Taylor & Francis Customer Story

Taylor & Francis (part of Informa PLC) is one of the world’s leading publishers of scholarly journals, books, eBooks, text books and reference works, with content spanning all areas of Humanities, Social Sciences, Behavioral Sciences, Science, Technology and Medicine.

With an online program characterized by “investment in innovation, partnering with major industry-leading technology providers and innovators with great ideas to continue to meet readers’ needs”, Taylor & Francis (T&F) works with digital transformation partners to support and advise on its ongoing digital strategy.

Ixxus was chosen as one of T&F’s partners to assist in this business-critical, digital transformation due to its global reach and experience in delivering de-risked, strategically oriented digital initiatives for academic publishers including Pearson Education, Oxford University Press and Cengage Learning.

Challenge

As part of its online program, T&F has an ongoing project to digitize and make discoverable the entirety of its print works. “Our aim is to facilitate discovery and allow our users to access relevant research and information quickly and easily, wherever they are... Through our digitization programs, we put important research that has previously only appeared in print at readers’ fingertips.”

Part of T&F’s digitization plan includes making content discoverable at a granular level, giving users the ability to not only locate the books they need but also search for specific chapters or sections within those books. Improved content discoverability also leads to enhanced revenue streams, giving back-list items a new lease of life.

Solution

Ixxus delivered the Books Online Product Platform (BOPP), a document management platform which would support and enable T&F in its digitization and discovery goals.

BOPP’s initial focus was to deliver content to Routledge Handbooks Online, with an initial 350 titles, representing some 15,000 - 20,000 chapters.

The objectives of BOPP were:

• to streamline and optimize the content and metadata processing and delivery process,
• to make this content fully accessible and searchable at a granular level, allowing users to easily discover a particular chapter, and
• to provide a scalable, robust document management platform which would support T&F in its ongoing online initiatives while meeting current requirements. 

T&F has invested in Alfresco One to support development and scaling of the BOPP platform. Alfresco was selected as a document management platform due to its:

• Multifunctional metadata capabilities
• Ability to integrate with existing third-party software and systems
• Powerful workflow, approval and permissions processes
• Scalability and scope for wider functionality

BOPP allows editorial and production staff to ingest existing content chapters in XML and PDF formats and combine them with associated authored metadata to enhance discoverability, before delivering enriched content out to T&F’s online platforms for public consumption.

By leveraging the document management and workflow capabilities of Alfresco, BOPP streamlines T&F’s editorial and document management by ensuring that both primary and secondary (metadata) content go through a defined workflow before being delivered for public consumption.

Within BOPP, users are empowered to discover the exact chapter they seek by searching across the entirety of the content and metadata store.

This enhanced search and discovery functionality and metadata management capability is delivered by integrating Alfresco with the enhanced search functionality of Solr, alongside Ixxus Faceted Search (IFS) – a proprietary Ixxus Publishing Module. IFS is an award-winning Alfresco component which allows users to explore content in the Alfresco repository by applying multiple filters to search results. The choice of filters (or facets) available is highly customizable, hugely enhancing the end-user’s search experience. 

Results

Designed as a scalable document management solution, BOPP supports content and metadata management processes while providing a flexible platform which will empower T&F in its strategic ambitions.

Ixxus successfully delivered BOPP on time, to allow T&F to hit its goal of delivering the initial 350 titles for Routledge Handbooks Online in three months.