Who do you turn to?

The other day I was clearing out some old journals and came across the Publishing in the 21st Century research papers that were sponsored by VISTA between 1996 and 2001. Having been honoured to be involved in the exercise I have always held the research as both informative and often groundbreaking. In fact the 2001 research paper on digitalisation made fascinating reading. It could have been written yesterday the issues it raised and prediction it made. The editorial team of consultants lead by Mark Bide and Mike Shatzkin I believe were second to none in the areas they covered and experience they brought to the table. Alas the 2001 paper was the last to be published.

Consultancy can come from many different quarters and will inevitably be bias to what people know and what they specialise or are interested in. You don’t ask a logistics expert to advise you on rights management and visa versa and the Publishing value chain is complex and covers many disciplines.
So where do publishers go now for digitisation help?

It isn’t always easy to find the perfect independent consultancy match and that is even a greater problem in a market where the different sectors are often moving in different directions and at a different pace. Independent advice today is becoming rare with many consultants having to juggle conflicts of interest.

I believe that the work that Mark Bide and Mike Shatzkin performed earlier this year on DAD (Digital Asset Distribution) research was a great start to demystifying the digital minefield for many. It is ironic that it is the same team we used at VISTA and I now hope that the likes of Klopotek will sponsor more such independent initiatives to help educate and provide impartial guidance to the market.

DAPs, DADs and DARs

Around 100 publishing folk gathered in London yesterday to hear the UK rendition of the Klopotek Digital Asset Distributor conference. It was certainly an informative day and all the DAD suppliers lined up in the beauty parade to give their 15 minutes of fame speech, as to why they were different from the pack.

As part of the parade it would be inappropriate for me to comment on the individual messages but the similarity and consistency of message was both scary for some and interesting for many.

What is a DAD? Well it’s a part new definition of the digital publishing life-cycle that encompasses; DAPs Digital Asset Producers – publishers to you and me, DADs Digital Asset Distributors – either publishers again or 3rd parties who distribute content, metadata (marketing and promotional stuff from bibliographic to the latest widget or blog) to DARs Digital asset retailers – anyone who sells stuff. We even had MUMs but that got too much and the meaning was lost on me.

Defining where one starts and another finishes is often down to consultants, salesmen and technologists. Whether you need three separate silos or just different views into the same silo is down to individual business needs. There is obviously the check it in and check it out editorial pre press development cycle, the archive and retrieval phase, the distribution of content and context and rights and finally the commerce. The question as to whether all DADs can support other areas is interesting and this blurring of boundaries is what makes putting labels on things often very difficult.

There were two interesting presentations from Abobe and Google and Google ‘Crawl’ certainly do what it says on the box!

But the event certainly raised the profile of the digital market offers and some of the issues we all face and congratulations must go to that dynamic duo of Mark Bide and Mike Shatzkin for pulling it together the timely and much needed research and to Klopotek for funding and supporting it.