Courses

Rights management is both the gas and the governor that powers using digital assets. The proliferation of digital media, as well as mechanisms and markets to exploit it, has increased both the importance and complexity of rights management. The successful DAM implementation will moderate and simplify rights as best it can to inform effective and efficient digital asset management and usage. The more DAM and Rights work together, the easier it is to both maximize usage and avoid the risk of non-compliance. This course provides a foundational understanding of rights management concepts from all sectors as well as insights that build on other DAM related topics such as metadata, data governance, and integrations that power successful DAM implementations.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

1. Understand the basic elements and terminology of Rights Management as it pertains to Digital Asset Management.
2. Understand the importance of Intellectual Property (IP) including the four types of IP and more specifically, copyright and trademarks, as these have significant implications for DAM practitioners.
3. Develop insights into the complexity of rights management and discover techniques for simplifying rights complexity to help increase rights awareness while reducing “friction” caused by rights complexity.
4. Gain insights into how contextual use can create gray areas for rights interpretations and to use practical techniques for empowering their users while continuing to manage risk of misuse.
5. Learn techniques for controlling content access in the context of acquired rights.
6. Understand the importance of aligning DAM ROI and commercialization of assets while still being compliant with acquired rights positions.
7. Create an actionable plan and tailored approach for aligning and implementing rights management practices with your DAM practices based on where you and your organization are with your DAM capability release strategy.

Today’s PR professional has the opportunity to practice much more than media relations; thanks to the blending of digital with traditional media, we not only have more ways to reach our audiences, we have more ways to measure the outcomes of our efforts as well. But far too many professionals are still wary of measurement. The truth is, it’s not tough, it doesn’t have to be complicated and, when done right, it can shine new light on how your strategy is working (or not). This course will teach you the strategic approach to putting an effective measurement program in place that supports business objectives, even if you’re on a shoestring budget.

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This course offers a comprehensive and focused new approach to communication and relationship building through the integration of new media. Companies today cannot afford to view social media through a traditional lens or with only tactical methods. Their approach must be strategic and include customized stories and meaningful content to share through new media channels. Stakeholders want direct engagement and to actively take part in conversations and collaboration with their favorite brands. Participants will learn how the approach to public relations and communications has changed, beginning with incorporating social media into the public relations planning process.

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The Strategic Communication Planning course is designed to help students think and act strategically, give them a working knowledge of the tools and techniques that will help them develop an action plan, and show them how to communicate it successfully.

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This course offers participants with an interest in public relations or organizational communications an opportunity to gain insight into the practice of strategic public relations. The lessons in this course are designed to help participants learn to see the PR process more strategically, including understanding research and planning, knowing how to make strategic choices, selecting from a multitude of tactical options, and evaluating program effectiveness.

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Planning for successful Digital Asset Management (DAM) has one meaning the day DAM launches, and once the initial goals are met, more challenges arise. Understanding how to plan for long-term operations and growth is essential. This course covers how to plan for enduring success with DAM, including the Digital Asset Management Capability Maturity Model--the industry's best guide and tool for success. Staffing, job roles, answering the question of “where does DAM report,” and managing how these will change through time are core to understanding how DAM implementations can be successful or fail. Insights on how to create metrics and measurement for DAM systems, best practices for developing deep organizational allegiances to support an ever-expanding network of use cases and persistent innovations, and securing budgets and constructive vendor relationships are just some of the lessons that lead to DAM successes.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

1. Explain factors distinguishing software implementation success and failure factors and generalize them to DAM.
2. Evaluate and defend how DAM component operations impact DAM success in the organization.
3. Apply the insights about DAM success to larger organizational/business goals on a recurring basis.
4. Understand and synthesize how DAM is set in an active context of much broader organizational and business operations.
5. Analyze and prepare for justifying persistent investment in the human capital needed to operate DAM.
6. Assess, describe and predict how DAM operations impact near-term and long-term organizational risk - preferably to mitigate risk.
7. Formulate DAM governance practices in order to effectively work with enterprise governance boards across multiple enterprise applications.
8. Demonstrate DAM’s impact on organizational / business valuation.
9. Justify and support DAM to become “at the table” in mergers, acquisitions and deaccession events.
10. Illustrate knowledge of how data, metrics and measurements support enterprise DAM and prove success.

Businesses and organizations of all types rely on digital asset management systems (DAMs) to store content and enable internal and external resources to connect and share assets and information. As the global demand to access and engage with digital materials increases, it is no longer sufficient to deposit assets into a database without leveraging modern approaches and technologies in order to create a smart, interconnected content ecosystem for stakeholders and content consumers. Improved classification tools, structured metadata and DAM systems, collaborative environments, and open standards enable the creation of rich semantic content and dynamic media consumption. This course will explore the underlying structure of a DAM, how digital assets are stored, enriched, published, and integrated into Web content. Special attention will be given to Web and DAM standards for creating semantic metadata, efficient processes and tools, and Linked-data collections.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

1. Understand basic components, processes, and data formats encountered in using a DAM system  or other online environments sufficiently to develop business requirements for working on a team evaluating or developing a DAM system.
2. Develop an understanding of how structured content can be organized, encoded, and validated to ensure it satisfies required business rules and requirements.
3. Understand how metadata is gathered, formatted, and stored, to help and how these processes are related to business requirements and impact system selection and design.
4. Gain insight into how metadata and content assets may be modular, reused, and how it affects metadata model design.
5. Gain insight into different data storage methods and their related search tools to enable developing business requirements for searching for digital assets.
6. Explore various indexing, cataloging, and knowledge organization approaches and how they may benefit a DAM system’s capabilities.

Digital assets are digital files and the corresponding metadata used to accurately and succinctly describe those files. Typical digital asset formats include digital images, documents, technical art files, videos, and audio files, and are ever-evolving. Digital Asset Management (DAM) is the blend of software and business practices used to manage these digital assets. In the premiere Rutgers course for the Bronze Certificate Program, Evolving World of DAM, a larger worldview is revealed for what a DAM system is and what a DAM system is not. Whether the DAM functions to support a film production studio, a video game boutique, an online hardware store, an international publishing house or a local archive, the course explores the foundational concepts, components, and organizational values expected of every DAM system, as well as the ten core characteristics required for managing DAM system success. At the same time, the course introduces new, existing, and future DAM practitioners to what it means to shape a career in the evolving world of DAM.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

1. Define digital assets and identify how digital assets are used while summarizing the origins of digital assets.
2. Provide examples of DAM system key components, and outline the ten core DAM system characteristics. 
3. Explore and discover DAM careers, and describe the role of IT (Information Technology) in DAM systems.
4. Design a simple DAM use case, distinguish between work-in-progress and finished assets, and identify how to facilitate DAM adoption practices.