Everything is being captured today. Universities and colleges are producing massive amounts of pictures and videos covering various events, happenings, and everyday situations happening on and around campus. The content is shared on social media, websites, digital signage, and used for press releases, fundraising efforts, as well as included in various promotional material.
Martin Vloet, Director of Enterprise & University Solutions and Kristin Twiford, Content Marketing Manager present Libris by PhotoShelter, an easy-to-use, cloud-based visual asset management solution that organizes media collections and provides easy findability for public and internal users.
Engagement and connection with the audience is at the heart of the system: the digital asset management (DAM) system allows users to share images and videos more efficiently. Especially in fast-paced social media, real-time communication is key. Hashtags are time-sensitive, making it essential to share own high-quality content on time if your goal is to have your content distributed. Technological developments allow photographers to wirelessly tether and upload their pictures to a laptop via wireless transmitters or USB. This will allow for an agile workflow as the recent pictures can be shared almost instantly with the communications team via upload to the DAM.
The photographer or members of the team should try to provide context to the images or videos in addition to the automatically camera-generated meta-tags, contributing names of photographed people and adding longer descriptions that will give context to images or videos and help to tell the whole story and make it easier for distributed teams to use the content.
When images/videos and descriptions are uploaded to collection folders in the system, they can easily be found, downloaded or shared by others. The granular, role-based system allows specific restrictions on any content in Libris, and provides remote access to internal or external audiences. It is easy to hide or show content or share invitation-only guest passes that allow users to download certain images/videos, or view specific folders only.
Moreover, DAM enables teams to repurpose content for various purposes. Images of major events are being used in numerous communication channels, either digital or print. When stored on a local hard drive of a single person or department, duplication of efforts is inevitable. Often, the same promotional shots are taken over and over due to issues with findability or lack of communication across departments. A single storage solution in the cloud that can be accessed by distributed teams across campus will save money and valuable staff time for all. Content can be sorted by date, collection or keywords.
In addition, Libris incorporates commercial options and different licensing models, enabling universities to make photos available for sale as an additional outlet to generate revenue.
Get a free 14-day trial of the software, or connect with the team via Twitter.