It’s that time of year again! The days are getting longer, the pollen is getting thicker, and your website is slowing down under the weight of media bloat, broken links, and outdated content.
Join us for the next Web Professionals Session on Thursday, April 4th at 2:00p.m. in the Graduate Center (211-A West Cameron Ave.) or on Zoom. We’ll be discussing ways to clean up your website, improve site performance, and create better user experiences. Whether you have a dedicated maintenance schedule, or have never considered this topic in your life, we will share tools and strategies to help you get your website spic and span.
Have a Digital Asset Management system? Need a Digital Asset Management system?
Come and learn from a panel of your colleagues as we share what works, what doesn’t and what other options may be available for storing, organizing and/or sharing photos, graphics, videos and other digital assets.
There are a variety of different systems employed by units on campus. Hear about your colleagues’ experiences and share your own. You may identify some new solutions as we go!
Digital Asset Management Systems Panelists
- Katie Costanza, Research, Communication & Program Manager, Center for Global Initiatives
- Claire Cusick, Senior Content Manager, University Development Marketing
- Gordon Palmer, Media Applications Analyst, School of Medicine Academic Technology Services
- Ken Strayhorn, Web Manager, UNC Children’s Hospital
- Rachell Underhill, Web and Information Systems Manager, The Graduate School
Digital Asset Management System PowerPoint Presentation (pdf)
Digital Asset Management System Resources
DAM Resources at UNC
UNC-Chapel Hill multimedia library (PhotoShelter/Libris)
UDO Marketing digital assets (Photoshelter/Libris)
HeelStream (Ensemble Video)
ibiblio:The Public’s Library and Digital Archive
School of Information and Library Science faculty under the Information Interaction area might have insights for both metadata and other organizational subjects.
Additional DAM Resources
Metadata resources
Recorded Discussion Notes
20181012 October Webmasters Meeting – Digital Asset Management Systems
Presenters
- Katie Costanza, katierc@unc.edu, UNC Center for Global Initiatives
- Gordon Palmer, gordon_palmer@med.unc.edu, School of Medicine Academic Technology Services, Instructional Media Services
- Ken Strayhorn, Ken_Strayhorn@unc.edu, UNC Children’s Hospital
- Claire Cusick, claire_cusick@unc.edu, University Development Marketing
- Rachell Underhill, runderhill@unc.edu, The Graduate School
Notes – Presentation
- Background
- What is a digital asset?
- Video, audio, logo, graphic files, spreadsheets, PDFs, pictures, CAD files
- What is a DAMS
- File sharing system with specialized tools for managing digital assets
- Image/media specific tools
- DAM Foundation
- Criteria
- Ingest
- Secure
- Store
- Render
- Enrich
- Relate
- Process
- Find
- Preview
- Publish
- DAMS at UNC (survey at UNC) – The uses
- Mostly using a shared storage space
- Many are using systems like Google Drive and Dropbox that are not actual DAMS, but work for collaboration
- DAMS at UNC – The bad
- Time-consuming
- Unwieldy
- Disorganized
- Frustrating
- DAMS at UNC – The wishes
- Better viewing options, categorization
- Sharing and external input
- Student contribution
- Storage capacity
Notes – Discussion
- Katie Costanza – UNC Center for Global Initiative
- Tools: SmugMug and Google Drive
- Smug Mug
- Features
- Galleries
- Permissions per Gallery
- Share a gallery with password protections for visitors
- Organization
- Drag and drop/GUI interface
- Collections
- Organize images into multiple collections
- Shows image previews making reviewing/finding images much easier
- Tagging
- Allows metadata to be associated with a digital asset
- Cost is generally low
- No worries about space limits given their current usage
- Challenges
- Managing the tagging system
- Managing organization of massive amount of images
- Works with Flickr and Lightroom
- Claire Cusick – Senior Content Manager at University Development Marketing
- Overview
- Video producing is a large part of her job
- Tools: External hard drives, Dropbox, PhotoShelter
- Department is tasked with helping campus
- Galleries and other media are open to campus community
- Most galleries are available, but if you cannot get access, send email and they will work with you.
