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.