There has been much written recently about digital fragility. Researchers and archivists have heard dueling longevity and futuristic projections. In trying to push this dire need without appearing like Chicken Little, I have embarked on serious primary research to expose the sheer volume of the problem. The in-depth article will be coming out in a professional journal within the year. Until then, I felt that I needed to speak up a bit about the need for our activism.

Between my teaching digital archiving courses and my work with clients, this issue has been prevalent in each work day. In fact, while re-processing an archives for a client, a case of 5 ¼” floppy discs were found. No one in-house knew exactly if these were of value, what was on them or even if they were created by the organization. When we offered to open them on a computer with a floppy drive, we were told just to throw them out. This is the fear that archivists are living with. Each time an archivist approaches this obsolete media, the questions come: How many others are out there? How many are being thrown out because it is easier? How many are left? How long do I save them? If I am able to find a player/drive/ etc. will I be open the software that the data is formatted in? Will it even be playable? Are we missing decades of human knowledge? How long will this continue? How can archivists slow down the moving train of media change? Can archivists increase re-formatting awareness? Is reformatting my only option? Where does emulation stand? Who do I call? Who do I write? How do I make a difference in this loss that flies in the face of everything my profession holds dear?

A colleague, Tom Featherstone, once told a class “Archivists get paid for throwing things out.” After the horrific silence, he explained that we cannot save everything. Archivists place value on what is received, appraisal occurs and the kernels of importance are retained.

In today’s Digital Age, few are seeing the kernels, the wheat, and perhaps even the farm!

A recent IDC/UC San Diego study estimated that the average American is taking in 34 gigabytes of information per day. As an archivist, let’s think about the volume of data that is being created and disseminated. If even half of one percent were historically significant, we still have a large preservation problem.

The loss of corporate, academic and personal data from the late 1980s to the current time is tragic for future generations of historians, technologists, anthropologists and sociologists. We are nearing twenty-five years with little implementation of preservation processes. This is not to say that Archivists have not offered plans. This is to say that they are not being followed. In pure sales terms, we have NOT “sold” the crisis to the people. This is not to imply that the issue is not real, it means that the dry facts were not enough to convince people of the crisis. More facts had to be gathered. Now a true implementation plan with typical business practices needs to be created.

Here are the options:

1) Do nothing and continue to sweep up after mass dumps of data. Process what passively comes to us. Complain a little (or a lot) and do the best that we can with the little that we receive

2) Be moderately proactive to educate the general public on the loss of human knowledge. Start education workshops at local archives, issue press releases individually and work at the grassroots level to educate your donors and users.

3) Be passionately proactive and begin a coordinated media campaign aimed at the public and the computer industry to work with archivists, historians, sociologists and anthropologists to stop the destruction of electronic records on all media. Work this campaign hand in hand into a reformatting program that is easy. Much like the environmentalists needed to educate consumers (e.g. “Reduce Reuse Recycle”). Catchy phrases work.

One of the biggest complaints leveled against our largest member associations is that they do not get involved in the issues that are most impactful for our day to day work. There is NOTHING bigger to archives than this, right now. Member associations are built on exactly that, their members. We can choose to have a voice.

How each professional decides to act on this data is an individual choice, but a large percentage of archivists and other professionals impacted by this severe and irreparable data loss would be a dominant force in the media, to donors and to the computer industry.

For twenty five years, archivists have been that little chick crying about disaster. It is time we grew up and became the rooster at the farm, crowing for the populace to wake up.

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.

In an age where music is so easily copied and accessed, it’s hard to imagine that any valuable recordings could ever be lost. But a new study predicts a grim future for millions of recordings across America.

The National Recording Registry was established ten years ago, following the passing of a congressional bill. The purpose of the NRR is to “maintain and preserve sound recordings and collections of sound recordings that are culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant, and for other purposes” (Public Law 104-474; H.R. 4846). Recently, the NRR released a 181-page report, The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States: a National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age. This report was the first “comprehensive, national-level study of the state of sound recording preservation ever conducted in the U.S.” 130 years since the invention of the phonograph, it’s about time the subject was addressed.

