DAMs in the Nonprofit Sector: From Striving to Thriving

This post was originally published on LinkedIn Pulse

Nonprofit organizations compete in the same world and vie for the same customers as any other consumer-oriented business. To be successful, we must be able to engage people in such a way that they will choose to spend their precious leisure time (and dollars) on experiences of culture, the arts and/or social meaning - as opposed to the other options. That's a tall task, especially in a world that offers so many popular alternatives.



The path to success within that competitive landscape is driven in large part by digital content. In order to attract and engage 21st century audiences and contributors, nonprofit organizations have become digital publishing operations, providing access to meaningful content on a scale that was never anticipated. This evolution has been a real challenge for the charities, museums, libraries and archives that serve the public. And like most forms of evolution, it was a test of survival.

Striving

I would argue that over the past decade most nonprofits have become quite adept at producing digital content (such as the high resolution digital photography done in fine art museums, see above). We survived!
That being said, the sector has been playing catch-up when it comes to organizing, cataloging and sharing that content - the core capacities of digital asset management (DAM). Not only is there a large and rapidly-growing body of 'digital stuff' being produced, there is also the cold reality of appropriate budget constraints that limit the sector's ability to invest in technology infrastructure and resources. So our sector continues to strive.
The big question: How can the nonprofit sector move beyond it's current position to one of great success; that is, from striving to thriving?

DAM Matters

Others have written about making the case for DAM, and have even published online questionnaires to help organizations understand their specific needs. After all, " ... a digital file is only a digital asset when it can be easily found and used. Otherwise it’s just another collection of stored bits and bytes."
From my perspective, all organizations need DAM because it's valuable:

• Significant time and money is spent producing digital media, organizations should maximize the return on that investment.
• DAM enables efficient publishing processes, which are flexible and support omni-channel strategies.
• DAM provides a resource across an organization, 24/7, preventing bottlenecks to accessing digital assets (by the way, those bottlenecks are usually people, and those people are generally not so happy about the situation).
• DAM enables brand consistency across all distribution channels.
• In some cases, DAM enhances an organization's capacity to manage intellectual property rights and to ensure security of digital assets.

The nonprofit sector (and I'm concentrating primarily on cultural heritage organizations here) must meet additional mandates, which are mission-driven:

1. Mandate to make Accessible Nonprofit organizations are often supported by public funding and direct donations from citizens. We have a responsibility to share our collections and our knowledge with the public. After all, a museum is really only a warehouse until it opens its doors and invites the public inside to experience its collection. Sharing digital assets - sometimes thought of as digital surrogates - enables an organization to share it's archive widely with the broadest possible audience.
2. Mandate to Preserve Museums, libraries and archives share a responsibility of stewardship. The public trusts our organizations to take care of our collections, in order to preserve them for the future. In fact, ideally that preservation would last forever - no small task. Not to mention, increasingly the "objects" in the collections are themselves born-digital.

I have written previously about the importance of DAM in our sector, and won't re-hash those points here. In summary, we've simply got to keep working hard in order to move from striving to thriving.

Vision: Thriving

What is the aspirational vision for DAM practice within the nonprofit and cultural heritage sector? Here's my list, which I'm sure is incomplete (please add your thoughts in the comments):

• As much effort and commitment is put into digital asset management practices and workflows as has been put into production.
• Re-purposing of existing digital assets is taking place regularly and seen as a humdrum, business-as-usual practice.
• Digital assets are shared openly, including via linked open data, all of which is driven by automated processes.
• Standards, for asset production and for asset cataloging-archiving-sharing, are consistently-applied and readily understood across sectors.
• Nonprofits are able to roll with the shifting sands of publishing workflows - COPE: Create Once Publish Enthusiastically

We can get there, and we'll get there faster by working together.

 

Gather - Collaborate - Share - Learn

In May 2016, I will be presenting together with several esteemed colleagues - including Julie Shean and Marianne Nouwen - at the Henry Stewart DAMNY Conference. Our session will use an interactive case study format to bring multiple perspectives to the topic at hand. Panelists from both larger and smaller organizations, representing different types of nonprofits, will share their stories. Along the way, we will explore commonalities and unique needs, and we’ll address some of the challenges faced by the nonprofit sector, such as: How do we implement and ensure the adoption of effective DAM tools and practices? How do we deal with complex metadata models? How can we control costs while still achieving our aspirations? By leveraging the power of collaboration, attendees and presenters will learn from each other, gain practical knowledge, expand professional networks, and set the stage for success. I hope you will join us, and add your perspective and energy to the ongoing dialog.

