Recently I was talking with the guys at YWAM Harpenden about options available for digital asset management (DAM). None of the YWAM Centres that I have been at have had a system in place for this, it was pretty much always handled by the media guys just "knowing" what they had, and where it might be. Here's a fun parody video of what it's like to look for this content (I've been there and done that).

The solution talked about at the end of the above video is Extensis, a paid for product worth about $200 per system.

The approach that I've seen in a lot of YWAM centres of manual archiving leads to a lot of waste, and a lot of duplicate content being created when the original asset can not be found.

A better way to organise the information is with Digital Asset Management.

What would you look for in a Digital Asset Management System?

1. Open Source / Free
2. Web Based for cross system compatibility
3. Categorising / Tagging / Metadata for easy search
4. Support for multiple file and media types (photos, videos, etc)
5. Easy user management

One product that I can across while looking is called ResourceSpace, which looks like it meets all the above requirements:

So what do you reckon? Does your YWAM Centre use a Digital Management Asset system or do you do it manually? Would something like this work for you?