Here’s the last month’s Digital Asset Management (DAM) articles which had a lasting impression on me – picked from the constant stream of blog posts floating by on Planet DAM.

Part of my LIS education was old school “Googling”: running around a scientific library, searching the shelves for a book or journal containing the right information. So I especially enjoyed Denzil Ford’s explanation on why it makes sense to call DAM a “library”, given its similarities with the traditional book library. See also Ralph Windsor’s introductory article and Constance Ard on how the core librarian skills remain relevant.

The recording of the New Jersey DAM Meetup’s virtual meeting on Metadata Automation, featuring David Riecks, Deb Fanslow and many other experts, is a highlight, and it’s being recommended by Ralph Windsor. See also Ian Matzen on Additive Metadata.

CEO Ramon Forster, in a letter and a presentation, introduces the upcoming Picturepark release – an API-first DAM system, ready to act as a “headless CMS”, with deep, semantically-linked metadata. Ralph Windsor (of DAM News) comments on this and other product announcements in Focus Moving Towards Integration & APIs In 2017.

According to David Roe on CMSWire, ECM vendor Nuxeo is now focusing on the DAM market (backed by $30M funding in 2016). CEO Eric Barroca: “Nuxeo Platform is disrupting the DAM market.” (See also Bynder’s $22M funding.)

Integrating data which lives in different systems is hard to do well, as Theresa Regli outlines in her article on PIM, PCM, and DAM. In Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive are not DAM systems, she reveals that 35% of 100+ vendors failed the DAM Foundation test, with versioning, transcoding and embedded metadata being the most challenging areas.

Libby Maurer shares how they started doing UX research at Widen, shifting from a tech-driven culture to one focused on DAM customer experience.

Elizabeth Keathley writes about finding a DAM career, and warns us about fake job interviews (and about inviting her without really meaning it). In Rules for Ruling DAM, she applies lessons from The Dictator’s Handbook to promote DAM adoption in the enterprise.

DAM system pricing is usually pretty vague, so it’s nice to see some real numbers (taken from the DAM News survey) which Danielle Templeton then compares with the costs of other “martech” software.

I love it when DAM practitioners tell their stories: This month it’s Susan Pleiman (Marriott), Bryan Cohen (Pfizer), Frédéric Sanuy (Dalim), and Troy Underwood (Kraft Heinz Company).

For interesting DAM system screencasts, check out Flight by Canto, Bynder and Daminion.

As you’d expect, some posts are looking back at the year 2016 – I like the ones from WoodWing and Canto best.

Finally, Ralph Windsor, in Improving DAM In 2017 And Beyond: Call For Contributions, invites “those who have an interest in Digital Asset Management to write an article [on DAM News] explaining how they would modify and enhance current product platforms, other associated services or possibly introduce industry-wide initiatives.” Please participate so that we have lots to read and think about!