Why Digital Assets

This is for all those librarians and information managers who are wondering how digital assets might concern them. Vendors such as Canto, who makes the digital asset management (DAM) system Cumulus, developed the term "digital assets" to encourage people to recognize the value of their art files and therefore manage them. The original DAM users were the creators - graphic artists, photographers, etc. They were the primary users and thus early on realized the benefit of being able to easily find their images again.

As larger and larger collections of digital assets are being created, more then the original creators want to use images, but can't always find the right one. Now the major purpose of a DAM system is that digital files that have been created at great time and expense can be reused easily in many uses. To reuse them efficiently, it is necessary to make them easily accessible and retrievable by all possible users. In other words be able to find them. So why can't they be found? Images remain illusive because the core functions have not been set up in the best manner.

These core functions of a DAM system are:

• In addition to creating views of certain resolution (decibel) of each (D,M,V) file
• Track each original file's location and also any derivatives if they are part of the collection
• Maintain information which is unique to each file, both typical file information such as creation date, file type and also other information which you feel is important to maintain such as rights, creator, or publication.
• Maintain information with which users can search for the file.
• Provide an access and search mechanism

Or basically a library system. In fact many in the library sector have become aware of the benefits of merging library (books and objects) skills and information (digital and electronic) management skills into the New Librarian. The New Librarian is one who does not discriminate with respect to format type - but treats all information equally.

As librarians, they already are bringing the mish-mash of information on the Internet under control to provide up-to-date current research data for their industries. Hopefully they will also look to organizing the information found in-house, which is necessary for the actual work their companies do. This might be called Content, Digital Asset or Knowledge Management. The method of organizing and describing this material is just being defined. Who should be part of the team doing this? One would hope those with experience is doing that sort of work.

It is time for the New Librarians to make themselves and their intrinsic skills known to the image users of their industry, because it is important that these DAM systems have a good integral structure. Librarians can help define what information will find the right digital asset.

• Good file naming is essential. For some, a file name may give all the information necessary to retrieve the image, such as Logo_8x11.
• A solid descriptive information structure is even better. In other situations you may want a image which matches several criteria, such as a public gathering, in a romantic setting with your product visible. For most Dams this would be a keyword list or thesaurus.

So the next time you hear people bandying the term Digital assets around, I hope you will say, "sounds to me like we need a good library system for those assets."

March 20, 2002