How to organize digital archives

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Jan, 1999 by Lafe Low

Lafe Low is executive director of the Adventure Club of North America and editor of ACONA Outdoor Adventure.

A media management system lets you turn digital data into digital assets.

Do the math. On average, a monthly, four-color magazine uses anywhere from 75 to 100 scans per issue. Over the course of an entire year, that adds up to more than 1,000 digital images, plus the final page-layout files. It you're a multi-title publisher, you'll be swimming in digital media by the end of your annual production cycle.

"Companies have so much digital content that they can't keep track of it, find it or use it," says Frank Leibly, director of Banta Corporation's Digital Content Management Solutions Center, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Banta's current client list includes catalogers, direct marketers and book publishers. Magazine clients, say company representatives, will follow shortly.) "I think we all assumed computers would make it simple to locate what we need, but that hasn't proven to be true. In some ways we're worse off than when we had piles of art boards. At least we knew where they were."

These image and text files can do a lot more than cause organizational headaches for production directors. With a media management system that catalogs and archives photos, illustrations and composed pages and lets users search and retrieve at will, you can turn digital data into digital assets. Asset management systems help increase workflow efficiencies between titles and mine new revenue streams from reprints and Web publishing.

Magazine publishing companies of all sizes are catching on to the concept of digital-asset management, hut as is often the case with the implementation of a new technology or workflow system, they are easing into the process gently. "We're going to approach this methodically' says Richard French, vice president of technology for the trade magazine division of NewYork City-based McGraw-Hill. Companies, which publishes 19 magazines and 31 newsletters. "We're making the transition from the Jaz Drive approach to Cascade's MediaSphere," he says. (MediaSphere can cost anywhere from $2,000 to $3,000 per seat.)

It's more than a database

After conducting pilot projects--archiving the digital assets of Chemical Engineering (a monthly title) and Business Week--McGraw-Hill is ready to expand the use of its digital archives to some of its other publications. "We were reasonably happy with the results,' French reports "Now we re going to roll it out in a production sense. The next victim will probably be Aviation Week". According to French, Aviation Week is next on the block because as a weekly, it generates a significant amount of material that warrants being archived.

Digital-asset management systems, such as Cumulus from San Francisco-based Canto Software, MediaSphere from Andover, Massachusetts-based Cascade Systems, and MediaBank from Burlington, Massachusetts-based Archetype, Inc., function as elaborate image and graphic databases, each with a variety of special features and capabilities. Most products can archive and catalog virtually any format of graphics files, complete QuarkXFress page-layout files, text files or any other digital element that goes onto a magazine page, as well as audio and video files. Production users can search for archived images or page files using keyword or natural language database queries, so archive searches can be as broad or specific as needed. Digital-asset management systems also provide thumbnail views of images along with corresponding search data, as well as full-page views so queries can include not only the images on a page, but the content, too.

Frank Moldstad, editor of PG Graphics and Video in Santa Ana, California, calls tapping into the monthly's digital archive for Web-site content, "repurposing at its finest." Many of these products now include features specifically for Web publishing. Cascade provides an extension to MediaSphere called MediaSphere/W3 that functions as a content manager to facilitate repurposing archival material directly to a Web page, Canto's Cumulus Internet Image Server is its solution for Web-site publishing, and Archetype offers the MediaBank Web Interface for direct Web publishing.

What to look for

The ability to retrieve archived elements quickly and efficiently is an important consideration when evaluating a digital-asset management system. "If you don't know where things are, you might as well not keep them. You have to have them in an order you understand," says Moldstad.

Tom Reale, production systems analyst for Miller Freeman, based in San Francisco, organizes his digital archives by many criteria. His department handles the digital archiving for 65 percent of Miller Freeman s approximately 80 titles. "We can customize [the image catalogs],' he says, "and we can group like objects together for the high-tech titles, the healthcare publications, or the publications for the textile industry."

Miller Freeman's archives are also categorized by copyright status Reale anticipates that the company's digital archive will eliminate certain time-consuming processes required to verify copyright. "We have them stored by articles we own and articles for which copyright needs to be confirmed. That will eliminate what is now a manual process" he says.