The report found that an estimated forty-six million recordings are held in American libraries, archives, and other institutions. Efforts made nationally in collecting and creating recordings are not matched by efforts to preserve them and this puts recordings of all types at stake. Furthermore, inconsistent local, state, and national laws have caused a “lack of national coordination… in addressing the challenges of preservation, professional education and public access.” The report states that not enough is being done to prevent a “permanent loss of irreplaceable sound recordings in all genres.”

Why does all of this matter? While most commercial recordings are not at stake at being lost, millions of recordings of performances, interviews, and broadcasts are at risk. So while the average Joe doesn’t have to worry about his precious Eagles and Zeppelin records ever being irreplaceably lost or damaged, scholars and historians face losing incredibly valuable resources. Someone conducting a study on race relations, for example, might use recordings of Minstrel shows as to demonstrate the willful acceptance and ignorance of racism in the late 19th century. A researcher for a film, be it a documentary or historical drama, might need to find old radio broadcasts for a project. The need for access to obscure recordings is far-reaching.

A huge part of the sound recording preservation problem is the “restrictive and anachronistic” copyright laws currently in place. Ironically, the copyright laws designed to protect recordings are essentially destroying them, by heavily restricting preservation methods. The report explains, “All US recordings, both commercially released and unpublished, created before February 15, 1972, are protected by a complex network of [copyright] laws.” As a result, any recording made before 1972 will not enter the public domain until 2067—95 years after the bill was passed. So, for example, a recording made in 1900 will not be able to legally be copied without permission until 2067, or 167 years after its creation. There’s no question that a considerable—if not irreparable—amount of decay will happen in that timeframe.

The good news is that copyright laws are not widely enforced, and library and archive facilities have some leeway in preservation and digitization. However, without legal rights to sound recordings, many institutions cannot procure the funding needed to restore and maintain their own collections.

Initiating a nation-wide study on the subject of sound preservation was a good first step on tackling the issue. What should be done next? Change the copyright laws, obviously. And while it would take years or decades to make copyright laws relevant to the digital age, librarians and archivists can take action in the meantime. The study states, “an individual representing one institution has noted that, unless or until instructed to cease and desist certain practices, his organization was compelled to ‘fly under the radar’ to support its mission.”

Awareness of the issue can also be a huge step in fighting loss of sound recordings. Educating record collectors and owners of original recordings on how to maintain and store their collections could go a long way in ensuring a better outlook for sound preservation.

In March, Rachael Clark discussed the necessity of completing a needs assessment as one of the important skills used in developing a digital collection. I would definitely agree that it is a vital skill for any information professional. Cliché as it is, one of my go-to phrases is, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail,” and performing a needs assessment is an essential part of the planning phase for any project. This includes diving into the world of social networking.

The first decision to consider with your team is what kind of social media outlet will be most beneficial. There’s more to the world of social networking than microblogging on Twitter. You can get your professional persona out there with LinkedIn, share attention-grabbing images of your collection using Flickr or post a webinar on YouTube. Consider your needs, speak with people who are fully immersed into the world of social networks and learn from them. There are many options from which to choose. Do a bit of research into what will work best for your organization before you spend too many “hit and miss” hours. Time is money, folks!

Once you’ve decided on the tools of choice, you probably think that adding social networking to your organization seems like such a simple thing. Go to your social networking site of choice, register and start posting, right? But before you dive in, stop and consider what kind of benefit you’re expecting from these popular tools. Do you want to reach out to patrons? Are you interested in generating buzz about your company? Do you hope to gain new clients? Perhaps you just want to keep in touch with colleagues around the world. No matter what your purpose, you’ll be doing a little writing and though this is writing on a small scale, the importance of writing for your audience cannot be underestimated.

More things to consider when creating a needs assessment are, how often and how much of information is being shared? How often are you going to use this tool? You will need to think about quality and quantity if you want to reach people and make the most of your social networking tool of choice. For example, if you’re using Twitter or Facebook, you will want to build an audience of people who read and repost or retweet your updates. If you want to attract loyal readers,  frequent, appropriate and relevant posts and tweets are vital.

