When I first asked for input on this subject, it became obvious that most people were answering a question about WHERE they stored their digital assets and institutional memories. In answer to the WHERE question, then number one response by far was “in the cloud”, followed by a shared drive like Dropbox or Google. Not surprising, and very sensible so that access is available to a variety of team members wherever they are working. The days of being vulnerable to data loss due to a crashed computer seem to be behind us.
It is a little less clear, however, whether or not older material that perhaps never even existed on-line is being digitized for posterity. If it is anything like most family photo collections, my guess is that intentions are running far ahead of execution, but that’s something to explore in more detail later.
It’s also not clear that everyone has a system for managing versions of material. You know how you create a great slide or graphic, and then you change your color scheme, so you edit it, but that von never makes it back to your master file? Or how you might have a photo that you’ve edited for different platforms like LinkedIn or Facebook, and then when you go looking for it, you never quite have the right size?
Here’s another wrinkle, and it seems to impact both small and large organizations, though in slightly different ways.
Some organizations indicate that they use different “where” solutions depending on the type of media or asset. So, for example, videos might be stored on Vimeo or You Tube, presentations on the Apple Cloud or Microsoft Cloud, and other digital assets in Adobe Cloud – see what I mean? And in larger organizations, the marketing/communications team might have one way of doing things and he business development team might have a different protocol altogether.
Those are the kind of headaches that demonstrate that an answer to the WHERE question might not be the end of the story.
It’s also why the next chapter in this story is going to talk about FILE STRUCTURE. Stay tuned!