January 19, 2022
•4 min read
Mise en place: How the James Beard Foundation stays organized
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Table of contents
30+ years = 377k+ assets = 13.5+ TB of content
Democratized access and unfettered growth
30+ years = 377k+ assets = 13.5+ TB of content
Since JBF was founded in the 80s, they’ve produced thousands of events. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, they hosted more than 200 events a year at their New York City headquarters alone and continue to produce local events all over the country, celebrating regional chefs, cultures, and cuisines. All of these events are documented by JBF’s nationwide network of freelance photographers and videographers. Over the past three decades, this work has resulted in hundreds of thousands of images and videos — like every other modern organization, JBF is a media business.
In the mid 2010s, they picked up a digital asset management system and began organizing their archive, but the software was too technical for the majority of the folks who needed to use it. Even for the tech-savvy contingent, there was a slew of frustrating quirks — particularly a slow, imprecise search function. Switching to Air brought a world of difference:
The UX and design, across the board, immediately made an impact. The media team is very used to the nitty gritty of working with photos and videos, but it’s always been difficult for the rest of the org. The fact that we can easily share a link with someone internally and make sure the assets live in one place is very important.
With their previous software, JBF’s Media team inevitably became a bottleneck for colleagues searching for specific assets; Air erased that issue.
Air’s smart tagging blew me away. I’d never thought about AI in this context. We had always relied on the institutional knowledge of people who had worked at JBF long enough to understand where in our system assets lived.
Democratized access and unfettered growth
The JBF Media team includes 5 of the Foundation’s 44 full-time employees — the other 39 still need access to the content library on a daily basis. Achieving that was a pain before, but it’s not now they’re on Air. Says Maggie,
You don’t have to be very tech-savvy. We have people who’ve been working here for decades and people who just started last week. With Air, they all instantly know what they’re looking at, can navigate easily, and can trust that the links they create will work, that they can just share it out.
Now all the content of the past three decades — and the next three decades — is and will always be a single search away.
It used to be, if we needed a seafood photo, for example, I’d have to go back, look through folders to find something, whereas now I can just search ‘lobster,’ and it’ll come up immediately.