Digital Asset Management: Content Architectures, Project Management, and Creating Order Out of Media Chaos

Digital Asset Management: Content Architectures, Project Management, and Creating Order out of Media Chaos is for those who are planning a digital asset management system or interested in becoming digital asset managers. This book explains both the purpose of digital asset management systems and why an organization might need one. The text then walks readers step-by-step through the concerns involved in selecting, staffing, and maintaining a DAM. This book is dedicated to providing you with a solid base in the common concerns, both legal and technical, in launching a complex DAM capable of providing visual search results and workflow options.

Containing sample job models, case studies, return on investment models, and quotes from many top digital asset managers, this book provides a detailed resource for the vocabulary and procedures associated with digital asset management. It can even serve as a field guide for system and implementation requirements you may need to consider.

This book is not dedicated to the purchase or launch of a DAM; instead it is filled with the information you need in order to examine digital asset management and the challenges presented by the management of visual assets, user rights, and branded materials. It will guide you through justifying the cost for deploying a DAM and how to plan for growth of the system in the future. This book provides the most useful information to those who find themselves in the bewildering position of formulating access control lists, auditing metadata, and consolidating information silos into a very new sort of workplace management tool – the DAM.

What you’ll learn

• The difference between DAMs, CMSs, and WCMs
• How to identify the need for a DAM, and how to conduct a needs assessment
• Why there is no single best DAM solution for every need
• How to discuss servers, hosting, and storage with your vendors and IT staff
• How to hire staff or create positions for digital asset managers
• How to survey and appraise collections and systems for DAM integration
• How a search engine within a DAM actually works
• How to establish reportable metrics for you DAM, including ROI figures
• How to migrate collections for digital preservation and protection
• Why rights management and brand management are two sides of the same DAM coin
• Why DAM workflows will change the modern workplace for the better

Who this book is for

• Anyone who creates, uses, or searches for visual information in digital form
• Librarians and Archivists interested in the future of digital preservation and access
• Information Science Students and Professionals
• CIOs and CEOs of companies with a large volume of visual assets
• IT staff who need to understand what digital asset managers do all day
• Graphic Designers, Photographers, and other creative people involved with image generation and storage

About the Author

Elizabeth Ferguson Keathley is a board member of the DAM Foundation and has chaired both the Human Resources and Education committees. Currently Elizabeth is working with the DAM Foundation to establish the first official certificate program for digital asset managers. One of the original UPS DAM team members for seven years, Elizabeth worked with her team to win the 2010 DAMMY award for best preservation, storage, or archives solution. Previous to her work at UPS, Elizabeth worked as a Preservation Field Services officer for the Southeastern Library Network, helping libraries, archives, and other cultural institutions meet preservation and access challenges by writing and teaching. She has written, taught, and been generally loud at conferences related to the arrangement, description, preservation and access of information for eleven years. Elizabeth has a MS in Archives Management from Simmons College, Boston, and has published in such periodicals as Journal of Digital Media Management. Her ongoing exploration of digital asset management and its relationship to user needs can be followed at her homepage for Atlanta Metadata Authority : atlantametadata.com, where she provides services related to the staffing, training, metadata modeling, and asset migrations for corporations acclimating to the labor intensive and detail-oriented nature of digital asset management.