» Binary code, plus descriptive information «
he above quote is how David Lipsey defines an asset. Lipsey is one of the pioneers of modern digital asset management (DAM) and co-founded the world’s only professional training programme in DAM and MAM (media asset management) at Rutgers University. He is also a co-founder of the Lab of Excellence in DAM at Toronto Metropolitan University, the only institution in the world devoted to the study of what a digital asset is and what can be done with it. But even he believes we’re only just beginning to understand what digital assets are and what they can do for rightsholders and audiences. “Rights are the third leg of the stool,” he continues. “Being able to know whether you can use an asset and use it in a thoughtful way.” The all-digital media world means that rightsholders are continually accumulating assets – from dailies to finished shows, pre-production art and marketing materials – at an overwhelming rate. At the same time, more and more distribution channels are demanding to be fed, each with their own peculiarities and audiences. Media companies need to find solutions for storing and managing all those files, but more importantly,
new thinking about how to manage and monetise what they own – transforming data into genuine business assets. The descriptive information Lipsey mentions – metadata – is the key to unlocking value in an asset. In the first instance, it makes content search easier, but it also allows you to see how and why your content could become monetisable in any given circumstance. When we look at metadata, we can see much more clearly that the asset uploaded to storage in 2016 is not the same asset today. A particularly obvious recent example might be that footage of Prince Charles is now footage of King Charles III – or is it? Librarians and archivists have wrestled with these issues for many centuries, but in a digital world, where metadata might be input by an intern or a robot at scale across huge numbers of files, it’s easy for assets to get lost or become nonsensical. “Metadata decays,” says Lipsey. “Think about what we have seen in five years of vernacular and common language evolution, and the expense incurred to clean up metadata. If you and I were poking around museums in London or New York and asked to see the primitive art, we’d be
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