Digital asset management consists of management tasks and decisions surrounding the ingestion,
annotation, cataloguing, storage, retrieval and distribution of digital assets.
Digital photographs, animations, videos and music exemplify the target areas of media
asset management. Digital asset management systems include computer software and hardware
systems that aid in the process of digital asset management.
The term "digital asset management" also refers to the protocol for downloading, renaming,
backing up, rating, grouping, archiving, optimizing, maintaining, thinning, and exporting files.
The "media asset management" sub-category of digital asset management mainly addresses
audio, video and other media content. The more recent concept of enterprise content
management often deals with solutions which address similar features but in a wider range
of industries or applications. Smaller DAM systems are easier to categorize
as to content and usage since they normally operate in a particular operational context.
This would hold true for systems attached to audio or video production systems. The
key differentiators here are the type of decoders and I/O used for the asset ingest, use and
outgest. Since metadata describes the essence, the metadata can serve as a guide to the playout
decoders, transcoders, and channels as well as an input to access control rules. This
means that the essence can be treated as a non-described storage object except when being
accessed for viewing or editing. There is relevance to this when considering the overall
design and use of larger implementations. The closer the asset is to the ingestplayout
tool, the greater the technical architecture needs to accommodate delivery requirements
such as bandwidth, latency, capacity, access control, availability of resources, etc. The
further the asset moves into a general storage architecture the more it can be treated as
a general blob that is typically held in the filesystem, not the database. The impact of
this set of needs means that it is possible and reasonable to design larger systems using
smaller, more expensive performance-systems at the edge of the network where the essence
is being used in its intended form and less expensive systems further back for storage
and archival. This type of design exemplifies Infrastructure Convergence Architecture, where
the line-of-business operations technology and IT technologies depend on one another
for functional and performance requirements.
Assets Generally the "asset" being managed is collected
and stored in a digital format. There is usually a target version - referred to as "essence"
- generally the highest-resolution and highest-fidelity representation. The asset is detailed by its
metadata. Metadata is the description of the asset and the description depth can vary depending
on the needs of the system, designer, or user. Metadata can describe, but is not limited
to, the description of: asset content; the means of encoding/decoding; provenance; ownership;
rights of access; as well as many others. There exist some pre-defined standards and
template for metadata such as Dublin Core and PBCore. In cases of systems that contain
large-size asset essences, such as MPEG 2 and JPEG2000 for the cases of images and video,
there are usually related "proxy" copies of the essence. A proxy copy is a lower-resolution
representation of the essence that can be used as a reference in order to reduce the
overall bandwidth requirements of the DAM system infrastructure. It can be generated
and retained at the time of ingestion of the asset simultaneous or subsequent to the essence,
or it can be generated on the fly using transcoders. Types of digital asset management systems
The following broad categories of digital asset management systems may be distinguished
as: Brand asset management systems, with a focus
on facilitation of content re-use within large organizations. Here the content is largely
marketing- or sales-related, for example, product imagery, logos, marketing collateral
or fonts, to give a few examples. Library asset management systems, with a focus
on storage and retrieval of large amounts of infrequently changing media assets, for
example in video or photo archiving. Production asset management systems focus
on managing assets as they are being created for a digital media production They usually
include work-flow and project-management features coupled with the storage, organization and
revision control of frequently changing digital assets.
DAM software may be open source or proprietary. See also
References
Further reading Jacobsen, Jens; Schlenker, Tilman; Edwards,
Lisa. Implementing a Digital Asset Management System: For Animation, Computer Games, and
Web Development. Focal Press. ISBN 0-240-80665-4. Krogh, Peter. The DAM Book, Second Edition.
O'Reilly Media. ISBN 0-596-52357-2. Krogh, Peter. The DAM Book: Digital Asset
Management for Photographers. O'Reilly Media. ISBN 0-596-10018-3.
Austerberry, David. Digital Asset Management, Second Edition. Focal Press. ISBN 0-240-80868-1.
Mauthe, Andreas and Thomas, Peter. Professional Content Management Systems: Handling Digital
Media Assets. Wiley. ISBN 0-470-85542-8. External links
Digital Asset Management and Museums - Digital Asset Management and Museums - An Introduction.
Open Source Digital Asset Management - Overview of open source DAM systems available.
List of Digital Asset Management Vendors - Comprehensive list of DAM vendors.
DAM Directory - Actively maintained and wide-ranging directory of DAM-related resources.