How digitalization provides easy access to content

Natraj Kuman, general manager of BPO Services, HTC Global Services

Microfilm does the job of preserving your company’s documents and publications for up to 500 years. But content digitalization offers an archival-quality storage method that allows convenient, searchable access to these materials.
“Digitalization allows you to unlock the potential of the content,” says Natraj Kumar, general manager of Business Process Outsourcing (BP0) Services at HTC Global. “The Financial Times, for example, already has the content and most is available in physical form. They wanted the content posted on their website so people can access it and they can make revenue from it.”
Smart Business spoke with Kumar about the process of transferring content to digital form, the value it provides and the types of companies that are benefitting from digitalization.
What businesses are utilizing content digitalization?
The companies that are transferring content to digital form are e-research businesses like ProQuest and Gale, which is part of Cengage Learning. They maintain databases of reference content used by libraries, schools and businesses. Their revenue is based on a subscription model, so they want to have their content on the Internet.
Another set of customers is national libraries, like the National Library of Australia or the Library of Congress.
Content digitalization helps anyone with a huge amount of paper or a large library. When the Enron and Arthur Andersen scandal hit, quite a few legal firms had to go through the paperwork and find liability and assets. The contract to convert that into digital form was for $25 million, so you can imagine how many pages were involved.
How is content digitalized?
Normally, material is scanned from books and microfilms. Sometimes it’s also from digital content. We’re working with National Geographic magazine and they send PDFs of issues.
But conversion from scanned to digital form is only part of the story. The indexing and granularity of the content is the engine behind the digital archive. Scanned images are fine, they’re still accessible, but if the indexing is good it helps people locate their content of interest quickly.
Indexing is a painstaking process; when it’s scientific, medical or biology related content it’s important to have people with degrees in those fields read through the material and do the indexing because it’s not just about English, it’s about subject knowledge. You have to know which terms to index.
What are the advantages of going digital?
Looking up all pictures of Mount Everest that appeared in National Geographic magazine would be a tedious task if you have to sift through 50 years of magazines. With the type of metadata utilized and the indexing that is done, a search brings out all of the details. These photos are not available on Google; this is copyrighted material and not available in the public domain.
It makes research materials so much easier to find. For example, Cengage has a platform featuring different content sources. When you search the term ‘Wall Street crash of 1989,’ you’re going to get articles from The Economist, the Financial Times and quite a few newspapers that they are hosting.
What should you consider when choosing a company to transfer content to digital form?
There are a lot of companies that offer this service and throw people into the job. It’s important that the company apply technology wherever possible, because of the cost benefit and speed to market. The typical archiving project runs from 750,000 to 1.5 million pages. If the project takes two years, your product could become irrelevant. You need a company that can get the job done in six months.
The company also needs to know what they’re doing to the extent that they will not be asking a lot of questions and tying up your employees. In short, they need the capability to deliver good quality and a large volume in a short period without engaging most of your resources.
Natraj Kumar is general manager of BPO Services at HTC Global. Reach him at [email protected].
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