Digital Media Asset Management: core functions

The first article in this series described the move towards all-digital media and the systems that produce, manage and distribute them, enabling all media to be stored on computer media. But to be able to find what you're looking for in a mass of digital data, you need to set up Digital Media Asset Management, or DMAM (or simply MAM, or DMM), i.e. the management of digital audio, photo and video media. To achieve this, additional data, or metadata, is associated with the data representing the sounds or images, to identify them and describe both the content and the container (format). Digital media can then be managed throughout a digital production-distribution chain, the functions of which are shown in figure 1 :

• the upstream functions : Acquire, Analyze-Index and Edit have already been presented in the article ;

• central and transversal functions: Store & Serve, Manage data (media and metadata), and Search & Retrieve are in this article – The Manage and protect rights function is the subject of a separate article. – Workflow function ends last article ;

• downstream functions: Distributing over networks and digital media, Selling digital media are described in the fifth and final article in the series. .

For an explanation of the abbreviations and acronyms used in this article, the reader is referred in

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