a sort of SWAT team.

In an earlier blog, I introduced the term eTaxonomy.   ETaxonomy represents “embedded taxonomies”.  Many kinds of IT solutions rely on taxonomy as a core organizing principle (reference data, content object models, information architecture, metadata schemas, etc)  as opposed to simply being a navigational construct.   In this blog, I discuss applications of eTaxonomy from our recent client work.  Of note are:

• Search
• Document and Records Management
• Content Management
• Digital Asset Management
• Ecommerce
• Marketing Campaign Management

Search                           

Search is about metadata.  A search application “derives” metadata by creating an index of the content.  The index is information about the content, i.e. metadata. The search tool uses the index to locate documents and pages.  This “derived metadata” can be enriched by adding attributes or keywords with terms defined in a taxonomy.  Taxonomy provides a hierarchical structure of controlled vocabulary terms.   With this structure, search-enabled applications can present related concepts, broaden or narrow the search, and filter results based on “facets” or attributes.  The use of related terms (developed with a “thesaurus” – taxonomy on steroids) provides tremendous power in search applications.

Document and Records Management

Our second session of the Digital Asset Management (DAM) Jumpstart series will address creative workflows and marketing resource management. The following post from speaker Ralph Windsor of Daydream describes the problems organizations face without effective metadata strategies in place to manage marketing communications:

After a decision has been made to invest into DAM or MRM solutions and the system has been introduced, one of the realisations that many marketers run into is that old IS maxim, “Garbage In Garbage Out”.

First, staff begin amassing marcomms collateral with the intention of uploading it. Then there is the next job to consider: who will carry out the cataloguing work so we can all find it? At this point, enthusiasm amongst most creative and marketing personnel begins to wane and so also their motivation to complete the cataloguing work effectively.

To get through the ever growing mountain of collateral produced by the business, metadata entry and management tasks may be passed down to inexperienced juniors or carried out at high speed to ensure that assets are available on the system - where everyone just assumes their colleagues will be able to find them because they are 'on the system'.

Card sorting is a popular technique for getting at users' understanding of content structure, relationships and terminology. I often will break out a card sorting exercise early on in a taxonomy project using terms extracted from the client's content or pre-existing taxonomies to get a sense of what kind of organizing principles are important to the users. I also find it to be a great way of socializing the project and educating people in taxonomy and information architecture.

Recently, I've been doing a lot of digital asset management (DAM) projects, where our taxonomy is meant to help organize and give access to a collection of images or other visual assets, usually through faceted search. While the typical card sorting activity is still relevant, given that we'll be using words/labels to create the taxonomy for the assets, I've found it to lack a certain something in this context.

So during my current project with a global pharmaceutical company, I decided to try a different approach: a visual card sort.

The same rules apply here as they do with traditional card sorting: you can do an open card sort (no pre-defined categories given), or a closed card sort (established set of primary categories). The only real difference being you do it with pictures, not words. And it tends to be a bit easier and fun, as many people are inherently visual.

Digital assets come in a seemingly limitless variety of flavors. Some intrinsic metadata comes along for the ride with particular formats, but without a robust metadata system and workflow in place, many assets will be “left behind” in any digital asset management (DAM) system. Use a systematic approach to naming: reduce the burden on users who need to open assets to determine contents, get those assets appearing in search results, and prevent misplaced files and data extinction down the road.