Decisions will also have to be made about who will be the social media guru of your organization. You may find staff resistant to using these tools or you may have staff members who are ready to make it their full-time job. The right person will have enthusiasm for this new way to communicate, but it’s important that he or she will be literate in the language of social networking. They need to know that it’s “tweeting” NOT “twittering,” and they need to have the ability to tell the difference between useless information and great things to know. Many social networking sites have users who are spewing a lot more garbage than gems. The person doing the majority of work with social networking tools will have to do quite a bit of filtering.

In this day and age it seems as if everyone and their grandmothers have at least dipped their toes into the giant pond that is social networking. If you take your time to examine your needs, then plan and execute a process to get the most out of the social networking tool of your choice, you will add volumes to the intellectual value of your organization.

As I was working on a workshop about process planning for digitization, I came across this quote by Peter Drucker, ”Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.”

No matter how pleasant you are (or you think that you are) the bottom line is that the funding and reputation of your institution rests on success.

There is a reason that business principles exist. There is a reason that companies that fail to follow these principles also fail. Few managers of digitization projects have business backgrounds. The number one failure seems to be a lack of project management skills.

There is not enough in the way of professional literature on this topic. Most is focused on case studies that are presented in ways that are specific to that particular project.

We need to try to develop standards or at the least, guidelines that are portable to most projects. A smart manager follows four important rules:

1. Establish written procedures (aka process manuals)
2. Develop deliverables (aka due dates and accountability)
3. Track production (aka cost accounting)
4. Adjust/improve processes as needed (aka communication and report generation)

In the words of many great politicians, “Let me be perfectly clear, “developing tracking and implementing good project management is not more time consuming than NOT doing it. On the contrary, the risk in not doing it is too great. Why don’t we put the time in to do this deeper structural work? My answer is that most of us do not realize the impact of not doing it.

The number crunching, procedure writing, report generation and pie chart creation is not the most attractive aspect of digitization. Showing the world a digitized version of a little-documented historic event is what pulls us in to this field. Creating tracking forms is NOT why 99% of us enter the profession.

I can’t even count the number of institutions that I have seen go over budget and have to stop in the midst of a digitization project. The lack of ability to manage, project and track costs has stopped some people from even trying. So, I think this is a fair forum to introduce some of these concepts.

Look for a serialized version of “Business Principles for Digitization” to be coming to the blog over the next month.

As always if you have suggestions of what you might like to see, drop me a note!

In teaching multimedia archive,s I think about the future of our content constantly. Like a new mother, I fret for its security, growth and health. What is THE answer for our degrading media, emulsions, for our software obsolescence and our equipment falling down around our ears?

Recent discussions on the AMIA listserv brought new energy to this discussion and I wanted to put my spin on this. The subject line was “What’s Not Cool About Cold?” and it solicited some serious discussion about whether we have made a horrible mistake for a generation of archivists and content.

Jim Lindner argues that the imminent demise of tape players is more important in an archivist’s preservation decision than our focus on the imminent degradation of the media itself. The latter being our big decision to place much of our media in cool or cold storage. The group discussion mentioned the fact that many of our players are no longer supported by their manufacturers and the simple math that the lack of machines and the existing wear on their parts will not even cover the playback of the volume of archival tapes awaiting…migration? This hits a deep reality. Have we lost hundreds of thousands of hours of archival motion under our watch? Maybe even millions or billions of hours?

With the current demand from patrons increasing and the desire to use motion outtakes, news, etc. for historic documentation this is a disappointing state. Motion is powerful, emotional and immediate. It puts patrons in the experience in a way that to the visual human being is dramatic.

This important discussion on the listserv was a strong exchange which took place over several days. Other important points included the argument that the research on degradation and proper handling has made the tape degradation less of an issue and now the issue is playback for migration and access.

Other points included:

1) The need to get these gems a proper venue to be seen (whether due to money or rights issues)

2) The natural evolution of gathering obsolete machines from production facilities and creating some centralized site for archival institutions to use.

3) How to custom make parts so that we can maintain the machines so that we can transfer the content.

4) Wait for a miracle technological innovation to happen in the next 20-30 years so that you can migrate. (Keep them cool until then).

We come back again and again to the complexities of managing archival multimedia. The next generation of archivists will have changed their paradigm and released themselves from the desire to preserve the artifact. I am not condoning refusing to preserve all originals but our focus as far as video tape and digital files will be on content migration.

