Upon hearing the term Asset Management System most production people think of a tape library or a system to keep track of equipment. In today's world of tapeless acquisition, our master assets are digital, and a comprehensive method to keep track of them is usually referred to as a Digital Asset Management system (DAM). The term Media Asset Management System is also widely used, and for our purposes they are interchangeable.

Many productions today consider the archiving of acquisition media something to be dealt with after completion of the work. Other projects consider the backing up of original data onto additional hard drives as their archive. These, however, do not utilize the organizational and long-term advantages of a proper archival system.