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.

Sadly, I currently don’t have much time to read about DAM. If you do, here’s lots of links from October:

Industry and product news: Ralph Windsor reviews the Elvis-based Swivle “DAM Lite” system. Acquia creates its own DAM system for Drupal. Northplains licenses CHALEX SmartFlo. Razuna 2.0 is delayed. Extensis Portfolio is named “Leader” and “Trend Setter” by G2 Crowd and KMWorld. Bynder is working on GDPR compliance. Webdam has a new Salesforce connector. Active Logistics partners with Picturepark.

The IPTC updates the RightsML standard and searches for a new managing director.

On DAM News, Ralph Windsor requests article submissions for a “Digital Asset Supply Chain And Creative Operations Management” series. The DAM Vendors Directory Premium Accounts are now free of charge.

Conference reporting: From recent conferences, watch the recorded presentations of Theresa Regli, Engines of Empathy, and Jason Gould, Developing a Technical Roadmap for Creative Operations. Elise Hollinger can’t wait to be back at Henry Stewart DAM Chicago. Vendors reflect on their customer events, namely censhare ecosphere days, Canto DAM Summit Europe (plus a German summary), and the Widen Summit.

Metadata: Kristin Twiford explains the basics in How to make your media library searchable with metadata, while Melody K. Smith’s Meta What? starts with HTML “meta tags”. David Diamond warns about slippery synonyms. Dan Hudson recommends using XMP to bring metadata, data and Big Data together. Carey MacDonald has tips on how to encode metadata using file-naming conventions.

Taxonomies seem to be a hot topic – Melody K. Smith explains what taxonomies are good for, Carey MacDonald has the librarian’s guide to building a taxonomy, and Heather Hedden writes about taxonomies for specific business needs. If you have an hour to spare, you might want to watch Andreas Blumauer’s webinar recording Taxonomies as the Corner Stone for Semantic Information Management…

AI: Even if “Artificial Intelligence” is not your pet topic, I recommend reading Ralph Windsor’s in-depth article Combining AI With Digital Asset Supply Chain Management Techniques. Jake Athey thinks AI is the Fourth Era of DAM, and presents survey results on whether DAM professionals think image recognition is finally ready, while Peter Krogh suggests using the term Computational tagging. In product news, Aprimo (formerly ADAM) adds automated tagging, and Box introduces the “Box Skills” framework for “smarter content”.

Other: Jarrod Gingras publishes a recording of his webinar The Right Way to Select DAM Technology. Uri Kogan also does a webinar on Challenging the Rules of DAM: 7 Game Changers for 2018, and kicks off a related series of blog posts called 7 Common Beliefs in the DAM Market… That Just Ain’t So: Predictions for 2018 (part 2).

Emily Kolvitz tells us how to use a DAM to optimize digital files for SEO, and Radmila Milenkovich says that your AdWords are your DAM problem.

Carl Petruson shares his thoughts on blockchain in the DAM community. Erika Morphy is sure that blockchain slowly moves into the marketing industry. Once more, the “deep dive” comes from Ralph Windsor: Linked Blockchain Data: Semantic Web Powered Digital Asset Supply Chains.

Nate Holmes knows where to start with DAM integrations to connect teams. Courtney Roe has four stops you need to make when plotting your DAM site audit roadmap, Beth Straeten four steps for easy implementation of a DAM system. Taylor Fleischner applies archival wisdom to DAM, explaining asset lifecycle and asset preservation.

Deanna Ballew shows how DAM systems are built in How we make software at Widen. On the Adobe blog, there’s a post about healthcare and DAM. Miles Kehoe asks whether your business needs a Search Center of Excellence.

DAM experts: There’s a lot of interviews with DAM “gurus” or “champs” this month – check out Mark Davey (consultant), Kevin Gepford (AT&T), Steve Bevilacqua (consultant), Uri Kogan (Nuxeo), Ben Baker (Vice Media), Jan Sykes (consultant), Gabe Ables (consultant), Mark Leslie (adidas).

Screencasts and screenshots: Daminion 5.5, Nextware Active Directory user management for Canto Cumulus, and Brand Management with Canto Flight.

Case studies: Niagara Falls USA, University of San Francisco, Argos, plus several ones from Brandworkz and Widen.

See you next month!