Digital Asset Management -- What A Concept

So there I was a couple of weeks ago at the Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management Conference, a two-day event at the New York Hilton. Quite frankly, I was trolling for stories and information. I like to encounter new and strange (to me) disciplines, subcultures and obscure (to me) corners of the universe. It excites me to know people are thinking about and making lives based on stuff that never would have occurred to me, is foreign to me and has a poetry I can marvel at because it comes from an entirely different way of perceiving the world and vocabulary.

Digital Asset Management (DAM) is buereaucratese for getting a handle on your stuff. When you’re a multinational corporation, a broadcast media company, newspaper or a university, you’ve got lots of stuff to handle — pictures, videos, brochures, training information, and all kinds of text documents.

Over the years, every fiefdom in these organizations had its own bunch of stuff. Items other departments, divisions or kingdoms could use weren’t, often because nobody knew the3se items were around and available . And because of changing personnel and other factors, people didn’t even know that somewhere in the enterprise’s history, a document, photo or video was stored that would solve a current problem.

The aforementioned types of orgqanizations aren’t the only ones using DAM. They simply are most obvious beneficiaries of this techno-salvation . They store and continue to acquire massive amounts digital files; they need to know what they can or can’t use; they need to accelerate workflow, in a landscape of permissions and approvals; they need to protect their brands. Most of all, they’re like the rest of us. They prefer to earn money, save money and not waste money. Aside from new storage capabilities, DAM’s fundamental ingredients are taxonomy (how things are classified) and metadata (essential and descriptive information about the digital file). Armed with an agreed upon vocabulary and metadata that uses that vocabulary, anybody anywhere in the organization can find whist they need, if it exists.

I expect to write more about DAM in the future.