In terms of a list of what Digital Asset Management tools typically provide the following is a list of the generic functionality you would
expect to have included:
Backing up digital assets
In terms of the way in which a DAM stores its assets – they can broadly be subdivided into two basic types; a) media catalogues and b) asset repositories.
What is a Media Catalogue ?
The primary characteristic of a media catalogue type of DAM is that the actual source files are left untouched and under control of the operating system or
network drive – so the Media Catalogue is not managing the asset itself. What the Media Catalogue does is create a layer of information about the actual
files themselves and stores this typically in a database as an ‘index’ of the assets. This index is used as a source of information to search the assets
and then access the native (original) asset via a link for whatever purpose it is required. Typically the Media Catalogue will present thumbnails of the
source image or a snapshot of the movie as the information that is displayed prior to retrieval. Media Catalogue have the benefits of being lower cost,
easy to install and administer, providing a fast search result and scalable across multiple divisions of an enterprise. Given that they don’t control
the actual asset, anyone with system access can typically view, change, move, or delete any content element without using the Media Catalogue interface
unless the system is set up to preclude this ability.
The downside of some of the more basic Media Catalogues is that they can lack features such as check-in/check-out of content, rights management, and
automatic versioning (the latest version of a print, for example). Equally, some of the more basic Media catalogues can also become sluggish when
scaled, - true some can but not true with Cumulus and others - especially if distributed across multiple servers or geographic locations as the index
may have to retrieve information across multiple networks and storage environments (though increasingly with web clients (as opposed to desktop clients)
this can be negated.
What is an Asset Repository ?
In asset repositories, unlike the Media Catalogue, the content itself is physically stored inside a secure database and accessed only via the Digital Asset
Management software. The assets are viewed directly within the DAM rather than viewing e.g. a thumbnail view of the source image. This results in a host of
benefits, including security levels, replication, referential integrity, and centralized data management (including full hierarchical storage management and
disaster recovery). Whereas the Media Catalogue is used to reference assets stored as any number of locations (and as a result it cannot provide any
certainty of availability of the asset which is indexed), within the Asset Repository, full control over the asset is afforded to the customer.
This becomes particularly important when for example the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) of the asset need to be protected and/or the rights and
permissions to owned assets need structuring to give a known access by employees or customers to the assets stored.
The flip side of this argument however is that Media Catalogues, by referencing the original, will not suffer any degeneration of the original (which can
sometimes occur when an asset is imported or moved into an Asset repository). Whether the ‘loss’ is significant enough to outweigh the benefits, will
usually depend on the types of asset being stored and their intended usage. It would also be worth mentioning that without the appropriate hardware,
searching across an Asset Repository can be a slower experience than with a Media Catalogue – but this depends on the size of the repository and the
nature of the assets being stored and indexed.
As might be expected, centralising all of an organisations assets into a single repository means that the hardware to support the storage are the best that
money can buy – and other infrastructure requirements such as high speed networks need to be ramped up to cater for the bandwidth needed (especially given
that many assets such as movie files, print ready images etc are large in size). Not forgetting, that as well as the main storage repository, back up
systems will need to be maintained as well as the security models – resulting in a higher level of administration of the system than that associated with
the Asset Repository.
What types of Asset Management system are deployed within organisations ?
Whilst the assets can be managed either as a Media Catalogue or as an Asset Repository – a number of common uses can be found within organisations;
