Transcript: On the Road to Intelligent Content

Interview with Carl Robinson, Ixxus

For podcast release Monday, October 1, 2018

KENNEALLY: Publishers have long dreamed of quickly and easily repurposing their catalogs for markets around the world. Transforming content, however, is no simple task. Some intelligence is required.

Welcome to Copyright Clearance Center’s podcast series. I’m Christopher Kenneally for Beyond the Book. Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross, a fellow at the Institute for Applied Computational Science at Harvard University, has defined intelligence as a force to maximize future freedom of action. Intelligent content, therefore, strives to maximize its potential for the futures ahead, known and unknown. The earlier that content is embedded with intelligence, the more freedom of action it will have in the future.

Next week at the Frankfurt Book Fair on Wednesday, the 10th of October, Carl Robinson, head of consulting for Ixxus, and his colleague Renee Swank co-present Getting on the Road to Intelligent Content: No Time Like the Present, taking place 11:30 on the 10th of October in the Education Stage in Hall 4.2. Carl Robinson joins me today from Oxford, England, with a Frankfurt Book Fair program preview for publishers who want to make the most of technologies and their content. Welcome to Beyond the Book, Carl.

ROBINSON: Thank you, Chris. Good to be here.

KENNEALLY: It’s good to chat with you. As we said, Carl, you are head of consulting at Ixxus there in the UK, and you’ve been in publishing since 1995 and have worked for Pearson Education, Macmillan Education, and Oxford University Press. Your work is focused on helping clients look at the vision and the goals and the strategies around their content and help them enable flexibility and readiness to meet all these changes that are going on in the digital marketplace. For people not familiar with Ixxus, Carl, tell us briefly about the company.

ROBINSON: So Ixxus was founded around about a decade ago, I think, and really focuses on providing solutions that help publishers accelerate digital transformation. We strive to kind of help them reinvent the way that they work, drive new revenues, change their workflows, enhance business agility, help them get to market quicker, and help them effectively maximize the value that they have in their own content. We do work with some of the largest names in publishing. You mentioned Pearson, where I was working at one point. But we’ve also worked with Cengage, Dorling Kindersley, Wiley, and others. In 2016, Copyright Clearance Center acquired us, and now we’re working together on all aspects of helping publishers get the most from their content assets.

KENNEALLY: And certainly, you’re going to be putting that into action when you get to Frankfurt Book Fair next week, Carl. Walking around the show floor, it’ll be clear that publishers of all types, but especially scholarly publishers, need to evolve their content strategies to meet the customer demand. So what do these publishers’ professional and academic customers want from them, and what are publishers doing to deliver on that?

ROBINSON: It’s a very good question, Chris. In our work with publishers, we often find that they are telling us that their customers are after personalized content. So their customers are looking for content that’s relevant to them in their field. They want to be able to search across the whole content base that a publisher has, not just in a given journal, for example, or a given book. Customers want to quickly find answers in the vast datasets that are available to them. And often they’re starting from different points. You know, one person’s searching for this topic. Another person’s searching for this topic. And they need to kind of have ways to navigate through the mass of data and content that publishers provide. Often what we find is that they’re looking for up-to-date content, often even reflecting real-time events that are going on today or coming up in the coming weeks.

So it’s very much about finding stuff for me – personalized content. And I think to meet this demand, publishers are realizing they need to evolve their content strategies. They need to be rethinking how they create their content, how they manage it, and how they push it out to the world in order to service their own customers.

Obviously, for us at Ixxus, the publisher is our customer, so we’re helping them do that. We try to do it in a number of ways. Some of the common things that we help with is to say, look, get rid of silos. Most publishers have content all over the place – on a desk drive, on a disk drive, on a server over here or in Dropbox or in Box.com or somewhere else. There’s all sorts of content everywhere. In email – I mean, that’s where we find a lot of it. So get it out of all of those places and put it into a single place so that you can start to move towards single sources of truth.

Another thing that we encourage people to do is to find cleverer ways to work on the content – to author the content together, to create content, to reuse content and assemble new products, rather than constantly buying content or buying in content from other places. So reuse what you’ve got and maximize that value. That often means that we’re encouraging people to get to the smallest reusable, repurposable chunk of content, as well. We call that – it’s a horrible word – granularization. That’s what people talk about, is trying to work with small pieces to leverage reuse and repurposing.

