With the widespread digitization of art, photography, and music, plus the introduction of streaming video, many colleges and universities are realizing that they must develop or purchase systems to preserve their school's digitized objects; that they must create searchable databases so that researchers can find and share copies of digital files; that they must track access control and permissions information; and that they need to integrate multimedia with learning management systems. Although today there is a wide range of commercial solutions available (each of which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars), there is also a thriving open source community called Fedora Commons (www.fedora-commons.org), targeting digital asset management in higher education. Yet a few years ago, neither proprietary nor open data asset management (DAM) solutions existed. This article takes a look at how different universities such as the University of Michigan, The Johns Hopkins University, and Gallaudet University create their DAM systems.