Maximizing Digital Asset Reuse
Many applications that enable users to create their own content from word processing to graphics/image creation have typically relied upon 3rd party Content Management Solutions (CMS) / Digital Asset Management (DAM) platforms to collect metadata describing the assets upon ingestion into their platforms. Many of these platforms have been “stood up” to support projects/teams either for collaboration on an existing project, or reuse of assets for “other” projects. As a person constantly creating content, where do you “park” your digital resources for archiving and reuse? Your local drive, cloud storage, or not archived?
Average “Jane” / “Joe” Digital Authors
If I were asked for all the content I’ve created around a particular topic or group of topics from all my collected/ingested digital assets, it may be a herculean search effort spanning multiple platforms. As an independent creator of content, I may have digital assets ranging from Microsoft Word documents, Google Sheets spreadsheets, Twitter tweets, Paint.Net (.pdn) Graphics, Blog Posts, etc.
Capturing Content from Microsoft Office Suite Products
Many of the MS Office content creation products such as Microsoft Word have minimal capacity to capture metadata, and if the ability exists, it’s subdued in the application. MS Word, for example, if a user selects “Save As”, they will be able to add/insert “Authors”, and Tags. In Microsoft Excel, latest version, the author of the Workbook has the ability to add Properties, such as Tags, and Categories. It’s not clear how this data is utilized outside the application, such as the tag data being searchable after uploaded/ingested by OneDrive?
Blog Posts: High Visibility into Categorization and Tagging
A “blogging platform”, such as WordPress, places the Category and Tagging selection fields right justified to the content being posted. In this UI/UX, it forces a specific mentality to the creation, categorization, and tagging of content. This blogging structure constantly reminds the author to identify the content so others may identify and consume the content. Blog post content is created to be consumed by a wide audience of interested viewers based on those tags and categories selected.
Proactive Categorization and Tagging
Perpetuate content classification through drill-down navigation of a derived Information Architecture Taxonomy. As a “light weight” example, in WordPress, the Tags field when editing a Post, a user starts typing in a few characters, an auto-complete dropdown list appears to the user to select one or more of these previously used tags. Excellent starting point for other Content Creation Apps.
Users creating Blog Posts can define a Parent/Child hierarchy of categories, and the author may select one or more of relevant categories to be associated with the Post.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Derived Tags
It wouldn’t be a post without mentioning AI. Integrated into applications that enable user content creation could be a tool, at a minimum, automatically derives an “Index” of words, or tags. The way in which this “intelligent index” is derived may be based upon:
- # of times word occurrence
- mention of words in a particular context
- reference of the same word(s) or phrases in other content
- defined by the same author, and/or across the platform.
This intelligently derived index of data should be made available to any platforms that ingest content from OneDrive, SharePoint, Google Docs, etc. These DAMs ( or Intelligent Cloud Storage) can leverage this information for any searches across the platforms.
Easy to Retrieve the Desired Content, and Repurpose It
Many Content Creation applications heavily rely on “Recent Accessed Files” within the app. If the Information Architecture/Taxonomy hierarchy were presented in the “File Open” section, and a user can drill down on select Categories/Subcategories (and/or tags), it might be easier to find the most desired content.
All Eyes on Content Curation: Creation to Archive
- Content creation products should all focus on the collection of metadata at the time of their creation.
- Using the Blog Posting methodology, the creation of content should be alongside the metadata tagging
- Taxonomy (categories, and tags with hierarchy) searches from within the Content Creation applications, and from the Operating System level, the “Original” Digital Asset Management solution (DAM), e.g. MS Windows, Mac
