What is a digital asset?
A digital asset is a digital file that you have the right to use---and that most likely has value to you. It can be textual content or image content or multimedia. Your digital assets include your logos, your product images, illustrations, photography, word documents, spreadsheets, audio files, video files, CAD files page files and more.
How do you value a digital asset?
The word "asset" implies value. So...how much are your digital assets worth? There is certainly expense involved in creating the asset in the first place--taking the photograph, purchasing an illustration, creating a design, writing a document, filming a 30-second commercial. That's the cost of the asset--the value of the asset is a little harder to calculate. A company's logo is highly valuable, of course. Any asset that represents your company or promotes your products, or communicates to interested parties, has intrinsic value. The value of these assets increases with use. If wisely re-purposed and carefully put to work, assets can increase in value the more they are utilized. And re-purposing existing digital assets can save time and money as opposed to creating new assets.
How do you organize digital assets?
In a word: metadata.
Metadata describes other data. In the case of digital assets, metadata is the embedded descriptive information that is connected to the file. This is how you are able to organize and then search for and retrieve your digital assets. There are some file formats that automatically write metadata to the asset, or you can also add metadata to your files manually.
The metadata might describe how large a photo is , the image resolution, or when the image was created. Some types of metadata allow you to personalize the descriptive information exactly the way you want--in the case of an illustration, for example, you may want to catalog by artist or the subject or the product. For other files you may want to catalog by keywords or creation date or client name.
A Digital Asset Management system is a centralized location for storing, managing and accessing your digital assets--along with their accompanying metadata, which allows you to organize and retrieve your files.
