When working with metadata, organizations must plan carefully to determine the optimal approach to entering, updating and validating information. Modern Digital Asset Management software will enable the existing metadata (information created by a program or device) to be read, stored and made visible to users. In addition in needs to allow user generated metadata and make that information portable with the assets.
DAM software should provide:
- Users should be able to update individual metadata fields or add them on the fly.
- Programs should provide an easy process to update several assets simultaneously that contain identical metadata information.
- Mass update capabilities should allow the addition or update of large numbers of files, preferably by importing data via a spreadsheet, CSV or XML file.
- Metadata should be stored against individual revisions of assets as the information will change during editing.
- Administrators should be able to create custom metadata fields of any type including drop-down lists for categorizing assets.
- Metadata must be exportable for validation and reporting purposes into spreadsheets for XML files.
- Any new metadata added to the DAM must be embeddable into the asset for portability.
- Users should be able to add custom Job related metadata.
- Users should be able to add custom Task related metadata.
- Users must be able to report on custom metadata fields.
For more information about metadata, view the Metadata Basics for DAM whitepaper.