Beyond the Job Title: Senior Digital Asset Management Specialist

A library tech job interview with John Dewees

Posted on October 27, 2025 in Job Profiles

Core to LibTech Insights’s mission is demystifying the broad and dynamic field of tech librarianship in higher ed. In this series, we interview a librarian every month to learn a little more about their position. As library tech jobs proliferate, they sometimes come with unfamiliar, jargony, or intimidating titles. We want to go beyond the title and look at the responsibilities, skills, and joys that make up the job. We hope this series will increase your knowledge of library tech jobs and skills and offer you greater insight into the working lives of your colleagues.

For this installment, we spoke to John Dewees to learn more about his job as a Senior Digital Asset Management Specialist. Check out our archive of job profiles. 💫

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What is your job title and responsibilities?

My title is Senior Digital Asset Management (DAM) Specialist, and my job responsibilities are a combination of those of a repository manager and a digital preservation librarian. DAM is a pretty fuzzy term that is very context-specific. It’s pretty commonly used in both the LAM space as well as by communication and marketing professionals, who use it in similar but definitely not identical ways. SAA has a pretty good (if brief) definition, and it mostly boils down to assigning responsibility to one or more people who can account for all the digital “stuff” the organization stewards so that they can make sure that the folks who ultimately need to use it are able to.

For anyone who has ever joined a new org only to open up their departmental share drive/Box folder/SharePoint and see the unmitigated mess of stuff that hasn’t ever been organized or cleaned up, DAM is kind of the opposite of that.

In my day-to-day, I’m responsible for ensuring that those materials we want to be accessible to researchers can be accessed on the web in the short term, as well as being responsible for long-term preservation and administration, which is essentially an open-ended time frame, saving resources for as long as is feasible, be that 5 years, 50 years, or 500 years. A fair amount of my work is technical in nature, using software APIs and Python scripting in order to accomplish our goals of getting digital assets into platforms and then managing them.

However, a lot of my work ends up being heavily involved with governance and committee work to ensure that our different departments work productively together. I was heavily involved with establishing our interdepartmental digital projects governance team here, which has meant establishing decision-making frameworks for how we select and prioritize projects, writing policies, and lots of communications work to ensure that the rest of the organization knows what we’re doing and has the information they need to make good, informed decisions. I represent one specific subject specialist on this team (with other areas like digitization, metadata, or collections management represented) but also do a lot of work in making sure the group itself can continue to learn and improve. 

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What was your career leading up to this role?

I’ve been involved with libraries my whole career, going on 20 years now, but my role has varied a fair bit. I started working as the closed reserves clerk in the circulation department at my undergraduate college library full-time, mostly for the tuition benefit because I took a while to finish my degree (I had a lot of fun in my 20s). I did that work for about 12 years, picking up my MLIS along the way and starting my job hunt for a professional position. I had originally thought I wanted to be a conservator, working to restore old books and manuscripts, but for various reasons, pivoted to digital preservation rather than physical. My first post-grad school job was working in the local history and genealogy department of a public library, which was a great experience. I had a lot of independence and was able to skill up in a lot of different areas at the same time because I was responsible for digitization, metadata, digital exhibits, digital collections, digital preservation, digital fill-in-the-blank.

I loved a lot of aspects about public librarianship, but eventually, I missed being on a college campus and started job hunting to get back to one. I ended up applying to my current position, which let me take a couple of the areas that I had worked on in my previous position (digital collections and digital preservation) and drill down on them a lot more. It’s been nice having other great professionals to collaborate with who handle the metadata creation, run the digitization lab, or create the digital exhibits and not be responsible for those as well. I’ve been able to become more of a specialist rather than a jack-of-all-trades. This is also my first position as a supervisor as well, as I have a DAM Analyst position that reports to me. My team manages the administration of our web archiving service, and the DAM Analyst is responsible for the day-to-day operations of that service point. This includes doing quality assurance, writing up documentation, crawling new websites, and more.

Are there any specific skills that your position requires, and when/where did you pick them up?

