Digitising info in publishing industry

In recent years, libraries from around the world have been undergoing a huge transition to provide content in electronic format for their users. As this new spend puts pressure onto library budgets, choosing the right content for your library is vital. The new challenge is to understand 'How users are accessing this content.'

MPS Technologies, wholly owned subsidiary of the publishing company, Macmillan India, has developed library tools after seeing an enormous potential in the publishing space.

Martha Sedgwick, product manager of ScholarlyStats, spoke to R Jai Krishna of CyberMedia News about digitising information in the publishing industry, at a time when usage of e-content is increasing.

Could you brief us about your new product – ScholarlyStats and its usage in the libraries?

ScholarlyStats is an innovative application, which is a solution to a librarian, who has been constantly searching for a better way to analyse the use of a library's online content.

The product, developed in eight months at the Gurgaon Research and Development (R&D) Centre of MPS Technologies, gathers, standardizes, and delivers these statistics through a user-friendly portal to provide its users a sophisticated tool, giving valuable insights and helping inform decision-making.

The application plays a vital role in contributing to the understanding of what content users need. This enables libraries in providing the best customer service and making their purchasing decisions that is right for their organization. It also helps the librarian to gain insights into user behaviour at the library and reduces the real cost of managing the usage statistics provided by the vendors. The application gives libraries a single point access to all their usage statistics that are, for many, a struggle to collate, available for electronic subscribers on a large number of different sites and in a variety of formats.

What was the rationale behind developing ScholarlyStats?

With the Internet penetration going up, the usage of e-content is also increasing. Even in some parts of the world, where there are bandwidth issues, we expect, it to pick-up in the next two to three years. Considering the growth and usage of e-content it is becoming more and more difficult for libraries to classify journals and they end-up spending on content, which people rarely use or do not use it at all. Thus, a database application becomes essential. We as a technology arm of a publishing house do understand the niche segment and thus ventured into developing the tool, along with inputs from the libraries as well as publishers.

Hence, the final product. ScholarlyStats now provides libraries across the globe with consolidated vendor usage statistics. ScholarlyStats collects, standardises and consolidates journal and database usage reports, providing libraries with a single point of access to their valuable usage data. This makes the role of a librarian proactive.

What is your future strategy in digitising information in the publishing industry?

To address our two key markets – libraries and publishers -- we are now working on developing a tool on database and pricing information to be published online, which will also have data analysis along with publishers’ web-analytics.

MPS is embarking on an ambitious strategy of putting all the publishers and their books online, thus creating a virtual bookstore, where the online formats would be sold. To enhance sales, we are considering options of publishing restricted content or may be a few chapters from the book, with the publishers content on the web. The company will be supporting the backend processes involved as a hosted and managed services. This would give a huge potential for the STM journal markets.

The new initiative, which will act as a single online portal, will see the publishers’ rating go up, enable libraries to decide on which content they want to stock up depending on the usage and making libraries run as a business house in future.

© CyberMedia News