Of course, metadata is a really, really important facet of this. They need to enrich their content with metadata that supports search and discovery so that their consumers are even able to find content they didn’t know they were looking for. I always think about search and discovery as two different things, really. Search, you know what you’re looking for, and you go out and find it. Discovery is you find something by accident because you were searching for something else. I liken that to looking for a particular photo in the attic – a memory – and then realizing there were 10 other photographs that you’d completely forgotten about but were relevant to you at the time. That’s what I think publishers need to do, is kind of rethink their content strategies around those areas.

KENNEALLY: So the case that you and Renee Swank will be making at the Frankfurt Education Stage is that in 2018, we’re headed toward this intelligent content. Tell us more about why intelligent content is really so different than what’s come before and what the potential is.

ROBINSON: I think the key point of intelligent content is that it’s about the relationships and metadata that are held together with a piece of content. The content is decorated with metadata around it and has relationships to other content. That ultimately makes it more easy to query that data and bring that intelligence together. I forget who it was, but I’m pretty sure somebody said intelligence is about making connections. It’s really that point of connecting that content using semantic enrichment to leverage the intelligence that’s there within those relationships so you can find stuff that you didn’t know you were looking for, for example, or learn something that wasn’t actually there in the content itself.

That’s the other really exciting thing about this is using technologies – and I’m no technologist, so forgive me, anybody out there who’s listening and goes, oh, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about – I know the phrase, and I understand the value of it. It’s called RDF triples. Apparently, what these things do is it allows you to connect content in such a way that meaning between those pieces of content can be inferred. That means that that data, that meaning, was not there in the content itself. So that’s leveraging that intelligence. Once you can do that, then you’re making access to the data all the more rich, and consumers can make so much more out of the content that you provide for them.

So I think that’s one of the really interesting things about intelligent content. For publishers, of course, this is just money and time savings. If you can make your content that much more attractive than someone else’s, then people are going to come to you.

KENNEALLY: Indeed, you’ve written about this topic in the current issue of Research Information, and you said that to become digital is to challenge publishing’s prevailing culture. In your work, Carl Robinson, how have you found it to be – is it controversial, is it difficult, to have this change with a publishing house?

ROBINSON: It shouldn’t be, but it is. I think it’s simply scary for an awful lot of publishers. Very few of the publishers that I have worked with and we have worked with at Ixxus have really taken the plunge and taken the risk to become digital. And I understand it. I was speaking to somebody at a university press a couple of weeks ago, and you realize that around about more than 80% of their sales are print sales. So it’s a big risk to say, right, we’re just going to dump all of our reliance upon that print sales revenue and go completely digital. It’s too much of a risk. So I think that’s injecting caution into decision-making around that digital piece that they need to embrace.

I think that perpetuates the print mindset. So it’s generally a print mindset business. That means content is created with – even if it’s not actually physically in print, it’s still a kind of print book on screen, for example. That tends to perpetuate decisions around content through the lens of the book or the printed article or something else. So you get decisions around content are made because of that format decision – so word counts and page layouts and so on, all of which impact those content decisions.

Then, what tends to happen is publishers try to turn what they’ve got into the digital version of that content, and that just puts you into a wealth of pain as you’re trying to convert from one format to another, and the two formats don’t really speak to each other very well. And the further pain that you get from that is just keeping digital and print businesses going in parallel, which is just sucking cost. That’s a massive drain on resources and time and energy.

Really, the world has gone digital, and publishers need to keep up. I see desire in publishers to do that, but I don’t often see that much action. I think, as I say, it’s simply scary. But it was Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, who said – and I think this is very, very true for publishers right now – is when the rate of change outside the company is greater than the rate of change inside, the end is near. So it’s really a classic rock and hard place. You’ve got to change, but you don’t want to change. That’s what I’m seeing out there.

