A new role for librarians: digital asset librarian – “Last fall, I participated in a webinar to discuss the inner workings of 24-by-7 media archive management and digital research. The webinar, and the forum of which it was a part, examined the media and publishing landscape and digital news marketplace, and what that means for research libraries. My audience was librarians, and my message was that librarianship is more than a nice-to-have DAM [Data Asset Management] or media archive management (MAM) resource; it’s a must-have. Large media concerns have been grappling with new resources and capabilities they need to manage, store and preserve digital news. And as noted by Bernard Reilly, president of the Center for Research Libraries and the webinar moderator, digital news is being produced at a speed and scale exponentially greater than the analog world, introducing new concerns like the extent to which media organizations can maintain this content and manage rights and authorship.

Across industries, from media and manufacturing to oil exploration and law, businesses have requirements that librarians are best suited to meet. Organizations want employees, authorized third parties and clients to easily access corporate assets (e.g., media, documents, designs, graphics, etc.) through a DAM system. Making that happen requires knowing how to sort and classify content, create, manage and govern metadata and construct workflows. It also takes someone who can survey power users and understand the use cases and context for employees’ work and access preferences. Librarians have the skill to bring order and consistency to these systems so who better than an experienced librarian to configure a DAM?…”