Content area
Full Text
INTRODUCTION
Isn't it strange how some opportunities just find you? In the fall of 2009 I received an email from a friend and fellow librarian. The president of the local chapter of the Special Libraries Association had contacted her about teaching a class in digital asset management (DAM) at Columbia University. The president was responding to an inquiry from the Academic Director of the Information and Digital Resource Management (IDRM) Masters program at the Columbia University School of Continuing Education. Since I'd managed photos and illustrations for the DAM system at Scholastic Inc. for six years and had consulted on a DAM project at United Media, I contacted the Academic Director who expressed interest in meeting with me. Since I'd often thought about teaching on the graduate level, the offer that followed was one I was delighted to accept.
The decision to hire a librarian to teach the DAM course interested me. After all, DAM software offers a technical solution to the challenge of organizing growing collections of digital assets in organizations and I'm not a technologist. A similar course is offered at the University of California at San Jose (UCSJ) within the Masters of Library Science (MLS) program and is taught by a librarian, as one would expect within an MLS program. But the course at Columbia is part of the IDRM curriculum where the goal is to provide students with the 'formal training and technological skills demanded by the international information economy'. 1 The curriculum includes knowledge management, legal and policy issues, IT project management, global trends in information access, records management, vendor relationships, and information networks.2 By selecting a librarian, Columbia was implying that the focus of the course was to be toward providing students with basic information management skills for application to digital assets. After all, technical solutions come and go and storage media change with the times, but basic information organization and retrieval skills have been applied to media as far back as 300 bc in the Great Library of Alexandria. We've come a long way since reading from ancient scrolls, but human information access needs remain essentially the same: We want to either create or be informed based on input from available information sources, usually within a...