First Sessions Announced

We are busy developing an exciting agenda for the Festival of DAM 2024 so keep your eyes peeled for details. Register here to be the first to hear about new sessions and speakers!

In the meantime, check out the exciting sessions below:

Building a Sustainable DAM

It's time to talk about the elephant in the IT server room: the environmental impact of your DAM system.

While you're no doubt familiar with the impacts of climate change, you may not be as familiar with the terms NetZero, carbon neutral, or sustainable computing.

Surely if your job is all about digital assets and you're often working from home - you shouldn't be concerned about how your DAM practices impact the climate - or should you? With people and software alike needing to adapt and prevent negative impacts to the planet, your role in DAM also requires you to be familiar with the impact you directly, and indirectly, contribute.

Better still: how can you make change for the greater good, while enhancing and modernizing your skills?

In this session, DAM industry veteran Theresa Regli shares recent research into the impact of enterprise DAM systems on the environment, and delves into approaches for running a sustainable DAM system and program for your organization. 

Theresa Regli, Director & Chief Strategist, Vox Veritas Digital

DAM Governance in an Artificially Intelligent Future

The focus of this session is on the implications of GenAI tagging without human oversight.

Elizabeth will share:

• The benefits and risks of AI solutions for content management.
• Learning from the past with "smart" tagging.
• The very real challenges with upcoming auto-tagging functionality.

The session will examine lessons learned and iterating from a place of learning – not hype

Elizabeth Fletcher, Digital Asset Management Librarian, Dell

DAM in the Age of Unreliable Narrators

Ten years ago, the Harvard Art Museums, a teaching and research museum on the campus of Harvard University, started using multiple computer vision (CV) services to tag and describe its collections.

The initial goal was to improve search and discovery of the collections in both internal and external systems by augmenting the curatorial written descriptions with machine generated metadata.

During early tests it was apparent that CV showed a lot of promise for describing representational art in ways our catalogers didn’t have time to do, but quickly stumbled when presented with more abstract imagery. While assessing the stumbles we started asking a lot of questions. Including:

• What transpires when humans and machines look at art?
• How much does accuracy matter when describing material that is evaluated subjectively?
• How can we use the inconsistencies of AI to serve our university and public audiences in new ways?

Ten years later, we’ve fully embraced the inconsistency of CV, and now modern large-language models (LLMs).

Jeff Steward will cover:

• The museum’s image and data pipeline.
• Seven CV and AI services used to describe images of art.
• Several ongoing R&D projects exploring new modes of storytelling and engagement for university and public audiences.

Jeff Steward, Director of Digital Infrastructure and Emerging Technology, Harvard Art Museums

Ensuring Your DAM Evolves to Match Your Changing Business Needs

Reality one: Businesses must constantly evolve to stay relevant for customers, to take advantage of technical advances and to ‘stay ahead’ of competitors.
 
Reality two: The way content is consumed, produced, and distributed has changed and continues to change – at an ever-faster pace. 
 
Reality three: A DAM system that was originally built to align with past workflows may lack the agility to pivot quickly to many of the new business requirements (or may require investment to be ready for them).
 
Reality four: The traditional scope of DAM – to maintain control of and to access digital assets – is being challenged by an ever-changing content supply chain.
 
No wonder many DAM systems, processes and ways of working must exert themselves to keep up.
 
A panel of digital leaders (all at the forefront of digital transformation) examines the implications of endeavoring to ensure that the content supply chain meets the needs of consumers – consumers who expect to be served content on-demand and personalized to them, delivered across multiple devices, and with payments using an ultrawide range of models.
 
Covering:

• How systems should be used to manage digital assets – the need to support enhanced agility.
• The importance of fast-turnaround content production relying on global collaboration whilst localizing, personalizing and repurposing digital assets for multiple markets.
• Why content owners need nimble systems, agile processes and specialized skillsets that match their changing workflows and “this month’s” business needs.
• Managing legacy systems whilst meeting new digital asset needs.
• The evolving role of metadata, especially AI-generated content to enrich, repurpose and target content.
• How global and remote DAM workflows are changing.
• Alternative approaches to managing production and work-in-progress digital assets vs archives.

Moderator: Graham Allan, Managing Director, Deloitte Consulting