All around the world, there are towns and even provinces built around corporations. In these places the streets have no names that aren't connected to the company, the founder, or perhaps his favorite pet. Such towns are populated by generations of families that share not only common strands of DNA, but also years and decades of working for that company. This is a case where workplace becomes so interwoven with personal life, you look at local editions of your workers’ union newsletter as a family album.

Imagine such a company, using or not yet using a DAM system, losing all these “assets?” And by “assets” in this case I mean not just the company packaging from 100 years ago, but chunks of someone’s life and heritage. Or, imagine losing all the paper and canvas-based art from the period of Italian Renaissance? Or, your collection of LPs and audio cassettes?

As with many things in life, technology is not the answer to all questions. A DAM system on its own will not help you preserve your personal or organizational history. Digital preservation is comprised of many policies, activities, and strategies around digitizing assets and making sure future generations will be able to “read” and use them. After all, there's no guarantee that any sofware you'll be running 20 years from now will be able to read a .jpg or a .pdf.

It wouldn’t be sensible to equate digital preservation with DAM technology, as in “I have a DAM, I don't need to worry about digital preservation.” Nevertheless, there are many functionalities in a DAM system that will help you with some of the steps in this process, such as:

• Asset ingest
• Scanning, reformatting or other methods of digitization
• Rights management
• Multiple format support
• Long-term archiving and storage
• Search
• Metadata management
• Disaster recovery

DAM systems don't, however, ingest, create thumbnails of, or transform the files you created on your Commodore 64 back in the 1980s. 

If you have particular file formats from earlier digital eras, or are about to embark on a project to digitize tanglible objects, you'll want to think beyond the DAM about a longer-term plan for digital preservation - despite the feel-good vibes about getting a DAM up and running, that's only for the current generation.