If a picture is worth a thousand words, my collection could rival Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. Film, slides, prints, and, of course, digital. Not just photos--illustrations, videos, and music, not to mention my archives of test scripts and materials. They live on Bernoulli, Zip, Jaz, and various optical formats--whatever the storage medium du jour has been for the past 20 years or so. Frankly, it's a bit of a nightmare. A few years ago, in an uncharacteristic burst of organization, I catalogued about 100 of my slides. So there you have it: in the interests of full disclosure, you now know that I am hopeless at asset management (don't even get me started about my finances). All those genes went to my older sister, leaving me with only my parents' pack-rat tendencies.

Right about now, you're snorting and wondering why you should read a column about digital asset management (DAM)--essentially, the practice of structuring digital object data so that you can find, retrieve, and track it easily--by someone who doesn't practice it. Because I've tried--and failed--with a variety of systems. And as such, I'm going to invoke my favorite mom-ism: Do as I say, not as I do.

Fools rush in
I'm guessing that the clothes in your dresser are arranged so that it's easiest to get to the most frequently used garments. You probably didn't have to think about it when you initially put them there and might not even have thought of it since. If you put your underwear, say, crammed behind some sweaters on a shelf that requires a stepstool to reach, you'd be forced to think about it every day. You may throw everything into one drawer or fold and sort them neatly; either way, it's habit. If you consistently can find what you need, it's a good habit; if you can't, it's bad. The moral of this blather? Once established, the right system requires little or no thought.

With asset management, the consequences of bad organization are harder to overcome than with a messy underwear drawer; conversely, though, I like to think the consequences of good management are more rewarding. And having the wrong management system may be worse than having none at all--not only do you get discouraged and fail to maintain it, but it makes switching to a new system look like an even higher mountain to climb. So before you do anything, you have to stop and think: What's your goal? If you don't know how and why you'll want to retrieve them, how frequently you'll need to access and update your collection, or the types of assets you'll want to manage, there's no way you'll be able to set up the right system. And you have to find a system that matches your style, whether you're a throw-'em-in-the-drawer or fold-sort-and-align type.

Style counsel
Basically, every DAM is a database. A lot of the time, that fact is obscured by a pretty interface, but if you recognize the underlying structure, it's a lot easier to find a method and supporting software that meets your needs. Even the file systems in Windows and the various Apple OS versions have database structures, making it possible (with some work) to turn your OS into a DAM system. Choosing among different solutions can be reduced to figuring out how much you want the software to hide its database roots from you. Then you need to decide how much control you want to surrender to the god of automation. The illustration below should give you some idea of how the solutions break down across user task and style types. As you move from left to right, the systems look more database-y. As you move from top to bottom, they become less powerful.

Of course, these are just the extremes of the spectrum; most of you probably fall into those empty areas in the middle. I'll be covering the different tasks you need to think about performing--sharing, archiving, and retrieving media--as well as the specific products that occupy those empty ellipses in my next couple of columns.

Got any media organization nightmares or success stories? Please share in TalkBack. Maybe we could all learn something.