During the Community Archiving practicum course, I cataloged eleven episodes of the podcast Free 'Em All Radio in the Dominican University ArchivesSpace repository. I listened to each episode and cataloged it according to DACS standards by creating abstracts, time-stamped indexes, subject headings, agents, and biographical/historical notes. A contribution I made to the project plan was suggesting that each record include a link to BlogTalk Radio, the website that hosts each episode, to help listeners find the source audio. The course taught me to think creatively to identify potential users of an archival repository. Students and researchers are an obvious user group, as the archive is hosted by a university. However, current listeners of Free ‘Em All, community members who live in Maywood and nearby cities, and community activists may also benefit from using the repository to satisfy their own information needs. When archivists design finding aids, digital repositories, and other tools, we must consider the needs of diverse user groups.

When tasked with identifying an organization in need of a Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) for LIS 757, I did not need to search far. As my team at the Obama Presidential Library has worked toward the ambitious goal of digitizing the entire artifact collection, our digital footprint has become difficult to manage with our database. Our shared drive has ballooned to include nearly 200,000 media files and more than 4 terabytes of data. As LIS 757 exposed me to the world of DAMS, I realized that implementing a DAMS would transform our ability to manage and ensure the long-term viability of the Obama Library's digital assets. 

I interviewed my supervisor to understand the challenges of adopting a DAMS from an administrative standpoint and spoke with my colleagues to understand their frustrations with our collection management system, TMS. I researched several DAMS products for museum collections to determine whether TMS Media Studio was the best fit for our needs and participated in a meeting with the Presidential Library system's TMS administrator and a Gallery Systems employee to understand how the product could be customized. In the final strategic plan, I offer an implementation timeline, an assessment of project's benefits, an outline of business rules & functional requirements for the vendor, several use cases, a data dictionary, and an analysis of current digital storage limitations. I submitted the plan to my supervisor, and it kickstarted conversations at the administrative level to determine the feasibility of adopting a DAMS.

The project challenged me to step outside my role as a TMS user and think like an administrator. The process of analyzing the current system, gathering feedback from users and administrators, and comparing the capabilities of Media Studio and other tools helped me achieve this learning outcome.