The user end: A guest visitor to MediaBank from Inso Corp. can access images and text in a toolbar-driven interface in what is one version of a digital asset management product.

DAM: Widely used term lacks definition but gains a following

Researchers say that adolescents are the main inventors of language. Their catchy slang -- code words that keep peers in and adults out -- quickly infects the surrounding culture and repopulates the dictionary.

So too with technology idioms. Phrases spun from programmer haunts, academic labs and web chat rooms smarten tech talk, fuzz up marketingspeak and finally slide from our ears to our mouths.

Who hasn't said "wired" or "vaporware?"

Now get ready for "digital assets management," an emergent term so enticing, yet so inclusive, that it confounds even systems marketers. If you think your newspaper needs an archive system, page-element tracking system, interactive central database or open pre-press system, you might find your old-buddy brands hanging with the new media sprouts under the DAM neon.

Is this a genuine technology advancement or a patter-freshener? It depends on where you stand in the product generation cycle. People on the leading edge, such as the engineers who tinker new technology into products, say the term heralds more intelligence -- and flexibility -- for storage systems.

You want text, photos, graphics, video, audio, ad jackets, spreadsheets, any kind of format in one massive data vat, with ladles for dishing out any presentation imaginable? "Can do!" they cry, thanks to Standard Query Language, eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and servers that are Open Database Connectivity (Odbc)-compliant.

People trailing the product cycle, including recently upgraded newsrooms, don't see that broad reach as a real press-stopper. For reasons practical as well as historical, newspaper tech managers still talk about job-segregated systems. They're not eager for unified production storage, shared by advertising, editorial, new media and marketing.

Instead, the zeal for all-in-one servers comes from businesses just tooling up, such as web commerce and corporate marketing. Unfettered by old processes, and too small for system specialization, the juvenile industries are bragging about cool new toys that do "point-to-point" on-line display and customized printing.

What does "DAM" mean at newspapers?

"I know it means tracking and accounting for the bits and bytes in our workflow from story, image and page creation until the trucks leave the dock or the web page is revised," said John VanBeekum, newsroom systems editor for graphics at the 331,000-circulation Miami Herald.

"It's called marketing -- a way to wrap a hip name around something that the vendors know we want, even if neither of us can figure out exactly what that is or how to make it work."

Even suppliers who use the DAM label, or equivalents such as media assets management or content management, agree that confusion exists.

"My interpretation of digital assets management is a system that not only provides the archiving of all the elements, long-term and short-term archiving, but also provides you the workflow management -- statuses, audit trails, versions -- of all the jobs and elements that are in there," said Francesco Rietti, marketing manager for publishing at Cascade Systems Inc. in Acton, Mass.

Does his marketing pitch use the label?

"Yes, we do, but it's very confusing, because everyone has started using that for all kinds of purposes, all kinds of interpretations," Rietti said. To underscore his distinction between DAM systems and electronic archives, he described two Cascade products, one aimed at advertising, the other at editorial.

He labeled Cascade's DataFlow as "digital assets management for ad production," which stores, archives, maintains and manages any elements for ad production, including full pages. However, he called the newsroom's MediaSphere a digital library or archive system, because it lacks workflow capabilities.

In the wider market, "it depends on who you're talking to and what their interpretation of DAM is," he said. He bristles at products that assume the title just because they can show a grid of photo thumbnails.

"It's crazy," Rietti said. "Here's a little Macintosh application that does that. Does that mean Sherlock is a digital asset management system, or is it an OS?

"I like to think that DAM is a higher level, or the more intelligent side of the spectrum," he said, one that provides workflow, statuses, automatic triggers based on file changes and so forth.

An engineer at a neighboring company in Acton, FutureTense Inc., agrees with Rietti's distinction.

Preferring the moniker "content management," FutureTense layers content-extracting and on-the-fly display tools on a Netscape server to more intelligently use data for web site building, said Maria Loughlin, principal software engineer.

"The traditional assets first pop into mind -- images, articles, web pages and related links when it comes to web pages," she said. Next, "FutureTense looks at other things -- the templates, the logic of what people look for, how to manage queries. ... Some information (worth managing) is what people do with these systems."

The brightest layers keep a tally of what visitors do at a web site and adjust the content of pages to their actions.

So what's the technology leap?
Such smarty-pants software is possible because cranky old issues like data transfer blockages and data format indigestion are dead to these youngbloods.

"In a way it is a change of technology," Cascade's Rietti said "Whether it's because of the Internet or new systems with Odbc-compliant databases and what-not, a lot of systems can share information quite easily."