- Open to sharing content, just need to reach out
- They receive photos from various photographers on campus
- Photo shelter
- Only image assets, video costs more to manage
- DropBox
- Mostly for sharing video
- 1TB option, ~$100 annual cost
- External HDDs
- ~$100 per
- Sitting under her desk, and backups in safe
- Challenging logistics to manage
- We Transfer
- If you don’t have Dropbox and don’t want to pay large money, use this
- Can transfer files up to 2 GB
- Asset Library
- Has campaign assets and other useful media
- Ken Strayhorn – School of Medicine
- Overview
- SoM always worries about security with HIPPA concerns
- Issues with wild-west mentality with DAM processes
- Needed to get things in a consistent, reliable shared space
- Spend about 3K on the hardware and software to provide the service
- Host on premises due to HIPPA
- HeelStream
- System created by SoM for asset management
- Place to manage video assets
- Place to go to upload videos into libraries
- Can manage playlists
- Can assign security rules to video or playlist
- Shared as links, embedded into websites
- Warpwire
- ITS managed service
- Developed by a company in Durham
- Free for use at UNC
- Upload content and it transcodes the content for streaming
- Can allow users to download videos
- Gordon Palmer – Web Manager at UNC Children’s Hospital
- Overview
- Uses primarily PhotoShelter
- Full professional account ~$300/yr.
- Very happy with the product, worth the cost
- PhotoShelter
- Ad-hoc gallery on the fly, send URL and password to external user and they can view
- Backend for performing analytics
- Can see usage, downloads/access
- ~4000 stock photos
- Multiple stock galleries for organizing images by some criteria and sharing with others
- Ex: Really nice images for internal uses, decent images for brochures
- Issues
- Bulk uploader only works on PC
- Rachell Underhill – Web & Information Systems Manager at The Graduate School
- Overview
- Have 29K+ photos in their system
- Resource Space
- Open Source
- Will likely need a developer to help you
- API functionality
- Plugin library and user base
- Customizable
- Can manipulate it to meet your needs if you are PHP savvy
- They have paid plans for helping with customization
- Designed for OXFAM originally
- Functionality for photo requests
- Library feel to it
- Works well with massive number of photos
- Have on separate server due to size
- Want to be sure it has enough resources
- Not folder based – Keyword based
- Must train users to think of things this way
- Can make collections and groupings
- Need to think differently about organization when uploading
- Can display external galleries
- Can store videos
Questions
- How to allow public to submit videos, images, documents?
- How to acquire media?
- Answers
- Submittable
- Expensive, prices constantly going up
- Does not talk well with other programs
- Works, but not the best program
- Is anyone using large storage solutions?
- How to handle massively expanding storage (5,10,20TB sizes)
- Do we know if the UNC libraries have a plan or system to aggregate UNC media?
- Do we have any expertise we could leverage from somewhere on campus?
- Answers
- How To Move Large Media Files Without FTP?This is not for storage, but a resource for sending huge media files, if this is a need for anyone. Pricey also.If you download the white paper, you will likely start getting lots of emails with that for a while. If you prefer to avoid that onslaught, here are two links to the product information.
Have you stumbled upon a new resource or tool that you find useful or cannot live without and are willing to share? If so, you’ll definitely want to attend the next Webmaster’s session on Thursday, June 8th @ 2pm in the Graduate Student Center (211-A West Cameron Ave.)
We will be sharing and documenting free, cheap, or otherwise life-simplifying tools that improve your work on the web. Come prepare to share your personal favorites and gather suggestions of new tools that others find helpful. From photo editing to user testing, metrics reporting to code updates, this session will share a wealth of worthwhile tools. Let’s learn from each other!
Tool Time Part 1, Links and Resources – Updated!
- CSS and Web Design
- Paletton
- Color scheme designer, with web page examples
- Adobe Color CC
- Color theme designer, integrated into Adobe Creative Suite
- Design Seeds
- Color palette inspiration
- CSS Zen Garden
- A demonstration of what can be accomplished through CSS-based design.
- Adobe Capture CC (mobile app)
- Turn any image into a color theme, pattern, unique brush, Look, or vector graphic that you can use in your creative projects on desktop and mobile devices.
- Mobile/Responsive Design
- Chrome Developer Tools
- The Chrome Developer Tools (DevTools for short), are a set of web authoring and debugging tools built into Google Chrome.
- Responsive Web Tester
- Quickly preview your responsive website designs at the dimensions they will be seen on popular mobile devices.
