Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions: Best Practice Cases
well as children’s, how-to, health, and other types of books, music CDs, audiobooks,
and videos.
Like Large Publishing Group, RDA has a number of asset repositories that it is looking
to unify, including a couple of different image repositories in different geographies as
well as a purpose-built text editorial workflow system and a Web content management
system for many of the company’s Web sites. Many of RDA’s content assets are user-
contributed, so they are very spread out geographically, and it is especially important to
be able to search across asset types and geographies.
RDA also has an extensive print repurposing program already in place: for example, the
content in the book Extraordinary Uses for Ordinary Things is used in dozens of
products ranging from the full large hardcover book down to small extracts inserted
into magazines or sold at supermarket checkout counters. RDA is interested in scaling
up the success of repurposing programs like these with more automation, more
consistency, and better ability to browse across the enterprise to find repurposable
content. This, along with RDA’s syndication of its magazine content to multiple
aggregators and licensees, leads to the need to track what content items are used where
— something that is not possible with several scattered and nonintegrated systems.
RDA’s requirements for DAM also include improving the automation of feeds from the
content repository to the company’s various Web sites and creating feeds of content to
mobile devices without building a “silo” for that purpose.
Laura Capasso-Fiorenza, Director of Global Publishing Technologies, led the process to
select a DAM system for RDA. They looked at several different types of technologies,
including XML databases as well as full-blown DAM systems, and issued an RFI and
RFP to vendors. They selected Nstein and began a pilot project in the fall of 2007.
Capasso-Fiorenza says that they liked the fact that Nstein was an all-encompassing
solution that included text mining as well as the repository component and XML
capabilities.
The objectives of the RDA pilot were straightforward: to show that they could ingest the
types of content that were important to them, including images, illustrations, XML
documents, and content from legacy systems (XML and non-XML). All text content was
ingested in XML form into Nstein. The pilot also exercised the system’s content and
metadata search capabilities, as well as its ability to maintain audit trails of where
content is used (Web site X, syndication to aggregator Y, etc.).
Unlike LPG, RDA chose to use Nstein’s out-of-the-box user interface for the pilot, in
anticipation of designing a custom user interface later.
Content export capabilities in the RDA pilot were not fully automated, but Nstein built
“triggers” for exporting content to see if it would work. A trigger is code attached to a
database that causes an action to take place if a certain condition is met. For example,
trigger code could be developed that generates a feed to a certain syndication partner if
content appears in the system that matches a certain set of keywords.
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