Insider tip: use this discount code when registering to get a great deal on the conference fees:  ARTSMIA100

Guest Post: Preparing for the Deep Digital Media Dive

Guest post authored by Frances Lloyd-Baynes, Content Database Specialist, Minneapolis Institute of Arts
Original post published on LinkedIn Pulse

When we started our journey to “improved digital media management” at Mia (Minneapolis Institute of Art) four years ago, we knew what we wanted (long term vision? tick). Our problem? Missing and inaccessible digital assets, with no way to get at and reuse them without making a whole lot of phone calls, wasting time and resources. (See Douglas Hegley, “The Mystery of the Missing Map and Other Digital Disappearances”.) We knew the assets were out there: they’d been created and maybe used once, but where the heck were they now? So our task was clear: get in a new DAM, fill it, serve it up, problem solved.  We made our plan, submitted our grant, and received funding to make our vision a reality. (Thank you, IMLS!)

Life is never that simple, though, is it? Filling the technology gap with a new DAM has been easy, but it is turning out to be the less impactful part of what we are delivering.

Yes, we needed a home for the assets being churned out by our designers, videographers, photographers, and educators. It had to be easy to use, straightforward, and integrate with our existing systems (an enterprise DAM, a works of art database, and website CMS). We chose an open-source DAM -  ResourceSpace (by Montala) - so we could access the underlying code and  tailor it to our needs. Our grant allowed us to bring in a developer to work on both ResourceSpace and the final piece of our project puzzle: a new search interface to unify all of our digital content systems.

ResourceSpace has (since June) simply and beautifully delivered a place to house and provide access to all of those wayward digital assets. Yet the new unified search interface is turning out to be the star of our project, with the potential to change significantly our digital media landscape. ResourceSpace makes finding assets easy; our other, enterprise DAM is less user-friendly. Our works of art database is both complex and has seriously restricted access. And none of the content systems on their own can provide a complete overview of the content we have related to our collections and our activities.  Enter MetaMia.

 

So very Meta

 

MetaMia is the new, browser-based interface we created to join all this content for one deep, inquiring dive. How did we do it? We extended our existing APIs (application program interfaces) to draw out the content from the source systems, then brought in ElasticSearch and Kibana to index and deliver that content up via browser interface.

In MetaMia, every word is searchable, all fields discoverable. Users can choose any or all of the four underlying systems to search, filter for asset types (video, audio, collection records, etc.) and for data mapped across systems, as well as use a field-by-field advanced search option. Assets are not only discovered, but can be directly downloaded from MetaMia, removing the need for our less-tech-friendly users to interface with our more complex systems. For a museum of (mostly) non-techies, it’s pretty heady stuff. (We received a spontaneous round of applause when demo-ing MetaMia at a recent all staff meeting.)

Early in the project, based on information we gathered from stakeholders, our team developed a set of guiding principles for managing the organization’s digital content. The core principles are

• Simplification (of processes; discoverability; use)
• Maximized resource (staff effort; asset use/re-use; system use/re-use; re: asset value)
• Flexibility (of formats; systems; use contexts; access/discovery; input/output)
• Clarity (clearly documented assets; standardized metadata; intuitive systems; museum processes & policies; user awareness)
• Independence (of formats; of users (i.e. they are capable); of systems)  
• Commitment (of the organization towards staff, support, resource)

With ResourceSpace and MetaMia, we are confident we have largely succeeded in fulfilling these principles. There’s still work to do, of course.

 

Making Meaning

 

Now that we have the search infrastructure, the pressure is on to offer up meaningful results. That means providing consistency (of content, structure, and language) across systems in ways we have not had to deliver before. As a collections data specialist, this is the stuff I get excited about: capturing that data, structuring it and controlling it to make meaning.

‘Making meaning’ requires getting the data into each system and associating it with the assets, into the right fields, and using consistent language. Here we have issues. We have significant gaps in the data we’re capturing - things we know people want to search by, but cannot because it’s not there now. Some of our systems have deeply complex metadata structures, others have virtually none. Some have built-in authority controls, others not. There is indeed work to be done to level the field.

The project is now drawing to a close and my final, personal goal, is to build a layer across all our systems for linking to common vocabulary controls. We are still working out how to deliver this, but looking at linked open data (LOD) to help. We need tools that sit outside individual systems, but which can be shared, e.g. the Getty’s vocabulary tools (Art & Architecture Thesaurus, Thesaurus of Geographic Names, and Union List of Artist Names) now being released in LOD format. And we need tools that can extend the meaning of our content (e.g. via translations into other languages) to a global audience.

Focusing on implementing a solution with the widest possible reach will help us move what is now an internal-only service to deliver deep content to a world of potential users. As it evolves, MetaMia will serve its assets directly back to our website, enabling the world to see the media-rich content we hold related to art, culture, history and our collections.
Mia is committed to the open source movement. Be assured that all our developments will be shared with the community via the Mia Github site.

If you would like to hear more about our project, my colleague Josh Lynn and I will be presenting at the upcoming Henry Stewart DAM Chicago 2015 event in September, where we’ll be sharing our work and its results. Note: As a reader of this post, you can register for that conference at a discount by using the code MINNEAPOLIS100. We hope to see you there.