George, I'm sure that your query is about more than just what "DAM" means, but just in case ... It's an acronym for
Digital
Asset
Manager, which basically means the part of digital photography software that performs a cataloguing function. Not all digital photography programs incorporate a DAM - some are only editors - and there are some stand-alone DAMs.
Lightroom is one example that is both a DAM and editor; I don't use it so cannot give a specific answer to your extended question, but Capture One, which I use, allows you to place images in a structured catalogue and also to tag them with keywords. Capture One will allow you to access the original raw (or RAW
) files and the edited variants. I'd be surprised if LR did not do the same.
HTH