What is Digital Asset Management?

August 16, 2007 – 10:36 pm

Digital Asset Management (sometimes referred to as DAM) is a somewhat vague term that can mean different things in different industries. In general, Digital Asset Management refers to the use of specialized software to organize, protect, and access files containing rich digital media. By rich media I mean images, graphics, video and audio.

Digital Asset Management (DAM) products range from simple, consumer oriented software applications to integrated enterprise-level solutions allowing for realtime media collaboration and access across the globe.

Some popular examples of consumer level Digital Asset Management systems include music and video management software such as Apple’s iTunes and the Windows Media Player. Photographers use products such as Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture to keep vast photo collections organized and accessible.

At the other end of the spectrum, large organizations who rely heavily on digital media are increasingly eager to consolidate, streamline and protect their unwieldy media libraries. Companies such as ClearStory Systems, a Digital Asset Management industry leader, promise to “put the power of digital media to work” for your organization.

To answer the question “What is Digital Asset Management?”, it might be helpful to look at some key features that many Digital Asset Management solutions have in common:

  • Digital Asset Management systems usually use of metadata such as keywords to facilitate organization and easy access to the media
  • Digital Asset Management systems typically integrate with the authoring tools of the particular media type (think Adobe Illustrator for logo designs, etc)
  • Digital Asset Management systems often include basic media editing functionality (cropping and resizing of images, for example)
  • Digital Asset Management systems can provide built-in file format conversion functionality
  • search functionality
  • tools to facilitate group collaboration
  • version tracking tools to manage the workflow of media creation
  • publish content