[Re-post from my work blog CoCuPu]

The Boring Story of Digital Asset Management

We have all this stuff on computers
and all these people who need to use it
some of those people know a lot about the stuff
others know nothing about it
We have a lot of trouble finding things
It’s important to let pople share stuff
but it’s dangerous if the wrong things are shared with the wrong people.
Blogs, flickr, Google Docs, oh my.
Twitter! Facebook! Social Media!
CLOUD!

Microsoft says “Sharepoint.”
Oracle says “Just f*cking pay us.”
SAP says “But you don’t have consolidated Identity Management”
Media specialists say “You need media asset workflow solutions.”
Librarians debate about bad metadata and authority control.
Somebody screamed HIIPA, another cried SarbOX.
The IT department is worried about stability and security.
Doesn’t our SAN hardware solve this? Do we need Hierarchical Storage? The cloud is expensive.

Three departments stood up Drupal instances and dumped their stuff in there.
We set up an image management solution. One in five users loves it. Most spurn it.
We’ve begun to learn that “Image” means many things to many people.
Video files are really big, and a bit frightening.
Actual document production and management has drifted into Google Docs.
We still have no way to say “this spreadsheet has information about those images and videos”
We haven’t even considered the idea of branching and merging spreadsheet data
Our senior counsel’s head exploded when we told her how many different ways people share files online. That was four years ago. She thinks we “put a stop to it”.

The Interesting Story of Data Curation

“What is it?”
“What does it mean? How do you use it?”
“Who is it (or should it be) relevant to?”
“Do they think it’s valuable? What do they think is valuable about it?”
“Is it worth preserving?”
“Why is it worth preserving?”
“… How long should it be preserved? Seven generations?”