As anyone in the DAM industry can tell you, metadata is an important word in our lexicon. We, as vendors, field calls day-in and day-out about metadata.
“Can your system read embedded metadata? XMP? IPTC? EXIF”
“Can you map system metadata changes back to embedded metadata fields?
“Can you sync metadata across different databases?”
“Can we create our own metadata fields?”
There’s no getting around the importance of metadata— without metadata, finding digital assets would be increasingly difficult—and because of that, we’ve built a variety of tools to help you map, change, view, and export all of your metadata fields to your heart’s content. But as important as metadata is to our industry, there still isn’t a controlled vocabulary to pin down the subject of managing digital assets.
Is it “Digital Asset Management,” or “DAM”, or “DAMS”? Digital asset management is also a term being adopted to discuss the management of cryptocurrency. Recent searches for DAM content turn up many articles about managing cryptocurrency portfolios. A question occurred to our team one day, could our industry be headed for a change in the naming convention that defines our field?
We began to quickly explore DAM and its problems. There’s the obvious search clutter that has someone sifting through articles relating to restricting the flow of water. That can be cut down by adding terms to your search to identify technology or software, but then you’re still competing against the spelling errors (We’ve covered this before). This is a real post on Twitter:
So what does a DAM do? In today’s industry, it obviously does more than manage your assets. A DAM allows you to search, browse, collect, share, approve, and even create new digital media. Essentially, it’s letting you explore your assets, so we began to talk about Digital Media Management or Digital Media Exploration. DMM isn’t quite as catchy, neither is DME. Then we thought about going completely tech-start-up and misspelling Exploration as Xploration. DMX!
For those of you not familiar with the rapper DMX, one of his most popular songs is called “X gon give it to ya!” I personally can’t think of a better catchphrase for a Digital Media Exploration system. Looking for a specific photo or logo? X gon give it to you! Looking for that PowerPoint presentation from last year’s sale’s meeting? X gon give it to you! And given the rapper's recent financial problems, he may even be open for an endorsement opportunity.
Of course, this is all in good fun, but I for one can’t help but find the humor in the fact that an industry that relies on findability and taxonomy is itself suffering from the problems it set out to alleviate. It just goes to show that in this DAM world, there are a lot of things to figure out. If you need any help on your DAM journey, give us a call, NetX gon give it to you!
