Digital Asset Management consists of tasks and decisions surrounding ingesting, annotating, cataloguing, storage and retrieval of digital assets, such as digital photographs, animations, videos and music. Digital asset management systems are computer software and/or hardware systems that aid in the process of digital asset management.
The term "digital asset management" (DAM) also refers to the protocol for downloading, renaming, backing up, rating, grouping, archiving, optimizing, maintaining, thinning, and exporting files. "There are two primary types of DAM software: browsers and cataloging software. A browser reads information from a file but does not store it separately. Cataloging software stores information in its own separate file, however, the software and the catalog document it makes are distinct from the photos themselves."
Types of Digital Asset Management systems
The following broad categories of digital asset management systems may be distinguished:
- Brand asset management systems, with a focus on facilitation of content re-use within large organizations.
- Library asset management systems, with a focus on storage and retrieval of large amounts of infrequently changing media assets
- Production asset management systems, with a focus on storage, organization and revision control of frequently changing digital assets,
- Digital supply chain services, pushing digital content out to digital retailers.
Uses of Digital Asset Management system
Many businesses and organizations are adopting Digital Asset Management as a business strategy because managing image, video and other media assets presents unique challenges and requires solutions designed specifically to streamline the acquisition, storage and retrieval of digital media. Effective implementation of a DAM system should reduce the time and cost of content production, maximize the return on investment (ROI) from media assets, bring new products and services to market faster and streamline compliance. This system should be designed in such a way that enables cost-effective optimization of media asset management across an organization.