Digital asset management (DAM) is a business process or a software tool for organizing the creation, management, distribution and archiving of a rich media asset. Rich media assets include photos, music, videos, animations, podcasts and other multimedia content.
Digital Asset Management involves the creation of an archive, the development of an infrastructure to preserve and manage digital assets and a search functionality that allows end users to identify, locate and retrieve an asset. At its simplest, a DAM is a set of database records. Each database record contains metadata explaining the name of the file, its format and information about its content and usage.
While digital media management technologies were once used exclusively by publishing and media companies, they are increasingly being incorporated into content management systems. DAM is generally considered to be a subset of enterprise content management (ECM), a business process or tool for organizing text documents, email and spreadsheets.