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Besides the irresistible puns when talking about it—you know, that DAM system!—the concept of Digital Asset Management is a really valuable one for companies large and small.

At conferences I’ve attended, it’s surprising the number people who admit that they don’t really understand DAM. They don’t know what it is or how it differs from other types of content management—like Web content management, or Document Management. It’s also valid to say that there is no definitive definition of DAM, per se.

In the broadest sense, a digital asset is any type of information or media that is stored in an electronic format. It could be a customer record in a database, a spreadsheet file, a presentation, a digital picture, a scanned document…anything that you can store on a computer.

The term “Digital Asset Management”, however, typically has a much more limited scope, usually referring to managing image and media files. For businesses, we’re talking about your logos, pictures of products and people, videos of your CEO, or the Flash animation on your Web home page. These are kind of digital assets that most DAM systems handle.

As with Document Management (and unlike Web Content Management) these digital assets are stored as files. Image and media files, though, have some attributes that make them different to manage than documents.

• Finding. With today’s full-text search capabilities, documents are easy to find because you can search for words they contain. By their nature, though, images and video aren’t searchable using words. The only way you can find a picture of a running horse (unless you’ve named it “running_horse.jpg”), is to tag the file with metadata and search on those tags. A DAM system provides a way to tag your media files so you can find them.
• Converting. Even before the Web, it was not uncommon for companies to create and maintain different “versions” of their images. For example, one version for a high-color glossy brochure and another for a printed newspaper. With the Web, you often start with a high-resolution image and then “render” it in versions like a .gif or .jpg file. DAM systems can automate this rendering.
• Organizing. Organizing your content is a big part of content management in general, but media-type digital assets have their own special needs when it comes organizing them. Again, when you create different “versions” of the image or video in different formats, you also want to maintain a link between the “master” high-resolution version (the parent) and the other rendered versions (the children). DAM systems allow store files in a way that maintains these parent-child relationships.

Companies that find themselves dealing with headaches like never being able to find the original version of logo or image, or who are spending a lot of time and money creating and saving images in different formats, are good candidates for doing some level of Digital Asset Management. If nothing else, bringing all your media files into one place where you can find and use them…now that’s a beautiful thing!

Rita Warren of ZiaContent, Inc. is a veteran of the software and digital media industries with more than 10 years experience helping companies deliver content in compelling and sensible ways. Well known in her field, Rita served as technical editor of the first edition of Bob Boiko's acclaimed book, the Content Management Bible. She is a frequent speaker at national conferences and contributor to content management industry publications.