Shyamali Ghosh
At the 5th Annual RSuite User’s Conference, someone tossed out this gross generalization early in the morning, much to the audience’s amusement. The phrase was repeated onstage and off for the rest of the day, and probably for days afterward. Small wonder—most attendees were involved in maintaining complex databases originally created in the 1970s, some still held together by multiple pieces of software and databases that were never really suited to the task in the first place.
There’s no need, though, to go back forty years to see how content storage and accessibility has changed. In the mid-1990’s I urged my employer, a small publisher of bioscience books and journals, to look at storing content electronically so that we could easily access articles on a given topic, and hopefully repackage content to our advantage. My boss thought it was a nice idea, but too much work. He couldn’t see the investment paying off. By the early 2000’s, I had moved on to textbooks. After watching the same quadratic equation written into and out of our newest math book over and over again, I begged my employers to consider some kind of content storage strategy, but to no avail. It was too big of a job for them to undertake.
Today, attitudes have changed a lot. Giant Oxford University Press is in the process of producing a standardized description of each item of content they own to create a free, cross-linked, searchable database they’ll call the Oxford Index. Given the amount of diverse content they have, the task is herculean, and the company representatives at the conference acknowledged that the Index requires a major investment of time and resources. Nevertheless, the company sees the investment as necessary, a process that will improve both the publisher’s and the user’s experience. And Oxford is not alone. Journal publishers are now much more adept at storing and repackaging content in special issues or adding addenda or errata as it becomes available. Even some educational publishers now routinely store individual examples and questions as xml data, so there’s no need to start from scratch every time a new equation is needed. As the barrier to entry for small to mid-size publishers gets lower and lower, few can now argue the question of the ROI on xml content repositories. Let’s hope we can shorten the adoption cycle on the next round of publishing technology innovation to a bit less than
a few decades, or its going to be a long century.
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