There's something else: "I think you are also dealing with more standard digital formats today than you were five years ago," and DAM suppliers pledge to swallow all of them. So aside from marketing flair, the new label helps bypass assumptions about what a storage box can and can't do. (A "photo archive" isn't expected to store PDFs, text or XML files, is it?)

And what comes to mind at the mention of an "open pre-press interface system?" Just imagesetting operations, like swapping high-resolution images for low-res? Managing RIPs and job queues?

Such a narrow job for such a promising title.

Take "open, interactive database" systems; "there's the traditional sense that's an asset management system," said Loughlin. However, "I think what people want to do with their assets has changed enormously," and new systems have functions built around operations that didn't happen three to five years ago.

"Think about personalization," she said. Now, by managing content pieces, you can "deliver to people the type of content they are most interested in."

You can either ask them through voluntary profiles or figure it out based on their clicking habits.

"This whole concept of personalization wasn't around until recently. An enormous opportunity exists in that we can customize what people see," Loughlin said. "The power of your assets is multiplied. You get the right assets to the right people."

Before you can do that, you need a layer of applications she calls "knowledge management" which take a piece of content, parse it, try to understand its characteristics and cluster items that are related to each other. It's the same job that editors do while packaging news, only there aren't enough editors to keep up with the Internet's data deluge.

"What makes that junk worthwhile is that someone put the effort into organizing it and making it worthwhile," summarized Jack Tam, development manager for applications for Thomson Enterprise Asset Solutions (Teams) of Rockville, Md. That "someone" today may be smart software.

Other technical advantages built into these systems are scalability -- the ability to grow as volume requires -- and extensibility, or the ability to accept and use more kinds of material, he said. New format types will emerge, as he cited rapid developments in searching and comparing audio and video files.

Fortunately, this never-ending format nascence has inspired fresh respect for standardized headers.

"That's what makes (descriptive) information, often referred to as metadata, as important or more important than the digital data itself," Dan McDermott explained. McDermott is marketing manager for MediaBank, a DAM system sold by Inso Corp. of Boston that is aimed at commercial printers, corporate marketers and advertising agencies (but you'll see the name floating into newspaper trade shows as well).

Metadata is a description of the data file's identity, its name, creator, last revision, subject and so forth, usually structured in fields, something akin to the Iptc photo headers.

For Inso, the more description the merrier, because of the potential to match customer preference profiles with marketing elements, whether displayed as one-to-one web pages or in "variable data printing" -- also known as one-off publishing.

And you thought zoning was a tough nut.

Where old realities meet new ideals
But these multimedia, ultra-customizing systems have a lot more appeal to teenaged new media businesses than to gray old newspapers. They cast a wider net than required by the page assembly line.

So what does DAM offer ink-stained fogeys? Two technology shoppers from the 475,000-circulation San Francisco Chronicle started their DAM quest last year.

It continues.

Director of Editorial Graphic Technology Gary Fong and Editorial Systems Director Mike Keiser are still looking. They want "one station, one place we can call up a story and see the associated photos and graphics all together," Fong said. They've seen a few systems that are close to having all the right functions, and specialized storage systems that do just one element category very well.

The two want to store more than the newspaper's components -- text, photos and graphics -- so they can feed on-line sibling The Gate and possibly engage in cooperative projects with the company's NBC affiliate, Kron-TV.

They want one system to manage files from film and digital photography, news wires, satellite feeds, the Internet, e-mail and occasionally television. However, multi-format storage isn't enough -- there must be workflow tools, delivering intelligent information about how the pieces are being used. Editing histories, previous versions and tracking tools matter, as do automated links between final page images and their text and image components.

Sounds like the regular DAM shopping list, true? Then comes the whammy: It's gotta work with the old system. The Chronicle is standing by its considerable investment, both financial ($4 million in recent upgrades) and intellectual (lots of trained users and support staff), in an editing system from Sacramento-based System Integrators Inc., and proprietary text archives dating to 1985.

When suppliers say they can do it all, Fong said, "it depends on whose definition of 'all.'"

My data, your data
Although their strictly editorial search is shaped by the Chronicle's status as part of a joint operating agreement with the 113,000-circulation evening San Francisco Examiner, their single-mindedness is common among larger newspapers.

There is little of the "all-in-one" chatter you find among web developers. Even papers which recently replaced proprietary legacy systems with standard-platform, open-interface models kept their separation of church and state.

