Matt touches on the most important distinction between a DAMS and CIS, but to make it as explicit as possible: most CIS's treat a digital object as an attribute of a physical object. In other words, there's a field in the object record that references a digital image, sound file or whatever. But to manage digital objects successfully you have to treat them as objects -- they need their own records, tables, etc. which can be linked to museum object records but don't have to be. I agree with the importance of the workflow issues. Information can be captured automatically and lot can be either entered by the scanner operator as part of file header metadata say, through a photoshop profile, or in the ideal world merged with data from the CIS. Kevin de Vorsey uses a home-grown system at the American Museum of Natural History to do the latter.
I'm a Mint user too, so let us know how it goes! Chuck
