Student Pamela Van Halsema Blogs from the Digital Assets Management Conference in New York

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In exchange for providing social media outreach, San José State University School of Information student Pamela Van Halsema attended the Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management (DAM) Conference in New York City, held during May 2012.

There, Van Halsema created a blog and wrote an initial article about the two-day conference, where she was the sole graduate student among Digital Assets Management industry leaders and vendors in the worlds of technology, marketing, and media.

Sticking closely to the presentations geared for attendees “new to DAM”, Van Halsema networked with TV people, HBO executives, reps from game companies, and vendors of cloud systems – all of whom were there to discuss and learn about new techniques and technologies for preserving intellectual property (and all the rights associated with them), as well as the related work flow.

“As a student,” Van Halsema wrote in her blog, “what I really appreciated was the chance to hear what the day-to-day issues are that people try and solve with their DAM systems, and the benefits and challenges that present themselves when working with these systems.”

Van Halsema credits San José State University School of Information instructor John Horodyski for his help getting her there. “I’m really thankful to Professor Horodyski. He gives great advice about careers, and he works with media professionals. When he asked those of us taking INFO 282 (Seminar in Library Management) if any of us wanted to attend the DAM conference in exchange for writing blog entries and tweeting about it, I asked to go and received some financial assistance from conference representatives.

In fact, information systems and communications are what brought Van Halsema to our school’s MLIS program. “I’m the content manager for social media and an administrator in the Dean’s office at Sonoma State University, in California,” Van Halsema said. “I’m gearing my studies toward public education, digital learning, and the assessment of those programs. Part of my current work is trying to understand who is using information and then strategically organizing information.”

In designing her coursework, Van Halsema “meshed together” suggested elective courses from the Digital Services, Emerging Technologies, and Web Programming & Information Architecture Career Pathways.  With only three more classes to go, Van Halsema recommends students interested in Digital Assets Management consider taking INFO 287 (Seminar in Project Management): “It looks really good on a resume and offers practical knowledge.” She also recommends INFO 240 (Information Technology Tools and Applications) and INFO 244 (Online Searching).

“I’m not necessarily on a track to work in a library,” Van Halsema said, “so it was refreshing to attend the conference and see how the MLIS skills we’re learning are applied in other fields.”