Hiring/Contracting Options for Digital Asset Management (Part 2 of 4)

Although a Digital Asset Manager is a relatively new position, it has quickly become a necessity in almost every industry. With over 20,000 asset managers working throughout the world (in almost every industry) today, and those numbers projected to triple within the next decade, the good news for executives and IT professionals is that you now have many more options available to you, than you did even five years ago. Whether you work in corporate America, the private business sector, government, law, or bio/pharma, a good portion of your business is now conducted in the virtual marketplace, and that volume is only expected to increase as time passes. Therefore, adding the right Digital Asset Manager to your organization is critical to your future success. In many cases using an outside firm to manage your digital assets can result in not only savings but productivity gains.  Hiring and contracting options for the digitization and management of your assets includes:

1. Outsourcing the recovery of archives, assets lost in a crisis, including storage repository recovery and expansion.
2. Outsourcing the digitization and organization of specific assets for a specific project.
3. Outsourcing the cataloging, meta-tagging, and organization of your digital and physical assets, followed by training of your internal information management staff for the ongoing administration of your library from in-house.
4. Outsourcing the digitization of your assets, and retaining a contracted digital asset managers as part of your IT team for the on-going administration of your asset library.
5. Adding an experienced digital asset manager to compliment your in-house employees for the digitization and/or permanent administration of your library.

In Part-3 of this series, I will cover the specific skill sets for librarians in the Digital Age.

“Libraries are not made; they grow.” - Augustine Birrell