- BrowserStack – A cross-browser testing tool ($)
- Live, Web-Based Browser Testing
- Debugging
- Chrome Developer Tools
- The Chrome Developer Tools (DevTools for short), are a set of web authoring and debugging tools built into Google Chrome.
- The Web Developer extension
- adds various web developer tools to a browser.
- Regex 101
- Web based regular expression tester and debugger
- Accessibility
- WAVE Toolbar
- The WAVE Chrome and Firefox extensions allows you to evaluate web content for accessibility issues directly within Chrome and Firefox browsers.
- WebAIM: Color Contrast Checker
- Quick color contrast ratio tester for accessibility
- Colorable
- Take a set color palette and get contrast values for every possible combination – useful for finding safe color combinations with predefined colors and includes pass/fail scores for the WCAG accessibility guidelines.
- Tota11y
- tota11y helps visualize how your site performs with assistive technologies.
- W3C Markup Validator
- This validator checks the markup validity of Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, etc.
- Usability
- The Readability Test Tool
- The Readability Test Tool provides a quick and easy way to test the readability of your work.
- UXSort
- UXSORT is a card sorting tool that allows user experience professionals or marketing managers to plan card sorting activities, manage participants and cards, collect card sorting data, analyze data, and create a report.
- Qualtrics
- The Qualtrics Research Suite is a powerful online survey tool available to all UNC Chapel Hill faculty, staff, and students, for UNC-related projects.
- Image/Media management and analysis
- Aspect Ratio Calculator
- Calculate and adjust the size of objects while maintaining a specific aspect ratio. This is useful, for example, when resizing photos or video.
- MS Picture Manager info and download
- No longer part of official MS Office suite but still available
- Adobe Spark Post (mobile app)
- Create social media posts and images
- PIXLR
- Photo editing apps for web and mobile
- Canva
- Social media image and graphic design creator
- GIMP
- The Free & Open Source Image Editor
- Icons
- Icon Finder
- Search for free or premium icons
- Font Awesome
- Font Awesome gives you scalable vector icons that can instantly be customized — size, color, drop shadow, and anything that can be done with the power of CSS.
- Noun Project
- Nearly a million curated icons, created by a global community. Useful for identifying icons for concepts.
- Canva
- Social media image and graphic design creator
- Nucleo Icon Set ($)
- Search, Customize, Export 8387 Icons
- JQuery/JavaScript Extensions/Add-ons
- JQuery
- jQuery is a fast, small, and feature-rich JavaScript library. It makes things like HTML document traversal and manipulation, event handling, animation, and Ajax much simpler with an easy-to-use API that works across a multitude of browsers.
- JQuery UI
- jQuery UI is a curated set of user interface interactions, effects, widgets, and themes built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library.
- JSLint
- JSLint is a JavaScript program that looks for problems in JavaScript programs. The JavaScript Code Quality Tool.
- React.js
- A JavaScript library for building user interfaces
- Zurb: Foundation
- A responsive front-end framework.
- Charts/Maps
- HighCharts
- Highcharts makes it easy for developers to set up interactive charts in their web pages
- MapBox
- APIs for maps, geocoding, driving directions, and more
- TileMill
- TileMill is an open source map design studio
In recognition of National Disability Awareness Month, we’re bringing in a special guest for our October meetup: Sina Bahram. Sina is an accomplished “universal design” and accessibility evangelist who greatly contributed to the implementation of NC State’s web accessibility policy. He also works with the Free Software Foundation, project GNU, on systemic accessibility matters such as the state of Linux accessibility, accessibility on the web, open source screen reader development, etc. Most recently, Sina helped bring to fruition a project in the country of Nepal, whereby a school is being opened to teach English, technology skills, and the principles of free software to blind students.
His passion for this field originally stems from the fact that he is mostly blind and he uses assistive technologies such as a screen reader to navigate various computer systems and devices. This is a great chance to see a screen reader in action (let’s see how a few of our UNC sites hold up!), learn about the latest thinking about web accessibility, and have your questions answered by an expert. Sina is known for having an engaging, interactive style so we’re going to have some fun.
Details
Location: Grad Student Center (http://gradschool.unc.edu/student/gsc/)
Date: Thursday, October 6
Time: 2:00p.m. – 3:30p.m.
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