In years of teaching visual indexing and being called in to create metadata schemas, I have seen some crazy attempts at description.

Sometimes we have been involved from the beginning developing thesauri of specialized terms for a collection, more often we are called in to fix existing records.

As I roll up my sleeves to tackle either project, I often wonder why organizations do not know more about what they want.

I come down to the same answer that permeates our profession as a whole. The majority of people do not understand the work that goes into providing quality. In our current era of fast and cheap; people have lost the quality aspect almost completely. When they can not successfully execute an accurate search in their database, then they call us to fix it. I am absolutely happy to do so, but make no mistake, I wish for that collection to have done it right the first time; rather than to have called us after hundreds of hours of wasted work. Quality becomes a feature of importance often only after a failure rather than as a preventative measure.

As I tell my classes, let’s talk about why doing it right is rarely done:

1) Illusion – “Everyone is digitizing” is akin to what your mother taught you as a child. “If everyone jumped off a bridge would you do it too?” Many Asset Management Companies sell short the highest cost of digitization which is (dun, dun, dun) linking the metadata to the record. The metadata needs to mean something.

I once saw a vendor selling his “automatic indexing” system. I stopped to chat with him. His product, he told me, will negate needing a human to index. As this is one of our services, I thought that I had better pay attention. He proudly told me that the video clips that he was showing me worked off of closed captioning. I was glad to know that I was not out of business. If you have ever viewed closed captioning, it is a fantastic service to those hearing impaired but it is far from error free. Aside from the many spelling errors within this due to the pressure of typing the words as a show airs (for live shows), there is no intellectual analysis of what is being said and how it relates to the visual.

If an actor said about a child, “Her temperature is 105 degrees!” Assuming the spelling was correct, that is all that the search tool would allow for. A professional indexer could include “Fevers, Childhood Illnesses, Sickness, etc”. This extra analysis would allow a successful search. Most user’s would not find that video clip by looking for “temperature” and they might not know it was a child if that is what they wanted. They would have to pull up the clips and view them. If your collection is going to stay very small, maybe this kind of quality will not matter to you.

For some, I worry that when management, tax payers or a municipality sees bulky systems with little relevance in results, they will certainly shudder at writing more checks for the system or archive.

2) Internal Pressure – “Everything needs to be digitized”
We see this pressure to digitize everything without a clear plan for prioritization. A serious needs assessment is required to be done to understand what needs to be digitized, why and what needs to be researched and described.

I have often told my students that I would rather misfile a photo negative in a physical drawer than have misinformation on a digital record. I am more likely to find it again in the drawer than in a large database.

3) Money – “Scanners are cheap, how much could it cost?”
Money is tight and people are even more apt to cut corners now. It is always cheaper and more accurate to plan something out and do it right rather than to try and fix it afterwards.

Building a business case for the step by step process of tracking assets, designing metadata, the costs of hardware/software/maintenance, training, etc. is often looked at as daunting or impossible. It is not. You have to think like a cost accountant to spell out the savings and efficiency gained. There is also often a publicity component to having an organized and highly accessible collection. This is something that needs to be built in to the value.

4) Ignorance of Computational Linguistics/Human Computer Interfaces/ Usability Studies/Search Strategies/Term Linking/(More) – “Just throw some keywords on it.”

Many times I have seen upper management wave their hands in the air as if with a magic wand and say “Just get it done.” Unfortunately, I am too old to believe in the magic wand and hard work is the only way to create a successful search tool. When I say “hard work”, I actually mean really, really hard work. Research, focus groups, linguistic analysis, understanding search tool limitations, etc. all play a part in quality design.

Along these lines, there is an interesting project that was all over the news. IBM has a team from their labs that have designed a computer to compete on Jeopardy. PBS – Nova had a documentary on it and many of the things that the lead researcher, Dr. Ferrucci, mentioned in that documentary is relevant to our field. The primary comment that caught my interest was when he discussed the fact that a computer competing on Jeopardy can be fed thousands of background documents but they have to work very hard to understand the actual question being asked. So they have the answer, they just do not know the question.

