I was recently given a metal detector, and over a few hours across a couple of weekends, I found a surprising assortment of items hidden in the soil of my garden. Although some items had been discarded, other valuable items had been lost in the past.
Losing valuable items is a universal experience that can often leave us feeling frustrated and helpless. Whether it’s misplacing keys, forgetting where we left our phone, or losing an important document or photo, the fear of losing valuable items can be overwhelming. In this post, I’ll explore the similarities between the search for lost items using a metal detector and the quest for efficient organization through the use of a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system and will share 5 top tips for making a DAM work for everyone.
We often find ourselves asking, “How do we lose things?” The reasons are varied – a momentary lapse in attention, a busy schedule, or simply misplacing items in the chaos of daily life. The anxiety associated with losing something valuable and the frustration of not being able to quickly find it again when it’s needed is an awful feeling that can lead many people to take measures to ensure it never happens again. Worse still is the experience of purposely placing something in a ‘special place’ that seemed sensible at the time.
THE METAL DETECTOR METAPHOR
Enter the metal detector, a tool designed to help locate lost items buried beneath the surface. Much like a metal detector can help in the search for hidden treasures, a DAM system is a tool to find digital assets otherwise hidden within a vast mass of data.
Just as someone might choose to use a metal detector to find a cherished piece of jewellery lost in the garden, organisations with similar fears worried about losing digital assets (or the time it might take to find an asset) come to manage their digital assets in a DAM. The loss of critical data, the inability to locate essential files, and the chaos that ensues without proper organisation can be hugely detrimental to business.
FIVE TOP TIPS FOR METADATA AND TAXONOMY
In the world of metal detecting, successful treasure seekers rely on understanding their equipment and the ability to interpret different signals to help discriminate between ferrous and non-ferrous targets. The strength of the signal can indicate the depth of the target, which might suggest the length of time spent buried in the ground.
Similarly, a DAM user’s effectiveness in finding assets quickly lies in their ability to search using relevant keywords and to understand the metadata and taxonomy used. Here are some top tips to ensure a seamless process:
- Consistent Metadata: Working with your stakeholders, establish consensus in a standardized set of metadata for your digital assets. Much like the consistent signals received by a metal detector when it encounters specific types of metals, consistency in naming, tagging, and labelling facilitates much easier retrieval later.
- Agreed Taxonomy: Develop a clear and intuitive taxonomy that categorizes assets logically. Just as a metal detector user mentally categorizes different types of signals, a well-defined taxonomy ensures that digital assets are organized in a way that makes sense to other users.
- Regular Maintenance: Metal detector users will clean and validate their equipment regularly to ensure optimal performance; similarly, periodic checks on asset use and lifecycle, metadata reviews and updates to your DAM system will keep it running smoothly.
- Onboarding New Users: Consider gamifying the challenge of onboarding new DAM users. It might sound like a simplistic way of getting new DAM users up to speed, but why not challenge users competitively to ask how they would tag specific files?
- Making DAM use habitual: Since everyone likes a ‘treasure hunt’, why not encourage user adoption and habitual use of the DAM by burying/cataloguing (photos) of gift cards or redeemable vouchers inside the DAM and described in a particular way to encourage the use of the taxonomy?
CONCLUSION:
The journey from using a metal detector to implementing a Digital Asset Management system may seem disparate, but the underlying theme is the same – the quest to find valuable items quickly. By embracing the principles of metadata and taxonomy to make search easy, it’s possible to navigate the digital landscape and find particular digital assets with better precision and success than a metal detector enthusiast has in unearthing hidden treasures.
