TAME YOUR ASSETS

According to Netflix, its online video series “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo” will help homeowners declutter their mess and “choose” joy. Despite its dubious promise and the ire some librarians have shown towards some of its methods, I like Kondo’s approach: it can be adapted and used as a sort of DAM philosophy. I’ve reworked some of the steps below, taken from both the show and Kondo’s book “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing”. I hope some of them will spark the “joy” of digital asset management in you.

• Envision the future ideal state
  • keep it simple
  • simplify it
  • simplify it some more
  • consider
    • you are managing a company/institution’s valuable intellectual property
    • the work you are doing today will benefit the company/institution in the future
  • form selection criteria: base it on what the company is now and wants to be in the future
• Select first, sort and store later
• Develop categories for your assets
  • Choose persistent descriptors (those terms that will always stay true… such as color, subject, creator.
  • Avoid the void: base them on your curated assets to ensure there are no unused categories
  • Base them on subjects to support findability
  • Keep accessibility and audience in mind: beware of overthinking your categories. Deep nested branches or overly narrow terms may seem like a good idea at first but could frustrate your users.
  • Avoid mutable concepts (if you can): though good for searching now, they may limit the ability to remix/reuse them in the future
  • Show others the product of your work; avoid letting them see you work… they’re paying you for your expertise not tickets to the DAM show.
  • Work with each concept at a time
• Maintain
  • Be flexible: regularly update the categories
  • review search logs for new categories (preferred, narrow, used for terms)
  • stay in touch with users
• Review
  • After it’s been around for a while, it is good to ask yourself about a digital asset:
    • is it useful?
    • is it valuable?
    • is it relevant?
    • is it unique?
    • is it accurate?
    • keep, move, dispose… or archive?
  • Remember: “A library is a growing organism” – (Ranganathan, 1931)
    • revisit: what the company is now and what it wants to be in the future
    • reorganize as needed

What is your DAM philosophy?

Ranganathan, S. R. (1931). The five laws of library science. Madras Library Association (Madras, India) and Edward Goldston (London, UK). Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10150/105454