Digital Asset Management (DAM) applications are quickly becoming essential systems in business (big and small) as the depth and breadth of digital media continues to expand.

In higher education, where photography resources are paramount in branding and marketing to a wide-ranging audience, how can a DAM be developed in an era of austerity? For uploading, managing, and storing photography resources, where does a department begin?

The College of Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology embarked on an internal development project throughout 2012 and 2013 to design, develop, roll out, and refine a DAM.

We’ll look at:
The Issue: Existing data/metadata management for photography
The Analysis: Analysis of existing DAM systems available
The Decision: Why we went with Drupal
The Plan: How we approached a DAM in Drupal
The Development: Development cycles and milestones
The Roll-Out: How we implemented the DAM with existing business practices
The Future: Looking ahead at areas of improvement and new trends

More broadly, we will consider the basic structure to develop your own DAM application using Drupal based on standardized workflows and business processes. We will list a collection of modules and features that were essential in constructing our workflows.

We will also consider benefits and limitations of our deployed application, as well as our expansion into video asset management.

We will offer a downloadable package that contains a starting point for DAM development in Drupal with a preconfigured Drupal website with test content.