Call for Contributions: Digital Asset Management Standards
As organisations increasingly rely on DAM systems to not only structure, store, and retrieve their digital assets, but also to license, distribute, and track their marketing and branding content, the need for clear, consistent, and widely adopted standards has never been greater. With the advent of AI, which is increasingly at risk from being used for fakery and misinformation, both hardware and software industries are racing to implement standards that provide added authenticity and digital provenance, usually via a new set of metadata standards or built-in security mechanisms such as origin watermarking.
Standards within metadata and file formats are fairly prominent in our everyday content workflows, with common schemas and languages such as EXIF, IPTC, Dublin Core, XML, JSON and CSV being familiar to many users; we often rely on these for exporting, importing and migrating data from one place to another. However, standards for DAM interoperability for example, are still conspicuously absent from most, if not all, platforms. A reluctance by vendors to standardise or unify their platforms’ architectures can be understood from a competitive perspective, yet as DAM systems become an increasingly more important and centralised component in the digital asset supply chain, the number of interconnected applications and services they have in common (Adobe, Office, Canva etc.) has also increased.
As more API-first and headless platforms are adopted and we utilise AI to assist and analyse our digital workflows, surely the industry should be looking to standardise both the functionality of DAM systems and the protocols by which they connect, interact and exchange data with the broader digital landscape? Ironically, for a stable full of software vendors that claim to be able provide a ‘single source of truth’, adopting a single dedicated standard against which their DAM’s capabilities and interoperability can be checked and measured doesn’t seem to be a particularly high priority.
To investigate the topic further, we are calling on our readers, subscribers and sponsors for their stories, experiences, and insights on how standards can shape real-world DAM practices. Has your organisation witnessed an improvement in DAM efficiency after implementing a new metadata schema or taxonomy? Does your sector require that digital assets comply with regulatory or industry-specific standards (e.g. government, medical or legal)? Have you found it difficult to implement, adhere to, or even find a specific standard for a custom integration?
Contributed articles should be no less than 800 words, exclusive to DAM News (i.e. not previously published elsewhere), non-promotional, and adhere to our editorial guidelines.
You can send your contributions to russell.mcveigh@activo-consulting.com.
We reserve the right to modify submissions in order to comply with our editorial guidelines and will notify the author should we need to make any changes. We will also provide a link to either you or your company’s website and/or LinkedIn profile.
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