Best Practices for DAM Maintenance

Now that you are up and running with your DAM, it is important to take some time to consider how to maintain the DAM so that it continues to be a dependable resource for your users.

Below are some important tips on maintaining your DAM:

1. Educate your contributors on your metadata strategy. When you make changes to your metadata strategy, communicate those changes to your contributors as well.
   
   
2. Don’t plan to add metadata later. Add metadata right after you upload assets to your DAM.
   
   
3. Keep keywords consistent by using a controlled vocabulary. When building the controlled vocabulary, gather feedback from contributors and general users to ensure that the words on the list are meaningful. Update the controlled vocabulary regularly.
   
   
4. Audit your DAM for metadata completeness and organization regularly. Are assets being keyworded and are they being placed in the correct folders?
   
   
5. Hold your contributors accountable for their role in DAM, for tasks such as adding metadata.
   
   
6. Request feedback from users and take action on that feedback. If users are not able to locate a given set of assets, perhaps it is because they are searching by keywords that you are not tagging assets with.
   
   
7. Setup metadata dropdown menus for commonly used fields such as photographer name or brand.
   
   
8. Keep your folder structure current. If you have folders setup product, when a new product is added to your organization’s portfolio, add a folder for the new product in your DAM right away.
   
   
9. Check for misspellings and typos in metadata and keywords. One misspelling can keep an asset from being found.
   
   
10. Set a schedule for your audits and stick to it. 

Following these guidelines for maintaining your DAM will save you a great deal of time in the future.

Updated February 23, 2024 20:26