Digital asset management (DAM) and the implementation of its use as a computer application is required in the collection of digital assets to ensure that the owner, and possibly their delegates, can perform operations on the data files. Terminology The term media asset management (MAM) may be used in reference to Digital Asset Management when applied to the sub-set of digital objects commonly considered "media", namely audio recordings, photos, and videos. Any editing process that involves media, especially video, can make use of a MAM to access media components to be edited together, or to be combined with a live feed, in a fluent manner. A MAM typically offers at least one searchable index of the images, audio, and videos it contains constructed from metadata harvested from the images using pattern recognition, or input manually. Management Creation Applications implement digital asset management by importing it from the analog and/or digital domains (by encoding, scanning, optical character recognition, etc.) or by authoring it as new object. Indexing A primary function of a DAM system is to make assets easily available to its users by providing a searchable index that supports retrieval of assets by their content and/or metadata. The cataloging function is usually part of the ingestion process for new assets. Workflow Digital assets will typically have a lifecycle, which may include various states such as creation, approval, live, archived and deleted. Version control Often a DAM system will store earlier versions of a digital asset and allow those to be downloaded or reverted to. Therefore, a DAM system can operate as an advanced type of version control system. Access control Finally, a DAM system typically includes security controls ensuring relevant people have access to assets. This will often involve integration with existing directory services via a technology such as single sign-on. Categorization Smaller DAM systems are used in a particular operational context, for instance in video production systems. The key differentiators between them are the types of input encoders used for creating digital copies of assets to bring them under management, and the output decoders and/or formatters used to make them usable as documents and/or online resources. The metadata of a content item can serve as a guide to the selection of the codec(s) needed to handle the content during processing, and may be of use when applying access control rules to enforce authorization policy. Requirements Assets that require particular