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 products that are designed to manage the very large repositories can automate labour-intensive and repetitive tasks. These include cataloguing and indexing the content, then the powerful search engines that we use to discover and find content.

The product developers have leveraged research into the understanding of speech, character recognition and conceptual analysis to index and catalogue digital assets. The widespread application of these ideas requires considerable processing power to provide real time ingest of content essential in many audio-video applications. The introduction of the low-cost and powerful computer workstations that today we take for granted now makes such technology commercially viable.

The modern business creates media content in many guises. Table 1.1 shows typical departments in a corporate enterprise, and the content that they each produce (see Figure 1.1).Traditionally each department would manage its own media content, usually with some formalized filing structure. Global...