Here’s the last month’s Digital Asset Management articles which had a lasting impression on me – picked from the constant stream of blog posts you can see float by on Planet DAM. For more curated DAM links, see the weekly Digital Asset Management.com Links and Tracy Wolfe’s 10 things on the 10th.

Theresa Regli states that ECM is the new black, and DAM is but one part of the fabric – an interesting observation given the current trend to rebrand DAM as a “content platform” (see the May 2017 reading list and Ralph Windsor’s article from July 11).

I love Nora Gehin’s 10 librarian principles to embrace to help manage your content – it seems my LIS education from two decades ago is still relevant! Emily Kolvitz has a nice, consise list of 10 reasons why digital assets rule the world.

In metadata and taxonomy, Annella Mendoza writes a great article about metadata and the findability of assets for DAM News (see also Ralph Windsor’s introduction). Bad metadata is also one of the reasons why enterprise search is so hard (Miles Kehoe) – improving metadata helped Kerry boost users by 270%. Heather Hedden does an excellent job of classifying standards for taxonomies. David Diamond introduces faceted taxonomies, while Rebecca Wyatt explains terms like folksonomy, thesaurus and ontology. Henrik Lambert writes about mapping file and folder naming conventions to DAM metadata, harnessing your legacy archive.

Conference reporting: Kudos to the IPTC Photo Metadata Conference 2017 for publishing slides and videos of most sessions! Alexander Lee summarizes the Henry Stewart DAM Europe 2017 conference, as does Frédéric Sanuy. Courtney Roe and Kevin Goeminne both look back at the DAM New York conference.

About to buy a DAM system? Nora Gehin writes in depth about the perfect path to a DAM solution that suits your needs, and there’s good advice by both Jarrod Gingras on the right way to select DAM/MAM technology and by a MediaValet-hosted panel of DAM experts on the journey towards a winning DAM strategy. Merlin thinks that speed is all that matters. Neil Monahan argues that flexibility is a must-have in your DAM platform, as does Uri Kogan who compares good DAM architecture to an Apple Watch and advises not to try consolidating content into a single repository. (See also Tony Byrne’s martech mall metaphor.)

Toby Martin lists the roadblocks on the path to DAM interoperability. Ralph Windsor’s new DAM Standards site for API documentation could help get some of them out of the way. Tom De Ridder gives a leading-edge, pretty technical talk on flexible enterprise cloud integration in the hypermedia world.

A DAM system can host more than marketing assets: The Photo Organizers recommend a DAM for business archives, Adobe lists use cases for manufacturers, Meg Prater suggests that copywriters share content calendars and text documents via the DAM, and Brian Kavanaugh mentions knowledge sharing in tech companies. A joint Henry Stewart and Dalim webinar deals with managing packaging artwork. Amy Chan writes about DAM usage at museums, heritage & cultural institutions.

Cory Schmidt gives a good introduction to SharePoint and DAM; more on that in the webinar recording of Steve Goodyear and Fraser Charles: Making the most of SharePoint and how a DAM can help.

Martin Cox and Thomas Kramer talk about DAM training.

Get to know DAM managers: In the DAM Guru Talks series, Kelly Pepper tells her story, including how she learned DAM on the job. Henry Stewart publishes short clips featuring Douglas Hegley (on DAM value in non-profits) and Jonathan Thurston (on accessibility metadata). People from DAM vendors: Bynder co-founders Chris Hall and Roland Keijzer talk about their company’s history, while Ian Truscott explores censhare’s early days in his video interviews with Dagmar Schneider and Walter Bauer. Andreas Gnutzmann reveals what inspires him as Fotoware product manager, and Meg Prater chats with new Brandfolder CEO Luke Beatty.

Industry news: The new NorthplainsNEXT product – the world’s first Content Lifecycle Management solution according to the vendor (really?) – is being introduced in a webinar recording. Jarrod Gingras lists pros and cons, while Ralph Windsor discusses whether this is a step forward or too little too late. In other news, Brandworkz integrates with Templafy, Bill Kasdorf becomes IPTC Public Relations Chair, and Stephan Wehselau gives some background on the recent DuMont investment in censhare.

Interesting case studies: CARE International, Pampered Chef, UCF Knights, JLL, Hannover Re (in German).

The latest screencasts and screenshots: The TACTIC Workflow Engine, Brandfolder for Slack, a Nuxeo demo, a Widen Media Collective demo, the IBM Watson Content Hub Palette, the Libris Adobe Creative Cloud Connector, Canto Flight BCN release notes.

Enjoy the summer, and see you next month!