Article Summary: “When Archivists and Digital Asset Managers Collide: Tensions and Ways Forward" by Anthony Cocciolo

  

In the digital era, some titles in library science have been rebranded. An association with data and computing is expected to attract prestige and money. LIS programs are becoming iSchools, and LIS graduates are more frequently pursuing jobs like “data architect,” “digital librarian,” or “digital preservationist.” Sometimes these positions are rebranded versions of the same thing, but sometimes they are truly new jobs.

Cocciolo’s article discusses the “digital asset manager” and how this position collides with that of the archivist. He carries out a case study at an art museum with one digital asset manager and two archivists. The digital asset manager was brought on in 2012 to manage the digital asset management (DAM) software. At first, the digital asset manager worked solely with the photography department, since DAM is most established in digital photography. Tensions arose, however, when the DAM spread to other departments throughout the museum.

Essentially, museum staff (including the digital asset manager) had an ambiguous idea of the archive and its purpose as opposed to the purpose of the DAM system. An assumption of redundancy brought a sense of competition. At staff meetings, the digital asset manager would make the archive seem superfluous.

The archivists, however, felt that the digital asset manager targeted “high value” content without attention to the records retention plan and long-term preservation. This is because the archive and the DAM system serve distinct purposes. The DAM serves the staff of an institution and makes active and immediately valuable records accessible for reuse. The archive, on the other hand, maintains records of permanent value that have become inactive. It is for this reason that the digital asset manager operates on a fast workflow and maintains content for the short term, whereas the archivists takes the long view. Moreover, digital asset managers focus on metadata at the item-level while archivists focus on the provenance of an entire series or collection. This is because the archivist focuses on the external context of a record more than its internal value.

Some staff believed that when records were deposited into the DAM, there was no need to deposit them into the archive. The DAM could hold all digital records, leaving archivists responsible for paper records. This “DAM-as-archives” assumption is false because the DAM provides highly accessible but short-term storage. DAMs do not have digital preservation functionality.

Cocciolo ultimately recommends depositing assets in both the DAM and the archive, since “lots of copies make stuff safe.” The digital asset manager and the archivist have two unique missions and must communicate with each other to distinguish these missions. At the same time, they have a lot to learn from each other. The digital asset manager can learn about preventing loss by obsolescence, and the archivist can learn to better provide unmediated and quick access to records.

Cocciolo, Anthony. “When Archivists and Digital Asset Managers Collide”: Tensions and Ways Forward.” The American Archivist vol. 79, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2016): 121-136.