What is DAM?
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.” ~ Wikipedia
That is a very good question. Thankfully CMS watch have the answer
Intro to Digital Asset Management: Just what is a DAM?
by Magan Arthur
30-Apr-2005
If you have been around the content management field for some time you might have read attempts from various writers to define and clarify the difference among solutions described by the those innumerable industry acronyms: DM, DAM, WCM, KM, DRM, etc.
Unfortunately significant confusion still exists, particularly about the role of Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems. After all, aren’t “assets” really just files? So couldn’t we use the same Document Management (DM) system that we use to manage all our other files? Well, the marketplace has spoken and its answer is, “no.” It turns out that managing digital assets — while in some ways similar to managing documents — constitutes a specific business problem that requires specialized software.
This article will contrast DAM systems with DM systems. Along the way, you should learn what content management skills and knowledge you could transfer between DM and DAM projects, as well as what is truly unique about managing rich media assets as opposed to text or imaged documents.
Which DAM?
To begin with, one thing that DAM and DM systems have in common are the different variants you find within each category. These variants are mostly creations of marketing minds and more often than not used to build a new independent “category” so the given marketing department can claim it is “The world leader in […].” Then other vendors picked up the terms because they saw a marketing advantage in doing so. As a result, one category like DAM — which ironically is not a large market segment compared to DM — can have many subcategories like Media Asset Management (MAM), Brand Resource Management (BRM), Entertainment Media Asset Management (EMAM), Marketing Content Management (MCM), and so forth, which are all too close to clearly differentiate in my view.
Products that claim a stake in one or some of these acronym-rich sub-segments are by no means identical in functionality and do not adhere to any common standard. In fact, one DAM system can be quite different from the next. This article will look simply at DAM in the abstract as a system that focuses on visually-rich media types
Below I will contrast DM and DAM systems through the lenses of:
- Tools and Processes
- File and Content Types
- Business Use
Tools and Processes
The heart of DAM and DM systems is a very similar set of core content management functionalities (some native, some perhaps from 3rd parties).
- The repository
This very core of any system builds a representation of the content utilizing a relational database or file system, or some combination. This includes basic repository services, such as version control, categorization, upload, and download. - The metadata index
This includes descriptors, administrative data as well as versions, and other hierarchical, peer to peer, parent child or lineage relationships. - The search engine
To perform searches against the above-defined index and repository. - The access and rights subsystem
Privileges and permissions that define who can see and do what with which objects. - The workflow or collaboration engine
Scheduling and definition of tasks in serial or parallel progression.
