Do you want to pay licensing and/or support fees each year?
Do you really believe your organization can do it all yourselves without any outside assistance, from the beginning into the distant future? (that would mean the future in years. Not weeks.)
In the long-term, what type of solution are you willing to commit to?
Whatever you choose, you’ll need support for DAM operations, DAM users and updates for the DAM. Where will this ongoing support come from?
Do you have full documentation for your organization’s DAM system provided by…?
Does the solution work with third-party applications you need to use it with?
Is it easy to use? Or do you need a software engineering degree to understand how to turn it on and make it work?
Is it a scalable solution, regardless of how big your collections or organization grow?
Is it fully searchable?
Is it secure?
If you use a DAM within your organization, please answer the following poll.
King’s College of London has started its first Masters (MA) degree program in Digital Asset Management (DAM) this year. MADAM is the first Master’s Degree program of its kind. Best wishes in all their endeavors.
As written in an earlier post, this is not the only school of higher education to offer courses in DAM by name. There are other courses and programs that may call it something else in the fields of Archiving (specific to digital) and Library Science (again specific to digital). The main issue I see ad keep hearing about is that too many schools are still resisting (not changing) to teach their students about the real digital world and how things get done today. More adjunct professors who still function in the real business world, not just full time academia helps minimize this. I would also encourage any student to get a real job or internship to see how things are done…not in theory, but reality.
You are more than welcome to try and:
Apply theory in practice when applicable
Learn to think on your feet
Think it through and act for long term, not just short term results
Walk through the possible consequences (pros/cons) of one action over another
Reference/respect other people’s point of view and take them all with a grain of salt
Do not ask anyone to do something you would not do yourself
Do it yourself before asking others to repeat the same tasks
Depending who you ask, you will get a different answer to the question, “What is Digital Asset Management (DAM)?”
There are plenty of unrelated answers found, about water reservoirs and feats of aquatic engineering. There is even an entry for “dam (dekameter)”. Umm, not really what we are talking about here, but thank you Wolfram|Alpha
In all seriousness, here is a list of answers to the question in their own words (click on each link):
So how do we get consensus on one definition? Can’t we just all get one definition for DAM? Does DAM vary that much? Do we need a broad enough definition that covers what DAM was before, what it is today and what it is becoming? Should there be a simple broad definition to understand the concepts and then more complex definitions to understand the various parts of the solution?
This discussion starts with unity among the DAM professional community. In September 2010, there were two DAM conferences back to back in different cities. Most of the top active minds in the ‘DAM-osphere’ were present. The issue is you could ask every DAM professional the same question and you would likely get a different definition from each person. Or they would ask you to reference xyz.
Sigh.
So how do we fix this? One solution is to set standards going forward. Someone told me ‘the interesting thing about standards is everyone has their own.’ Where is the standards body which creates these standards and hashes out what it really is? Sure, there are well accepted standards bodies. Just to list a few, there are:
The issue is these standards bodies move slowly when establishing standards. It can take 5 to 15 years to set a standard. Does anything change within that period of time?
There is one group which DAM professionals may have heard of already.
Enter the DAM Foundation. Yes, that’s right. There is one. And their major purpose for existence?
It has hundreds of members from DAM professional community already. You will hear more about it in the coming months. I have spoken to plenty of DAM professionals who would love to hash this out together… not individually. A standard accepted by the whole can trump the standard mentioned from one.
Meanwhile, we can continue the discussion…
What is your definition of Digital Asset Management?
Another DAM Blog 