Other formats still have certain inherent value and that is a different blog posting!

Future archivists will have a much better long-term understanding of what is an artifact and what is intellectual content that needs to be migrated. They will be more adept to the rapid pace of format change and will HAVE to adapt quickly.

Not that I am faulting us. We are the transitory archival generation, the one that bridges the 100 year film format and the thumb drive.

I agree that the great research done in the field has helped us to minimize that problem, but it does seem that we took the eye off the ball a bit on migration. We cite lack of funds, lack of understanding of the urgency by the non-archival world, the frustration with equipment manufacturers, etc. It sounds like we need a development guru to raise funds, awareness and help to join all the key players for a collaboration. Many mention that the creators often do not prioritize preservation as they should. That is true, but our role as professionals is to educate.

Hand-wringing is not allowed! The energy that we have spent on that could have been put forth to an international collaboration with a real potential for migration, managing equipment, and innovation. One manufacturer can not do this alone, everyone needs to get on board and when I say “everyone” I mean:

Archivists
Creators (producers, studios, channels, directors, talent, writers, etc.)
Media
Equipment and Media Manufacturers
Technologists
Professional Associations
Funders

I think all of the above agree that the loss is imminent. The question is can we use our collective economy of scale to work together? Or maybe it is will we?

I spent the last week writing and editing a book chapter on process management for digitization. My head has been trying to process all that I contemplated while doing such an intensive session.

I think that a lot of process management comes down to skills that we often no longer practice. These oldies but goodies are classics that we need some reminding about. The most important is…LISTENING.

We Twitter, we Facebook and we Blog but we are not necessarily listening to each other. Engaging colleagues in the process of digitization or any other information management process makes a huge difference in creating efficiency. More brains are always better than one!

The next skill is one that many of us are skilled at but do not have time for: analysis.

There was a great quote that I read ages ago “If you want to live forever, write something worth reading.” That has stuck in my head and inspired me to continue to write personally. The reason that quote is so powerful is because of its qualification “worth reading.”

How much of the information explosion is worth reading?

One aspect of self-publishing that is great is that anyone can post any wonderful idea for all to see, but it is also the great disadvantage. Who has time to qualify all that is out there? Librarians would love to direct patrons to well-researched blogs, but who has the time to research their accuracy? We fall back to well-known publishers, many of whom have had their own authenticity problems.

We have sites where Librarians assess other sites and compile them so that we can be assured that we have access to high quality tools. In my latest nights, I wonder…how much checking can we really do to ascertain quality? In this world of self-promotion and personal status sites, are we really examining the information? Are we slowing down enough to get this?

Lastly, is the skill of planning.

Many times librarians and archivists (particularly of the solo version) spend so much time feeling overwhelmed that we only react instead of proactively changing our state. After reading hundreds of interviews that my students have done with leaders in the field I see one common thread between success and failure…planning. So that goes back to being proactive, taking a breath and listening to what it is your users and your collection needs.

Listening to the content and the users means that you have a better plan. Maybe it is a stolen hour a week to consider this and shut out the information noise, disseminate the good research and plan how to get where you need to be. Ignoring for just an hour the budget pressures, lack of staff skills, and bureaucratic realities allows you to envision where you can be and as many great business leaders espouse, visualizing your success plays a big part in getting to it.

So in the words of the great Frasier Crane, “I’m listening.”

After teaching so many archival and technology classes, I began to realize the incredible depth and breadth of our loss of data. Over the last three decades billions of discs have been created and sold and presumably used. What has happened to these discs? To the data? If even 5% was worth saving for historical purposes, that is still about one and a half million discs to save and migrate. Has that been done?

We all know that the answer is “no.” So that means that we need to look at what is important and what level of effort is necessary to save it. I know that we can not save everything and I know that we would not want to. As Nik Cubrilovic mentioned in a recent Washington Post article entitled “Letting Data Die a Natural Death”: “Not only is a lot of this data not important, but do we really want to keep it? I certainly would not want a full account of everything I did in my youth sitting on a server somewhere. I am also certain that we do not want the record of our as a society time being documented and discovered by future civilizations based on Twitter messages.”

