DAM New York 2025

Metadata, Rights, and Meaningful Change: Building a Scalable Framework for Governance and Reuse

Fact:

When metadata, legal permissions, and asset usage rights don’t align, teams face delays, compliance risks, and barriers to content reuse.

Solution:

• Connect the dots between intake, governance, and delivery - all while focusing on user experience and long-term scalability.
• Adopt a framework that integrates a work management platform, a digital asset management system, and a custom-built portal.
• Embed rights metadata at the point of submission to reduce friction and enable compliant reuse of third-party content.

The challenge:

• Managing assets that originate outside the enterprise. (In-house content typically has clear rights ownership, inclusion of third-party content introduces far more complexity and potential risk.)
• Addressing the distinction between internal and external is key to building a governance model that is both effective and scalable.

Implementation in practice:

• A people-first approach to solving metadata and rights challenges - how to identify the human barriers to legal compliance and metadata consistency, and how to guide cross-functional teams toward change by showing them the why behind it.
• Tactics to improve governance using tools you already have - how to embed usage rights at the point of submission, simplify form selection with conditional logic, and enable safe, scalable reuse of third-party content - all without needing to invest in new technology.
• What it really takes to build a scalable framework system - beyond the theory - a candid walkthrough of how, for us, this framework came together, and the roadblocks faced along the way.

Rus Martin, Senior Digital Asset Specialist, Creative Lab, Esri

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