Businesses and organizations of all types rely on digital asset management systems (DAMs) to store content and enable internal and external resources to connect and share assets and information. As the global demand to access and engage with digital materials increases, it is no longer sufficient to deposit assets into a database without leveraging modern approaches and technologies in order to create a smart, interconnected content ecosystem for stakeholders and content consumers. Improved classification tools, structured metadata and DAM systems, collaborative environments, and open standards enable the creation of rich semantic content and dynamic media consumption. This course will explore the underlying structure of a DAM, how digital assets are stored, enriched, published, and integrated into Web content. Special attention will be given to Web and DAM standards for creating semantic metadata, efficient processes and tools, and Linked-data collections.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

1. Understand basic components, processes, and data formats encountered in using a DAM system  or other online environments sufficiently to develop business requirements for working on a team evaluating or developing a DAM system.
2. Develop an understanding of how structured content can be organized, encoded, and validated to ensure it satisfies required business rules and requirements.
3. Understand how metadata is gathered, formatted, and stored, to help and how these processes are related to business requirements and impact system selection and design.
4. Gain insight into how metadata and content assets may be modular, reused, and how it affects metadata model design.
5. Gain insight into different data storage methods and their related search tools to enable developing business requirements for searching for digital assets.
6. Explore various indexing, cataloging, and knowledge organization approaches and how they may benefit a DAM system’s capabilities.