Digital Asset Management (or “There’s a reason the acronym is DAM!”)

Historic images in various forms including a Magic Lantern slide, stereoviews, postcards and photographs ready for capturing and DAM.

Digital Asset Management or DAM, for the purposes of this blog post, is basically a fancy name for properly saving and backing-up your files.

First an anecdote:  When I first started making historical documentaries, I began to deal with archives and archivist across the country.  I was shocked to find that they had not embraced the process of scanning and digitally archiving images and documents in their collections.  Their idea of “back-ups” was to take a photo of a photo or negative or film in their collection and then squirrel away the original in a climate-controlled vault.  In our digital age this seemed infuriatingly archaic to me.  Why not scan images and have digital copies existing in multiple locations, perhaps in archives around the world?  As I thought about it more, the answer was pretty simple.  Scanning hundreds of thousands of assets takes time and money.  Placing a photo in a vault essentially means you never have to worry about it again.  Whereas, digital assets require upkeep and constant evaluation of the newest storage media.  So, on further reflection, archivists continuing to do things the way they have for decades makes a bit more sense to me.

However, we all live in an increasingly digital world.  How do you best preserve images and files?  Well, first of all I suggest you take all those old family photos or historic images of your company and have them professionally scanned.  Once you have images in a digital form, you need to practice good DAM (hopefully, damn good dam!).

Here are my simple (?) suggestions for Digital Asset Management:

• Back-up your files on a regular basis. (Duh!)
• Back-up your files to at least two separate devices.  The adage is “It’s not a matter of if a drive will fail but when.”  Every digital file you have – whatever it is – should have a back-up copy.
• Back-up your files to at least two types of media (i.e. hard drive and Data DVD, hard drive and tape, hard drive and solid state drive, etc.).  Every type of media has advantages and disadvantages.  The way to overcome the disadvantages is to use more than one type of media to store your files.
• Keep your back-up files in at least two locations (office and home, home and safe deposit box, computer and cloud, etc.).  Bad things happen; fires, earthquakes, tornados, floods; solar flares!  Keeping duplicate files in two completely separate physical locations will help guard them.

And my personal pet peeve (although not technically a digital asset):  Don’t just rely on digital copies of your precious photos, have your photos professionally printed as well.

“Geesh, that seems like a lot of work.”  Yes, Digital Asset Management takes time and diligence.  And, of course, I’ve only really scratched the surface here.  If this seems daunting to you, consider the consequences of not doing the work involved;  the potential loss of critical files and images that simply can not be replaced.