Office of Marketing and Communications

DAM Contributors

The Ohio State DAM features several user roles. A contributor to the DAM will upload, tag and manage digital assets.

  • Contributors may be photographers, videographers, or design specialists.
  • Contributors may be assigned to their unit's walled garden or may be general contributors to Ohio State Shared Assets.
  • Contributors will be trained to use Ohio State keywords and captions.

Training for Ohio State DAM Contributors

Keywords

  • Ohio State keywords are defined in the DAM for consistency in our approach to labels, captions, and tags.
  • Reference the Keywords Guide PDF
  • The language at Ohio State changes over time and so do our keywords. Contact the DAM administrator to suggest a change or ask about keywords.

Photo Curation

  • Contributors may be adding digital assets to the DAM for different purposes. For Shared Assets or Walled gardens, a level of curation may happen before assets are loaded into the DAM. We recommend a few different solutions for photo management and curation.
  • Lightroom does this and gives what benefits.
  • Photo Mechanic, by Camera Bits. This software is helpful to catalog photos as you are in the process of capturing them. The tagging features are helpful if you find yourself organizing lots of images. Not only does it help you organize your photos, but the tags transition smoothly to the DAM in digital tags. 

    We recommend photographers in the university, or anyone who tracks assets destined for the DAM, sample and invest in this time-saving software. 

    Quick start guide to using Photo Mechanic [link]

Asset captions

  • Searching the DAM is easy when contributors add tags with metadata and captions. 
  • Reference the Ohio State DAM captions guide to understand how to caption assets.

Asset metadata

  • Metadata is a number of specific fields applied to digital assets. These include photographer name, photo capture date, asset file type, copyright clauses, and many other points of data.
  • Some metadata travels with the file on upload or download.
  • Contributors will help keep metadata relevant.