How to organize digital archives

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Jan, 1999 by Lafe Low

Reale has been using MediaSphere for nearly two years and is especially proud of the archiving and storage capabilities the system provides for Miller Freeman s geographically diverse publications. "We've got publications in San Francisco, Laguna Beach and San Mateo, California, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Lawrence, Kansas, and Dallas, Texas," he explains. "All of the data from those titles are warehoused in our San Francisco location using a wide area network [WAN]."

Since Reale s department ramped up production over the past year, he says they are now storing Quark files and high- and low-resolution images. "We can store anything they throw at us," he boasts.

Reprints and new editions

If reprints are a part of your current revenue mix, a digital-asset management system can pay for itself with increased reprint sales. "A reprint can be a couple of things' says McGraw-Hill's French. "Manufacturers will come to us and say, 'I love the article you wrote about us I want 5,000 copies to pass out at a trade show' That's our traditional reprint business."

However, a well-organized digital archive also facilitates selling reprints directly to general retail customers. Although French sees this as a limited avenue of reprint sales, it has the potential to grow through the careful management of digital assets Having the ability to produce and sell reprints directly cuts out the middleman, he says.

Miller Freeman is streamlining the process of preparing archival material for use on the Web. "We're looking to help production users build a bridge to HTML [hypertext markup language]," says Reale Soon, magazine archives will be available in HTML Reale adds "Are we 100 percent there yet? No Are we going to get there in about four months? Yes."

Once the material is ready for use as Web-page content, individual magazines take the ball from there. "We're using it as an in-house facilitation process. It's up to each publication whether or not they want it to be a revenue generator, and whether or not they're going to leverage this media. This gives them content back in the form that they need it," he says.

Profit from efficiencies

Besides the revenue potential of reprints and Web pages, a well-organized archive can save a magazine money by streamlining daily operations. Philip Morrongiello, photo editor for Woman's Day, is using Canto's Cumulus primarily as an image bank, although he plans to expand the archive to include entire Quark pages with all their respective elements.

'The designers and production staff at Woman's Day use Cumulus as a resource. Any designer who needs to view unpublished or previously published images can search through the archive using general or specific keywords.

'The designers can browse through [the images] themselves instead of coming over to my desk," explains Morrongiello. Such increased access to a magazine's image bank can improve the editor's or the designer's creativity as well as his or her productivity. "This could radically change the nature of the way people do things," he continues. "An editor working on a story about coughing could see every visualization of coughing we've done over the years."