Educational institutions typically have large media collections. There are several reasons that this is unavoidable. And working with large media collections requires your DAM to have certain capabilities which are lacking in many applications. This includes finding and discovery capabilities that can scale to hundreds of thousands of files. Mediagraph has been designed from the ground up to be able to handle large collections. Let’s dive in.
Why are EDU collections so large?
There are some things that we see almost universally in EDU accounts. They drive the need to have a lot of photos and videos in the DAM. These include:
- EDU institutions are typically large and very active. Simply put, there is a lot going on. And it’s important to document much of it. This is for promotional needs, and for the historical record. And in many cases, the visual media team is a service used by many groups across the institution, and they are required to cover events of the different departments.
- It’s a visual-first culture. The students in EDU institutions have grown up in the age of ubiquitous visual media sharing. Pix or it didn’t happen. They want to see the campus, the people, the events more than to read about it. And, of course this is not just a student preference, it’s also for faculty, staff and alumni.
- Social media is visual-first. Social media channels are essential for all types of communication with prospective students, current students, alumni, donors and the community. And social media requires a photo or video for every post to drive engagement.
- EDU institutions need to keep the media longer. Outside EDU, it’s common to have a much shorter timeline of media to have at hand. Maybe this is only the last year or two of current photos. In EDU, “current” media may be a period of four years or more. But the need does not stop there. People have a lifelong connection to their schools. And the schools have a lifelong investment in their alumni, as they go on to have careers and accomplishments that reflect on their EDU affiliations. Photos and videos are the social proof of this affiliation.
Designed for Large Collections
While many DAMs can hold large numbers of files, they may fail at making the content in the account findable. All parts of your system get tested as the collection grows. A DAM that works well with 10,000 or 20,000 files may become very frustrating at 200,000 files. Let’s take a look at some of the elements that are in play here.
- High performance at scale - Very large accounts can tax the infrastructure of your DAM. Mediagraph can page out 10,000 thumbnails at a time. Drag your cursor 5000 thumbnails down the window and watch it pick up rendering almost instantly. And it can re-sort these according to multiple criteria about as fast as you can press the buttons, even for hundreds of thousands of files.
- Efficient tagging at scale. AI is really helpful for finding some content. But much of the content in an EDU account must be tagged with specific information that AI can’t know. This includes names of events and other contextual information not discoverable by the API alone.
Mediagraph addresses this by letting you build a user-facing taxonomy that represents your people, events, departments and culture. And this taxonomy supports drag-and-drop tagging. This allows you to quickly and efficiently make content discoverable. It also allows you to build and deploy a controlled vocabulary.
- Unlimited Admins in multiple levels. When a DAM is serving a large institution, it’s likely that the work must be spread between multiple administrators. There may be too much work for a small team to fully handle. And sometimes there is departmental knowledge that a central admin team simply won’t know.
Of course, adding new people to your team can be a little dangerous if they are not trained properly. That’s why it’s important to have multiple levels of Administrators. Mediagraph offers tiers of Admin roles that are easy to understand and assign. These tiers allow you to add team members
- Comprehensive Group Management - Colleges and Universities are typically made up of many departments, administrative branches and other distinct groups. This can include MarComm, athletics, health care, alumni affairs, social media, colleges and departments, and more. These groups may need their own goals, content, users, SSO logins, taxonomies, administrators. Mediagraph supports an unlimited number of separate groups in all account levels to provide a tailored user experience for each.
Mediagraph also allows easy sharing between these groups. This can happen inside a single account, or between multiple accounts at the same institution.
If you want to see how Mediagraph provides a platform for the entire institution (or just for a single department), please click here to set up a meeting.