Digital Asset Management
Digital Asset Management, abbreviated as DAM encompasses the management decisions and tasks around the areas of ingestion, cataloguing, annotation, storage, distribution and retrieval of assets, which are in digital form. Music, videos, animations, digital photographs demonstrate the target-sectors of Media Asset Management, which is the sub-category of Digital Asset Management. It primarily addresses media assets like video, audio, pictures etc. The Enterprise Content Management, abbreviated as ECM, which is a concept that came up recently also has similar functions but the difference is that it deals across a wide range of applications or fields or industries.
DAM systems include both the hardware systems and computer software that help in Digital Asset Management process. The terminology also includes the protocols to download, rename, back up, group, rate, and archive, optimize, maintain and export files. The digital assets that are managed are usually collected to be stored in digital format. Usually, there is a fixed target version, which is referred as “essence”, which is generally the representation of highest fidelity and highest resolution. The details of the asset could be found in its metadata, which includes the description about the asset, the depth of which could vary as it is dependent on the designer’s, user’s or system’s needs. A metadata can include details like the content of the asset, encoding/-decoding means (tar, MPEG 2 or JPEG etc.), provenance or the asset’s history since its capture, access rights, ownership and a host of other details. There are templates and set standards for metadata like PBCore, DublinCore. For the systems that have asset essences of very large size like JPEG2000 and MPEG 2 for images and videos, they usually have related copies of essence, known as “proxies”. A proxy is a lower-resolution copy that represents the essence, which could be used for referencing, thus bringing down the overall requirement of bandwidth for the infrastructure of DAM system. It could be generated during the ingestion process of the asset, either at the same time or after the essence.
Various types of systems in Digital Asset Management –
- Systems for Brand Asset Management focus on facilitating content re-se in big companies or organizations. Mostly, the content could be sales or marketing related. Examples can include imagery of the products, logos, fonts, marketing collaterals etc.
- Systems in Library Asset Management focus in storing and retrieving a vast amount of media assets that are not changed frequently. Examples in Library Asset Management would include the process of archiving of photos and videos.
- Systems in Production Asset Management focus on the management of the assets while they are still in creation for production of digital media, which can include 3D feature film, video games, animation, scenes with visual effects etc.). Typically, they will have the features that encompass workflow, project management along with organising, storing and revising the digital assets, which changes frequently.
- Services like Digital Supply Chain push out digital content (games, music videos etc.), received by Digital Retailers
Software for Digital Asset Management could be either proprietary or open source.
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