New roles for librarians: custodians or digital asset managers

This paper attempts to analyse the convergence
roles of librarian and digital asset management in the
contemporary information environment. The key components of
Digital Asset Management have been defined by van Niekerk,
one of the key commentators on the subject, as all of those tasks
needed to allow the ingest, annotation, cataloguing, storage,
retrieval and distribution of digital assets. This paper will
particularly look to Ranganathan's Five Laws of Library Science
and subsequent attempts to re-write them for the digital age as
the conceptual framework within which such an analysis can take
place. By examining the core principles on which library science
is built, it is argued that the principles of digital asset
management are firmly embedded within these and that an
overlap and ever-increasing convergence between the two
disciplines is inevitable.