Definitions

The term 'Digital Asset Management' itself can be defined in a variety of ways, with differing viewpoints and perspectives. There is an amazing maze of interwoven terms and acronymns, often confusing, sometime conflicting. Some selected defintions include:

"A DAMS (Digital Asset Management System) infrastructure can ingest digital assests, store and index assets for easy searching, retrieve assets for use in many environments, and manage the rights associated with those assets."

From:
Overview of Digital Asset Management Systems
EDUCAUSE Evolving Technologies Committee, September 6, 2002
Alan McCord, University of Michigan
http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/DEC0203.pdf [PDF file]

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"Indexing, storing, searching and retrieving material through metadata tags is at the heart of the emerging technology of digital asset management (DAM)."

From:
Why metadata matters: it greases digital wheels
By Steven Vedro
Originally published in Current, Sept. 10, 2001
http://www.current.org/dtv/dtv0116meta.html

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"Digital asset management over the internet today requires technologies for:

• asserting intellectual property rights;

• protecting intellectual property;

• managing the intellectual property value chain;

• efficient storage and retrieval of digital assets;

• verifying the source of the assets (authentication);

• secure distribution of digital assets to end users;

• effective distribution of digital assets to end users."

From:
Digital Libraries: Digital Asset Management
Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) Workshop 6A, Winter 2001
Organized by: Michael Barnsley, University of Melbourne; George Cybenko,Dartmouth College and David Du, University of Minnesota
http://www.ima.umn.edu/multimedia/winter/m6.html