The human brain “gets” the context of place and language. Computers have not yet mastered this. Those brilliant connections of slang, historical context, cultural cues, body language, etc. are a tremendous gift that humans have.

I have stated for years that I wished our culture valued the human brain as much as technology. Watson’s project is interesting and what it proved on Jeopardy is just a portion of what it will prove going forward.

Until then, we who aim to direct searchers into exactly the video clip, manuscript or image that they desire need to value our brains and find better ways to sell our skills.

My indexers know that “Picket Fences” have a certain lifestyle context. Automation or even off-shore indexers do not know that and we can do so much better than cutting corners on core concepts.

Let’s use the gifts that technology gives to us. The ability to link, create synonyms, cross-reference records, stream clips, etc. are all exciting tools and work best in conjunction with a well thought out plan designed by a human brain.

Good luck Dr. Ferrucci but I am not sure that it is Watson that is on trial but your brain.

After reading some marketing information from a DAM vendor, and working in the field for nearly 20 years, I just needed to vent about how some present their product.

Some DAM system vendors often tout their automated systems as replacements for what they claim is “costly manual tagging”. Yet, after implementing one of these expensive systems, their customers often turn to information professionals for metadata development help, because their end users are unable to find the assets they need in a timely manner. There is an obvious disconnect between full automation versus high-end manual service.

Using “smoke and mirrors” has unfortunately been an approach for some DAM system vendors. Like stage magicians, they use misdirection to steer potential customers away from the failings of their systems, sometimes by using confusing jargon or misleading customers about the true costs of accurate, efficient metadata development. They argue that automated indexing is superior and less expensive than human catalogers, yet the customers who purchase these systems are disappointed to find that after spending hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars on an automated system, they still need to hire information professionals to make their assets truly useful. At this point, like the professional mechanic trying to repair the shade-tree mechanic’s work, the issue can become more costly than it would have been if the information professionals were consulted in the first place. Cleansing metadata is always more difficult than designing it well in the beginning.

So, despite the “sexy librarian” stereotypes that abound, our profession is often “out-sexed” by the glitz and glamour of technology and the deliberately misleading sales pitches of some DAM vendors. Some corporate officers are enamored of technology and reluctant to expend budget on people. It is only when they realize that the assets that are vital to their core mission cannot be easily found and reused that they turn to information professionals to “fix” the metadata problems. Keep in mind that reuse generates income to help pay for the database system, and in the most successful cases, to more than pay for the existence of the archives & its staff.

Each industry has a specific terminology that distinguishes itself from other industries and from competitors within their own industry. This complexity of language requires mediation by individuals who understand not only the language, but the way in which users apply the language in searching. While computers & software can do a great job of capturing content, they are not as successful at interpreting that content’s meaning to the organization which generated it, or to the public at large. Interaction with the public to increase brand recognition is vital to every company’s mission, especially in light of the increased use of social networking.

Building brand recognition depends on how well one’s marketing efforts are communicated to the public. The textual content of advertising, even with the use of closed captioning and scripts, does not always convey the concepts that a brand manager wants to stress to the public. Often, advertising is so subtle that it does not even contain dialogue. How successful is machine generated indexing to this type of material? A human indexer can capture concepts such as value, convenience, refreshment, fun, excitement, vitality, friendship, family, customer satisfaction, and many others, that may only be contained in the visual component of the material.

The communications department of each company may also have specific requirements for reusing historical imagery. It may be necessary to know that an image of a delivery truck represents the first use of innovative technology, or that a product package image is a limited edition, advertising the anniversary of the company’s participation in a sporting event. This information may only be available from visual clues within the image itself, or from non-documented “corporate memory” which exists only in the knowledge of the people who created the images. It is also essential for a company to know whether or not the talent that appears in an advertisement has been bought out for a limited period of time, in order to avoid unauthorized usage. This requires not only that the talent be identified, but that documentation of the rights contract is available in a form that can easily be accessed. Advertising agencies have not historically kept this documentation readily accessible. Researching this information can be time consuming and difficult to navigate, as the records may only be organized by date, job number or brand, or by the name of the union with which the rights had to be negotiated. Working titles for individual spots may change multiple times, ending with a completely different final title. Accurate identification is essential for successful reuse of corporate assets. A skilled researcher can quickly cut through the layers of obfuscation to get to the heart of talent rights.

