Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions: Best Practice Cases
For example, photographers from one of the LPG titles create extensive photo coverage
of one of the more highly visible public events of the year, and they syndicate the
resulting photos through Corbis (one of the leading image licensing agencies, owned by
Microsoft’s Bill Gates) and other licensors.
Saunders enlisted the help of Wendy Rodriguez, Associate Director for Editorial
Technology, to gather requirements and select a DAM system. Rodriguez had well over
a decade of experience with DAM systems and had seen them all; she shared the desire
for an enterprise-wide approach to DAM and became Saunders’ colleague.
The process started in October 2006. LPG selected Nstein’s Digital Asset Management
platform, in part because of its use of IXIASOFT’s TEXTML native XML database,
which she had seen used at a couple of other publishers to good effect. Another reason
for the selection of Nstein was that Nstein exposed a lot of its product’s functionality in
APIs that external developers could use. LPG intended to hire a developer to maintain
and enhance the system over time so as not to be overly dependent on the vendor for
ongoing support.
The objective was to bring every piece of “as-published” material into the Nstein
repository, including text, images (preview only), and page layouts (in PDF). High-
resolution images and Adobe InDesign page layout files would still be stored on file
servers.
LPG kicked off its process with Nstein in March 2007. The first two to three months
were spent gathering data. Nstein guided them along the process of figuring out what
types of assets to define, what metadata fields should be defined on those asset types,
and how the permission model should be set up.
The security model actually took a disproportionate amount of effort, because LPG
wanted to do something with security that Nstein had never implemented before. They
wanted to impose two independent layers of permissions: one was role-based
(permission to edit articles, permission to edit photos, permission to create external
feeds, etc.), while the other was magazine title-based (user works for Magazine X, user
works for Magazine Y, etc.). Nstein can support both of these types of permissions but
had not integrated them together before.
In LPG’s digital publishing workflow, they send page layouts to an outsourcer in Sri
Lanka, which builds XML pages for each article and its associated content items
(photos, illustrations, pullquotes, decks, sidebars, etc.), using a combination of
automated and manual processes. The XML for each article contains links to images
with tags in PAM (PRISM Aggregator Message, a magazine industry metadata
standard) format that contain pathnames. LPG receives the XML files from the
outsourcer and ingests them into the Nstein system, which resolves the pathnames into
links. This way, users of the DAM system can view articles in PDF and click on links to
navigate to the text and to images themselves, which are stored as low-resolution
previews with visible watermarks.
Editors insert into the PDF files the numbers of contracts with authors and
photographers, to make it easy to look up the rights that LPG has to the content when
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