New content types FEATURE
Alexander Street Press was established in 2000, initially publishing digital collections of letters and diaries in American and women’s history, before expanding into other text collections as well as audio and video collections. It now has five million pages of text, eight million tracks of audio, and a video platform with about 52,000 videos. In comparison SAGE Publications has a far more traditional publishing history: established in 1965 it now publishes over 800 books and 850 journals every year. Electronic journals have been joined by a number of other online platforms, hosting both print-first content – books and encyclopedias – combined with new material for a digital first environment including online streaming video, case studies, statistical datasets for both teaching and research.
Discoverability
Of course the new information is only useful if it can be found, and both Sedgwick and Ciuffetti emphasised the importance of discoverability. For Sedgwick, discoverability can be divided into three key areas, search engine optimisation, library discovery, and building links to related content: ‘Discovery is key for us, and it’s absolutely critical for our library customers that are investing a lot of money into discovery tools to support their patrons. We have to ensure that our content is accessible and found on the open web and typically for our products we want to see more than 50 per cent of traffic
coming in from there; the majority of that has been from Google, but with video a lot of individuals will go straight to YouTube. ‘Users also want to search library systems to find their content and we need to get our materials there; we work closely with discovery vendors to make sure we’re optimising the metadata and full-text feeds that go out to them and educating our customers so that if
‘Of course the new information is only useful if it can be found’
they’ve invested in some of our products and they want to boost them up in the search results that they can do that. ‘Finally, once a user lands on our site and finds some great content, how do we make sure they keep finding other relevant stuff? SAGE has an unbelievable diversity of content, so how do we make sure when someone lands on a journal article we throw up a relevant video, statistical data set, case study, or ebook chapter? ‘We’ve indexed all of our content against our newly developed social science thesaurus to create semantic connections throughout our content – this new tool will roll out later this year to help users more easily find other relevant material on our sites, even if they wouldn’t have thought of looking for it.’ The issue of stickiness is stressed by Ciuffetti too, with an emphasis on the importance of curation and editorial staff: ‘We need to make
sure that after the discoverability problems are solved that our sites are sticky, because a lot of the renewal decisions librarians face are to do with the usage.
‘There will be more curation there, so that we’re presenting, for example, more case studies and case events where our editorial staff have grouped together material that’s related to a certain research concept, so that when you go to that event you’re seeing more of what we can aggregate for a given topic, rather than having everything keyword matched. ‘We spend a lot of time on indexing, and that indexing does help but still when you provide a common phrase into our search engine and you get dozens or hundreds of items back, there’s no sense of curation. The more that our editorial staff can do things like putting together playlists that have common themes in them, the more we’re matching what the users expectations are.’
User experience
But stickiness is not driven by content discovery alone, it is also driven by the user experience with the content. For Ciuffetti it’s about developing the lean-forward experience: ‘For other media platforms discovering the content is all they have to make possible and then there’s just a play button and the user plays; we call that a lean-back experience.’
‘But in our case the users are studying the material, primary material, for research or teaching, and so they are often very interested
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OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2015 Research Information 45
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