IFRA

Answering for Tera Digital Publishing is John Juliano, Manager, Worldwide Marketing and Reseller Relations.

WAN-IFRA: Why is digital asset management important for news publishers?

John Juliano: News publishers today don't merely publish text and photographs, they produce content in all of the media forms that are available. That content is one of the organisation's most valuable assets, and a good digital asset management system allows those assets’ value to be maximised and protected.

The value of the assets comes in many ways, here are three: republishing the assets, using the assets for research and in developing new assets, and monetising those assets.

WAN-IFRA: What benefits do users get from DAM?

Juliano: A proper DAM provides numerous benefits for the user by organising, maintaining, and protecting the assets. By organising I mean associating metadata, allowing new metadata to be added, and by maintaining relationships between assets. Relationships between assets are such things as all of the assets that were published in a single news article, as an example. All the different places and asset has been used in all of the assets that were used in each instance of use.

A good digital asset management system will transform the asset automatically both upon ingestion andfor its next use. As an example of photograph might be converted from a TIF to a JPEG, or down-sampled and resized for use on a website.

Upon Ingestion, the DAM will validate normalise and transform the asset, including adding metadata.

A good digital asset management system provides proper search facilities that understand the content. Examples might be recognising person names or places or categories within the content to help the user find the most appropriate assets.

In today's world where storage media is for all intents and purposes free, there is an incentive to keep all digital assets online so that the proper management of those assets becomes all the more important.

WAN-IFRA: What are the strengths of Tark?

Juliano: Tark4 is the newest release of Tark and builds upon the many strengths of Tark3.

Tark is known for its exceptional speed, ease-of-use and ability to preserve the relationships between assets. Tark keeps track of assets and their use, so when an asset is used and then returned to the archive a new copy is not created, instead the asset is now "linked" to the other assets with which it was used.

With its exalead search engine, results of a search return additional information categorising the content.

WAN-IFRA: Once the contract has been signed, approximately how long does it take for a publishing client to begin working with Tark?

Juliano: Around 7/10 days if you don’t need to convert existing archives, if there are archived data then it depends on the existing data structure.

WAN-IFRA: How much training is required for a publication's staff to start using Tark?

Juliano: Usually two hours for the standard users, 8 hours for the librarians

WAN-IFRA: How many titles are using Tark globally? And besides the IHT and Vecernji list, what are a few of the other titles using Tark?

Juliano: Almost all our GN3 customer are using Tark. So many hundreds of titles.

NSTP in Malaysia, as well as Utusan. Many Trinity Regional titles including Liverpool. Titles throughout Italy. In South America, O Globo, El Universal in (I think) Mexico.

In the US the largest Spanish-language newspaper chain, Impremedia uses Tark, as does the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and Houston Community Newspapers for its tens of titles.

Another is the CN group, a small group of newspapers, in Carlisle, UK.

WAN-IFRA: What developments is Tera working on in this area now – any planned updates for Tark in the near future?

Juliano: The big news is Tark4, which is based on Tera’s CMSA Content Management Service Architecture. All of Tera's next-generation products are built on Tera’s CMSA, so Tark4 now shares the same content store as GN4, our next generation newspaper editorial content management system.

Tark4 includes all the content indigestion, content transformation and validation facilities that are found in GNPortal our content ingestion product.

The number of advantages actually take an entire brochure to list. But some of the highlights that people seem to think are the most interesting, are:

• cloud deployment
• customer definable object types
• customer definable user interface
• SOA architecture which facilitates mash ups, organisational wide access to the assets, monetization of the assets
• Plug-in facility to add support for new content formats
• 100% browser-based.

The real strength of Tark4 and all the products built on Tera’s CMSA is the plasticity.

All of our products are built on the idea that products are configured not customised.

With Tark4, the customer can change the schema to define new metadata, new structures, and completely new basic object types. In practice this has meant that news organisations with very specific needs and news interests are able to configure Tark4 to exactly match their needs.

It's been a very exciting product to be involved with.

As an example, Tark4 is installed at Radio Netherlands Worldwide where it is being used to manage all of the assets of this international multilingual radio network.

At RNW, Tark4 is managing content in Chinese, Arabic and other non-Roman alphabets.

Interview conducted by Brian Veseling, senior editor for Publishing, Editorial and General Management and WAN-IFRA Magazine.