Any technical presentation that I do usually starts off with a disclaimer that I am not a programmer: I’m just a librarian who happens to know some code. For me, learning Python has been far and away the most useful skill to pick up, and has really increased the scale of projects I’m able to tackle or the speed of work that I can reach. I originally learned Python after I hit a project at the public library that was essentially just a lot of data manipulation in spreadsheets, and I did the math and realized it was going to take several years to complete the project manually doing it 40 hours a week, which was not particularly feasible. I took about two to three months to do Dr. Chuck’s class on Coursera, and then was able to finish the project in a couple of months after that. Since then, I’ve been building up my skills, though my code is still likely terrible to any real engineer.

Other than that, having a good understanding of copyright law has been useful knowledge for working with digital collections platforms that the public will access, and Creative Commons has a good certificate program that I enjoyed doing. Also, being willing to constantly improve one’s communication skills is something that I think is important, no matter what you do. I’m not necessarily much for capital “R” Research as a librarian, as I find theory to be draining, but praxis is energizing to me. I try to do as much writing up of workflows as I can, publishing them on my personal site, and publishing code on GitHub to try to help others in the wider community, which is a process that is a lot faster and more forgiving than doing refereed journal articles. Thus, as a continuation of communication skills, writing skills in particular are important to develop.

Python often comes up as an important coding language for librarians to learn. What is it about Python that makes it so suitable for librarians’ work?

That’s absolutely true—Python definitely is the most popular language for the librarian-technologist. For the actual engineers/developers/computer science folks out there, they might be working in a wide variety of languages depending on what it is they are trying to accomplish. For the librarians, however, Python is often a pretty accessible language that is easier to pick up than others. I think you see success build on success as well: it’s structured to be accessible to begin with, abstracting away a lot of the fiddly, low-level programming tasks, and it’s pretty easy to read in natural language(ish) way. Since it’s generally seen as accessible, you then have resources like Dr. Chuck’s class or the Automate the Boring Stuff resources come out, which are specifically targeted to this audience of folks that just need some automation in their work to make it easier.

Additionally, once you have librarians who start learning Python and then skilling up to the point where maybe they are actually creating their own tools that can be used by others, they are going to build them in Python, both because it’s what they know and because they know it’s what others will know, so they will actually be adopted.

The other big advantage is that it is just unbelievably flexible. I use it a lot for what are ultimately very basic operations: renaming files, organizing them in very specific nested folder structures, creating ZIP files, writing templated XML documents, etc., because it’s infinitely easier to do that via script than doing it manually.

Python is also really good at data analysis and manipulation using tools like pandas, for building websites with django, for pulling content from the web with httpx, or a million other applications. Since it’s really good at working with data, you also have all sorts of AI things happening there, but that’s not really something I know about.

A lot of the vended software products that libraries purchase end up needing scaffolding around them to actually make them implementable in local circumstances, and then you see other Python libraries get created to handle all the API calls, as well as pyPreservica for Preservica or ArchivesSnake for ArchivesSpace. Whatever you want to accomplish as a librarian-technologist, there’s a good chance that there is a way to do it with Python, and you can get a lot farther than you might think with just this one, really flexible tool. Also, once you learn just a little bit, it gets easier to build on it over time. It’s funny, some librarians end up using a lot of Command Line Interface tools to accomplish some of this stuff, but I’ve never really gotten around to truly learning the command line because I just do it all in Python instead. It lets me focus on expanding my knowledge of one tool rather than learning scads of others.

What’s your favorite part of this position?

I really like the variety of work I do, and that I get new problems to tackle pretty regularly. I am frequently bopping around from one type of work to another over the course of my week. I’m one of the project managers for our governance team, so there is usually meeting wrangling, documentation, and task management that needs to happen. As already mentioned, I’m also our digital preservation subject matter expert, so I do work ingesting content into the repository, configuring it, and troubleshooting when things go awry. I really enjoy doing professional service work, as it lets me interact with other folks that do what I do at different places; digital preservation is often only done by one or maybe two people at an organization (if that), so you end up looking outside the organization for community when it comes to the work. Specifically, I’m trying to get more involved with the National Digital Stewardship Alliance. I’m part of a writing group, and I really love being part of a mentorship program. Ultimately, I like that my position allows me the flexibility to do this wide variety of things.

Mostly, I’m really lucky to work with a whole slew of people who are really great. The further I get in my career, the more it really seems to be the people that make the work worthwhile, and in these stressful times, I’m feeling that more than ever.

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