6 free publications and resources for DAM managers

6th November 2024

The Digital Asset Management industry is constantly evolving, as new technologies and best practices emerge.

This means DAM Managers have to spend almost as much time keeping themselves up-to-date with industry news as they do administering their organisation’s DAM system. Fortunately, there are a number of free publications and resources available. In this article we take a look at five of the best.

DAM News

The number one source of Digital Asset Management news, DAM News publishes the latest news, reviews, trends and opinions about the DAM industry.

DAM News regularly have in-depth feature articles contributed by independent authors, but they also provide weekly round-ups of industry news from around the web, whether that’s from vendors or DAM experts. Additionally, the site frequently highlights industry events and high profile job vacancies.

DAM News publishes the majority of their content for free, but you can also subscribe to access premium articles, special reports, webinars and course notes.

DAM News was acquired by French Digital Asset Management consultancy Activo in September 2023, but that hasn’t affected their journalistic rigour, and the site continues to be an essential resource for DAM Managers at all experience levels.

Mod Librarian

The Mod Librarian is a blog written by Tracy Forzaglia, an expert in taxonomy, metadata and content management.

Tracy publishes regular round-ups of knowledge graph and taxonomy-based articles, as well as content focusing on Digital Asset Management, metadata best practices, cataloguing, digitisation, search and social media, emerging technologies and visual resources.

Hedden Information Management

Another high-profile expert in the field of taxonomy, ontology, metadata and indexing, Heather Hedden is founder of Hedden Information Management, while she also maintains The Accidental Taxonomist Blog—a very highly regarded resource that’s frequently featured on DAM News.

Heather’s blog content focuses primarily on taxonomy, but also covers information architecture, content management, metadata and much more.

Kaptur

Digital Asset Management is all about visual media, and Kaptur is one of the best news magazines focusing on the visual tech space, including augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), content marketing, mobile apps, image recognition, in-image advertising and image search.

Some examples of the sorts of content Kaptur publishes include ‘Rethinking Photography in the Age of AI’, ‘6 Game-changing Visual Tech Innovations’ and ‘Anchoring Trust in Visual Content’.

Kaptur was founded and edited by Paul Melcher, an expert in the visual technology sector and MD of Melcher Systems LLC—a boutique consulting firm providing expertise in visual technologies.

Canva

Moving away from free news publications, Canva is a popular cloud-based editing software that users can access in their browser and is great at helping DAM Managers to easily create and tweak images.

You can achieve professional results on desktop and mobile devices by using some of Canva's templates that offer a useful starting point for your designs. They're categorised too, making it easy to create promotional content for a range of use cases.

You can perform basic photo enhancements, like adjusting the brightness, contrast and saturation too.

Canva's free features mean you can maintain a professional look for your company on the go, and you can gain access to the more advanced editing tools, fonts, and templates for a subscription or small one-off payments.

READ MORE: Top 5 free picture editors

Discord

The DAM Folk channel at Discord.com is a great community that Digital Asset Managers can join for free.

There are discussions about DAM industry jobs, conferences, best practices and more general conversations, and it’s perfect for meeting and collaborating with fellow DAM experts and practitioners.

Looking for free Digital Asset Management resources? How about a free DAM system? 

You can launch your ResourceSpace instance within minutes, absolutely free. Choose from a preset template (for example Museum, Academic Institution or Restaurant Chain) or a blank system, and start using ResourceSpace immediately.

Not ready to get started? You can book a free, no obligation demo by following the link below.