Yet, how much is lost that we have accepted and are wistful for? Some of my own graduate papers written on 5 1/4” floppies were not salvageable. That is of course, a personal loss that matters to NO ONE else but me.

What about the loss of communication histories in Presidential administrations? It took NARA six years just to process the Clinton presidential emails. (I am not sure how many people they had working on it, but that certainly sounds overwhelming!) Assuming that each succeeding administration will have geometrically more, what effort will it take to separate the diamonds from the coal? Add into that the constant evolution of tools like Instant Messaging, Texting, etc. and where will historians be able to turn to determine how national decisions were really made? Or have we EVER had that, even in a paper driven world of the past? Doesn’t everyone edit trails that reflect badly on them?

In the article “The E-Memory Revolution,” Jim Gemmell and Gordon Bell talk about the new “digital person” that has a “total recall” to their life as it is all in “e-memory.” They talk about patrons asking librarians about helping them to build new connections for them to their content. As an archivist, I ask, “In what format will their 20, 30, 40, or 50 year old history be?” How many of us can access our data from a phone that we had one year ago? These digital tools are wonderful BUT they are transitory.

They are primarily to transmit current records. Whether an email joke to all your friends or a tweet to meet someone at a concert. The problem is that we also have history making decisions ONLY in email form and new marketing ideas only documented on Twitter. So for future researchers, how will they take your 1000 new weekly emails and get the funding to sort through them?

Is it the same way that the 4 billion floppies manufactured by 2003 (according to one site which I can no longer find, how ironic!) and the 200 million Zip discs manufactured in 1999 alone (according to that same site) were handled? My 15 years of experience tells me that only a fraction of a percent might have been migrated. Is that a loss? Maybe we will never know? Because without the data we don’t know what we don’t know. Is everyone comfortable with that?

In the last month, I have had to replace a one year old refrigerator, a 30 day old phone, a two week old portable drive and a one-day old server. Technology is not always our friend!

When I first got involved in digitization (15 years ago!), I was sorely disappointed with the inefficiencies and struggles to get output as promised. I teach my students today that the information world is a difference place. We finally have tools that talk to each other, tools that can be modified through menus as well as hard-coding. This is a wonderful world of possibilities.

Tonight as I sighed and sat down thinking about all the time I have wasted on new products failing, I thought…”Am I right to be telling students that finally the tools are working for us instead of the other way around?”

In getting this blog up and running, we chose a simple template. We wanted it to be clean and easy for users and for us. So far, according to our change document we have encountered five unexpected problems that took a fair amount of time to fix (even with experts on staff). These problems all centered around incompatibilities to get information where, when and how we wanted. As information managers these seemed like simple moves and formats. We thought that we were not doing anything fancy.

I also tell my students to take as many technology classes as they can “stomach”, because the more that you know the smarter your decisions will be on which technology to use.

We are a pretty technical bunch but since each project is so different, and each institution is managing different types of information from any country and any time period in history, how can our information tools keep up to accommodate all human knowledge?

Open source is a start to integrating these tools but I still believe deep down that more librarians and archivists as programmers would make our tools much more common sense based.

I have seen many tools that sell well but their implementations are so short-sighted as to make the product unusable.

Here are some for instances:
1) All fields migrate from one database to another but only a portion are searchable!
2) The new Speech to Text feature gets every single word wrong and yet it is still for sale.
3) The new template for your site will not allow you to migrate data from your old template.
4) You can’t migrate your contacts from one phone to a new one
5) You can’t change your default directory when scanning.

These examples are counter-intuitive to good information management. Are there better products out there? In some cases, yes. This is why we need to be careful consumers. In some cases though, there are so many unknowns until you install your data that it is a painful “learning on the job” situation. In many more instances, your institution is already married to a technology and you just have to work with it.

Will things get better? Or is the question HOW will they get better?
I firmly believe that we (librarians and archivists) need to become more technologically astute and create our own products. The more we know will also allow us to push developers to better understand what we need.

We also as a group, have to really praise developers that are listening to us and that DO create products that are user and administratively friendly.

So, my question to you, is how best to do that?

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.