Why digital preservation is so critical.

Rob Hummel currently serves as the Chair of the Public Programs Committee of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences’ Science and Technology Council and sits on the Scientific and Technical Awards Committee. Rob has hosted several programs at the Academy on film formats, film technology, and 3D stereoscopic imaging. He is also an associate member of the American Society of Cinematographers and was the editor of the 8th edition of the American Cinematographer Manual. Hummel moderated the keynote panel “Mission Critical” at Createasphere's Digital Asset Management Conference in March 2011.

How did you get into Digital Asset Management?
My career has always been closely tied to the preservation of Motion Pictures. I realized early on the value of archiving color negatives to B&W 35mm Separation masters. Color negatives could fade, while B&W never faded, and were especially stable archivally when combined with polyester based film (what Eastman Kodak calls Estar™).

Also, the restorations of "Wizard of Oz" and "Gone With the Wind" that I was involved with further helped me appreciate the value of long term storage of valuable assets.

My sole purpose of my current company, Group 47, LLC is to take advantage of some incredible technology for storing digital information that would be stable for no less than 100 years. With recommended storage temperature range of 10º to 40º C, it's an amazingly green technology as well. So, I'm excited how everyone will benefit from it.

Why are Digital Asset Management and Digital Preservation so critical?
Everything we create now is either originated digitally, or very quickly transformed into a digital format. Finding those assets so we can make use of them is no small task, since the quantities of information we're talking about needing to keep track of far outstrip anything the Dewey Decimal System was meant to track!

Digital Preservation is critical because at this time, there is no digital format that could be remotely considered archival in the constraints of how any archivist would define archival; that is something that will last a century. Most magnetic media requires migration within five years to prevent loss of data. Spinning disks consume massive amounts of power for air conditioning, and are vulnerable to magnetic damage from EMP (both intentional and accidental) or even solar flares.

We need to ensure that the massive amounts of digital information our society is now generating is safe and secure so that future generations will be able to access it. If we don't ensure that data is able to be secured without the need for electrical power, we run the very real risk of losing critical historical, artistic, and cultural information.

What do see as the biggest challenge(s) in digital asset management?
Standardization. SO many people are implementing their own approaches to DAM, we run the risk of none of them becoming established. One thing is clear: DAM must be designed and implemented by the users of DAM, not the manufacturers. So that's the challenge, to make sure that the users get what they want, and don't have some half-baked proprietary solution foisted on them.

How do you use DAM in your personal life?
I suppose you could say that all I do in my personal life is use iPhoto to catalog and organize my family's photographs. Other than using Apple's spotlight search engine to find things on my many hard drives, I confess, I don't have a DAM solution implemented in my personal life!

How do you see DAM looking 10 years from now?
Well, 10 years ago, only the most enlightened were talking about DAM, and now everyone is. I would hope in another 10 years, we'll see an implementation that meets the needs of archivists and is easy enough for anyone to archive, access, protect, and find any information.

Why is it important for people to attend Createasphere’s DAM conference?
I think it's a great opportunity to hear what approaches in DAM are being implemented now, and in turn gives those attending a chance to question, challenge, and embrace the ideas they hear.

Hopefully, at the end of it all, we'll have learned more and gotten new inspiration on how to make DAM achieve a design that is almost as ubiquitous as the Dewey Decimal became.

Createasphere's Digital Asset Management Conference travels next to The Hague, Netherlands on November 8-9, 2011.  Learn more about sponsoring this dynamic Conference.