Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

6
Digital Asset
Management (DAM)
Film libraries, photo libraries, music collections, and text documents were once entirely
separate from each other, requiring different storage conditions and the expertise of
librarians with different skills. Now, computer bits have become the lowest common
denominator, reducing all media to digital data that can reside on identical storage
devices. With this change has come a new profession and a new category of software,
both called Digital Asset Management.
Most organizations have a disparate collection of media, stored away in various archives
or still present on the hard drives of employees’ desktop computers. DAM attempts to
leverage this valuable asset, making it possible to extract value from it and to use it in
current work. It makes a lot of sense, especially now that printed documents are held
in digital form, along with photographs, presentations, sound recordings, video, and
film clips. The art of DAM involves making these media accessible, preferably without
having to change their physical location.
There are 1,001 ways to organize digital assets, a fact that has led to highly customizable
systems. Image data, in particular, present a big challenge because of the demand
for different formats: archived RAW originals, high-res TIFFs and PDFs for print, lowres
JPEGs for the Web, and so on. If software can handle images satisfactorily, it is a relatively
small step to make it handle other media. Several DAM solutions have started
as image management systems and have gone on to embrace the whole spectrum of
media, such as Extensis Portfolio and Microsoft’s Expression Media.
The criteria for good DAM software are many—scalability comes near the top of
the list for growing companies, but excellent browsing facilities are equally important.