Information passes to an ad-planning system, which dummies pages and passes layouts back. The megaserver then marries ads to layouts and, through its OPI, produces dummied pages. After doing so, it lets the billing system know that the ads ran. But when limited in scope, DAM can be blessedly simple. Nor do such systems exist only at large papers.
Salespeople equipped with laptops use the database to pull up and update ads while visiting clients.
Photographers soon realized that the information they enter for photo assignments could be reused as captions and then key words in an archive. Copley officials suspect that the system will not only prove robust enough to handle production and archiving, but also serve California and Midwestern newspapers collectively. Other approaches blur the production-morgue dichotomy. The Post's Washingtonpost. That process now takes until 4 a.m. at times, largely because of the labor-intensive process of preparing newsroom copy for entry into the existing archive.