Digital Asset Management

1Introduction to digital asset management

Introduction

This chapter introduces the concepts of asset management. First it answers the question ‘what are assets?’. Then some of the related solutions are described—document management, content management and media management, and finally, ‘why is digital asset management (DAM) useful for any enterprise, not just publishing and media industries?’.

DAM has proved quite a technical challenge. It was not until the end of the twentieth century that affordable systems became available. The fall in the price of processing and disk storage has been the primary enabling factor, along with the ever-increasing band-widths of computer networks, both within a local area and over long distances. Many of the ...