This article caught my eye today. Random House have launched a new widget, powered by a web service called Insight, which will make the full works of about 500 authors accessible and searchable online. They are also working on digitising their entire back catalogue.
This is a great example of a company keeping up with consumer habits and going where the users are. Digitising their back catalogue will also be extremely advantageous to the business, allowing the stock to be easily searchable by editors looking for re-release possibilities, rights information, answering queries from staff or the public etc. As pointed out by Peter Bowron of Random House, digitisation will also allow more retail opportunities for the company – they will be able to sell their products in a range of media – an obviously advantageous move. It also works towards future-proofing and protecting their content – it will never be fire damaged or lost in a dusty old room. Alex Iskold’s article shows the scope of this new technology – for instance you can search the archive to find how many books and pages from the archive contain the word ‘Ulysses’. From experience this tool would be invaluable for responding to customer queries, which can be much more complex and much weirder than you’d think! I admit to receiving some and wondering why on earth they want to know such a thing! This article states that some public libraries are now able to offer Random House e-books as part of their collection, a move which has myriad benefits for libraries, allowing them to offer a wider choice of materials with less demands on floorspace.
As I’ve said previously, my employers (also a major publishing house) need their arms seriously twisted to spend any money on their archives, despite us trying to convince the head honchos of their importance. As it stands I can barely convince them to give us somewhere dry to store them! This may be the impetus we need in order to secure more funding – my employers may not be interested in digitisation – but their competitors certainly are – and if we don’t address this we’ll be left behind in the future. Businesses need to stop taking their archives for granted and realise their full potential. It’s an uphill struggle for us librarians / archivists, but hopefully we’re beginning to see a change in attitudes.
Congrats to Random House, it all sounds fab!
I can’t believe that your employers are so reluctant to protect their archives; haven’t they heard of risk management?
Maybe you should create a business case for ‘digitisation as a valuable tool’ and e-mail that onto your ‘head honchos’!!!