Isn’t it about time that we, as a profession, sell our abilities as well as the DAM system vendors sell their systems? After all, we’ve been proven vastly superior, despite the claims to the contrary. Human beings can make the connections between content and context that automated systems are incapable of making. While there have been improvements in face recognition, speech-to-text and other automated indexing methods, nothing beats a professional indexing team for improving accuracy and adding value to machine-generated metadata. For accuracy of retrieval, there is no replacement for a well-tailored controlled vocabulary used in combination with a well-designed indexing policy. This is one of the many places where information professionals excel.

Fortunately, there does seem to be a movement among smarter corporate entities to incorporate librarians, archivists and other information professionals into the teams making the decisions regarding DAM system purchases & implementation. In addition, many employ specialists to create metadata dictionaries, crosswalks to vendor databases, and to manage the quality of metadata entry. These companies have the best track records in developing systems that are the most useful & successful, even winning awards for their efforts. The success of these projects should lead other organizations involved in digital asset management projects to emulate their efforts and consult the experts in metadata development.

The best DAM vendors know that their tool is just part of the solution for asset management and a great team of people needs to set guidelines, determine field requirements and design searchability together. This is what any institution looking for an answer to Asset Management should look for.

When I started 15 years ago, we had some really amazing tools already in asset management. What has evolved after that was really entwined with the 1990s web company expansion and what I have called the “gold rush” mentality. Vendors smelled money. They wanted to sell million dollar systems to big media companies, the Fortune 100 and the government. As the flurry evolved we saw less and less money going into development and more into marketing. As more players came to the party, a very cutthroat mentality took hold.

Over the next five years we saw a loss in basic functionality but an increase in “glamour features”. These features included fuzzy logic searching, text to speech and visual searching.

The features that were not being implemented included spellcheck, basic global thesaurus changes and improvements in report generation. In a study that I did in 2000, none of the leading DAM systems were working on this and 100% of the users that I surveyed were asking for this.

As the web bubble burst we found that these companies were spinning and their stock values plunged, they had to innovate. This lead to the introduction of the leasing option for companies without $1,000,000 to put down up-front. It also has lead to some feature innovations but not enough.

What has really led the charge to manage assets now is the open web. WordPress and other small innovators have created low cost and sometimes free options for archives and libraries. Filemaker templates can even handle large visual collections and when married with an e-commerce vendor there is a robust option to circumvent many of the legacy digital asset management systems.

So are digital asset systems obsolete? In truth, it was obvious that they were just a stepping stone to the next technology. We now know that the new “it” is easy to use web platforms. In my view, “yes” the DAM systems are on their way out. The push for open source and interconnectivity allows for us to build our own systems piece by piece. This does not mean that we will need less IT support, just less vendor-dependent IT support.

In a study predicting the trends in DAM for 2009, most of the features listed were being worked on or asked for 10 years ago. Facial recognition, reporting, e-commerce, tagging, etc. The three that were new are ones that I predict will be the ones that “take”. These are: collaborative tagging, web versions (on-demand and hosting) and incremental pricing with lower leasing fees.

It is hard to hang on to a lead in “It” as things can shift so rapidly. Technology kingpins need to realize that there is no way to hang on if you are not giving customers what they have been asking for. When I asked an IT developer why they were not doing a better job with hierarchies, synonyms and spellcheck he said “Oh you won’t find anyone is going to put development money into that! It is too much money. We need to sell now.” Eventually consumers will find their own solution then. Even if they had to wait 10 years, other programs like WordPress can be better purposed for what we need and with the cost savings we can continue to improve it on our plan, on our time, on our budget.