The Hot New Career

puredrifting

puredrifting

Major Contributor
This article is brilliant and I think would totally make sense for those of us who shoot P2 and SDHC cards. I have about 80TB of P2 media stored, tens of thousands of negatives, S16 and 35mm motion picture negative, CDs and DVDs, etc. Keeping track of all of these assets, databasing and keywording them, etc. is going to be a big job and it's a job that has barely existed in the past on this level. As we all know from the Internet, having a ton of information is easy, those who will succeed in the future will be the ones who can data mine and sift through the tons of data efficiently. The creatives will pay you pretty well to keep track of all of their assets.

I address this to a lot of the kids who post on DVX User, asking if they should go to film school or how can they make a living "in the business". While this is not a sexy, glamorous job, it is a necessary one and through doing it, in the near future, you will have an opportunity to make more money working with media in this way than almost all indie filmmakers and mid level below the line people. It's not a career I could do, but I know a lot of anally retentive people that would actually find this sort of work fun.

Fresh Starts: Digital Archivists, Now in Demand http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/jobs/08starts.html?emc=eta1 (need NYTimes.com free membership probably to access?)

Dan
 
It is amazing when you see new careers springing up where they didn't exist just a few years ago. I know from production company experience that if you shoot a lot of media, hiring a digital archivist can pay for itself many times over. Almost everything I shoot and every place I shoot, I will always try to grab a few extra shots "for the archive". You never know when you might want or need or be able to license out a shot of Times Square, Heathrow Airport, Sedona, etc. If you don't have a digital archivist, you forget where you even put these shots or that you even shot them.

Dan
 
One of the reasons economies stumble is because the situations -- things people are willing to pay for -- change more quickly than the existing system can, so there's a lot of frictional damage. Businesses providing things that people no longer want . . .

One of the ways economies recover is when business adapts to the new model of how things are. This is an example.
 
This has been going on for years in the publishing industry (educational publishing). We have to archive everything associated with a textbook; page PDF's, instructional movies, interactive exercises, photography, illustrations, icons, web sites, user manuals, instructor manuals, workbooks...you name it...PLUS, all the source code too! DAM systems (Digital Asset Management) as well as CMS (Content Management Systems) are key to releasing and revising textbooks and their suppliments.

...it's a LOT of work and usually housed within the corporation for protection purposes.
 
Agreed David.

To me, this is the sort of mindset that can help to shore up our economy, we have to find the services and products that people will value or find a necessity. Many of these services and products did not exist a short while ago.

Surviving (never mind succeeding) in business these days requires major flexibility and the ability to multi-task and take on new ideas and new projects in an instant. Opportunities come and go within weeks now, I think that we are going through a fundamental change in how business works right now and we are seeing the results of running business in the same old way. Old line giants are falling quickly and it will be the people and mindsets that are the most adaptable that will succeed.

Dan
 
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