In the last year, the 243,000-circulation Pittsburgh Post-Gazette retrofitted its editorial operation onto a standards-based system from CText Inc. of Ann Arbor, Mich. At last there's a PC on every newsroom desk.

Yet for archiving, the newsroom stayed with the Post's long-time provider, MediaStream Inc. of Philadelphia. With text stockpiled since 1990, remarketer pipelines in place and the Year 2000 deadline near, upgrading "was the path of least resistance," said Tim Dunham, the paper's technology systems editor.

That said, they would like more features than MediaStream offers. When looking 18 months ago for a system, "the idea of what's now being called digital assets management, everybody was headed that way, but nobody had their finger on it," Dunham said. "We wanted something that would thread a lot of needles for us," like retrieve a story with links to its related photos and graphics.

The perfect system wasn't working then; at least now the paper is better positioned to adapt as improvements come along.

"If you have standard equipment that you can manipulate with standard software, you can take advantage of price-perform improvements that everyone else is taking advantage of," he said. "We can move forward in time without throwing away all the pieces and having to move" in one leap.

As FutureTense's Loughlin observed, "The reality is that newspaper print systems are very well established and are not likely to be thrown out very soon."

With dedication to legacy systems and non-standard databases, it's unlikely that centralized data vats are practical in newspapers.

"It's difficult for us to talk to those databases," she said. "I believe it's due to technology and also the enormous infrastructure in organizations. That isn't going to change just because something new has come along."

So the young pup media will get the freshest solutions, and possibly catch the new business rabbits. Or perhaps old dogs do catch on.

"I think the Web has almost helped the newspapers and other publications realize that the information they have is extremely valuable," said Mary Ann Skinner, director of editorial technology and information services at Newsday, the 572,000-circulation daily serving Long Island from Melville, N.Y.

Newspaper content can be repackaged in many ways, from CDs and books to web sites, she said, and the fact that it's in digital formats makes repurposing a lot easier to accomplish. After Newsday ran a 10-month series on Long Island's history, from glaciers to the space age, the pages -- stored as files in Portable Document Format (PDF) files stored on a Cascade MediaSphere system -- were repackaged as a hardcover coffee-table book.

It sold more than 20,000 copies.

The project demonstrated how a central digital repository permits quick turnaround for repackaging. "The nice thing about it was, even if we had to replace a low-res photo, we had the photo, too," Skinner said.

That appreciation for one repository hasn't led to merging editorial and advertising data. Although it too recently migrated to a standards-based editorial system, this one from Blue Bell, Pa.-based Unisys Corp., Newsday planners stuck with ad and news segregation, despite the Unisys DocCenter archive's wide format portfolio.

It's a practical matter.

"We have real concerns that advertising people can only use things appropriately," Skinner said. "If you give everyone access to everything, without knowing what they're going to do with it, you run the risk of being sued for it."

Her case in point was Walt Disney Co.'s chiding letter after advertising staff ran a headshot of Martha Stewart, clipped from an old still from the Ellen television show (owned and broadcast by Disney subsidiary ABC-TV).

Not a licensed use, warned Disney's copyright sleuths.

So, will newspapers be like the steel industry, stuck with old factories and forges while competitors retool and prosper? "I think the biggest problem for DAM is defining itself," said McDermott. "I think the companies will pick niches to survive. Some will choose very narrow niches, some target very broad niches."

Which may well suit newspaperdom's affinity for job-specific solutions. Just bear that in mind when you see the DAM banner.

As McDermott said, "Canto Cumulus is a very good product. MediaBank is a very good product. Do they do the same thing? No. Are they classified in the same industry? Yes.

"And that's the problem."

-- Marion J. Love

Atex Media Solutions Inc., (781) 275-2323, e-mail: info@atex.com;
Cascade Systems Inc., (978) 795-7000, e-mail: info@cascadenet.com;
Canto Software, Inc., (415) 703-9800, e-mail: info@canto.com;
CText Inc., (734) 677-4700, e-mail: sales@ctext.com
FutureTense Inc., (978) 635-3600; e-mail: info@futuretense.com;
Inso Corp., (617) 753-6500, e-mail: info@inso.com;
MediaStream Inc., (215) 239-4100, e-mail: jdimarino@krmediastream.com;
Thomson Enterprise Asset Solutions, (301) 548-4160, e-mail: vanessa.durst@Teams-Thomson.com
Unisys Corp., (215) 986-4080, e-mail: william.stroud@unisys.com.

From THE COLE PAPERS, May 1999, Copyright © 1999, All Rights Reserved.