It’s interesting. I was reading an article just this morning that was published in August by Michael Cairns. It was on the BISG website. He actually says – I wrote it down, because I thought it was interesting – publishing does not see investment in technology to be strategic or value-enhancing. That perspective is a mistake. Publishing companies with inflexible and antiquated technology infrastructure may not be spending large dollar amounts on maintenance and support of these systems, but they are likely paying a penalty – stunted growth opportunities. So if we’re talking about maximizing future freedom of action, stunted growth opportunities is the reality, then there’s a problem in publishing.

KENNEALLY: If we’re going to get on the road to intelligent content, Carl Robinson, where do we go for some premium gasoline, or petrol, as you would say?

ROBINSON: (laughter) Enrichment – I think I mentioned it earlier on. Basically, I think properly enriching your content, properly decorating your content, is the way forward. And I think that – a story a few years back. I was speaking with a publisher who said, Carl, everybody’s talking about metadata, but until someone can prove to me that there’s a link between metadata and money, I’m not convinced. That same publisher right now is having a challenge in that their customers can’t find their content easily and can’t find related content. That’s put them on the back foot in the competitive marketplace. So getting your content properly enriched directly impacts your revenue potential, and I think that’s the key message people should take away, is enrich your content properly.

KENNEALLY: Well, they will get all of that and much more on the Education Stage at Frankfurt Book Fair on Wednesday this week. You and Renee will be there to make a point that the strategy that publishers have around their content should be a CCC thing, which doesn’t stand for Copyright Clearance Center. What does CCC stand for in this case, and is that coincidental or what?

ROBINSON: It’s completely coincidental, Chris. We were using the term the three Cs of metadata long before CCC and Ixxus got together. What we often see is messy metadata or confused metadata that’s ambiguous or uncontrolled, and that doesn’t enable all of the goodness to come out that we’re talking about, meaning the relationships between the content and the ability to kind of find your content and discover it. Often, we see publishers making the mistake that more is better. I think sometimes less is more.

So the three Cs are about getting your metadata complete, correct, and consistent. You make sure you have the right amount of metadata – that’s the complete piece – and make decisions around which of that metadata is mandatory for your content and which is optional, rather than letting people kind of create what they call a folksonomy and just tagging willy-nilly whatever they want to do. That’s the complete part. Then find ways, and automate them if you can, to make sure that it’s correct metadata. And then ultimately be consistent in how you apply it across all of your content. That way, you really are going down that road. That’s the petrol or the gasoline, as you’re talking about. That means your content will be easily discoverable and easy to leverage, and you really, truly will be setting yourselves up to have that freedom of action.

KENNEALLY: A lot of people are getting on the road to Frankfurt Book Fair this week. Carl, you’ll be among them, and thousands of other publishing executives will be there. Have a good trip over to Germany and a great fair.

ROBINSON: Thank you.

KENNEALLY: We’ve been chatting today with Carl Robinson. He’s the head of consulting at Ixxus. And we want to tell you a little bit more about Copyright Clearance Center’s presence at the Frankfurt Book Fair. You can learn all about it online at copyright.com/frankfurt2018. I’ll give you a quick rundown of the programs that we plan to present.

On Wednesday, the 10th of October, it’s a busy day for Copyright Clearance Center, with three separate programs, beginning with Getting on the Road to Intelligent Content program that we were just chatting with Carl Robinson about. That starts at 11:30 on the Education Stage in Hall 4.2.

At 2:30 in the afternoon, Michael Healy, the executive director for international relations at Copyright Clearance Center, is joined by a recent guest on Beyond the Book, Michiel Kolman, who is president of the International Publishers Association, and they’ll be talking about publishers raising their voices for copyright. That’ll be at the Academic and Business Information Stage. That again is at 2:30 on Wednesday the 10th.

And then finally, at the end of that day, at 15:30 as they say there, or 3:30, it is going to be a discussion about open access monographs, a look at the viability and the needs of open access books compared to open access journals. The panelists there will be publishing consultant and sort of a guru of the industry, David Worlock. He is the co-chair of Outsell’s leadership programs. And joined by Brian O’Leary, executive director of the Book Industry Study Group.

And then finally, on Thursday morning at 9:00, we will be looking at a topic that has now heated up quite dramatically for everyone in the weeks before Frankfurt Book Fair, looking at ways to get smart about Plan S. Plan S was announced just weeks ago, and now everyone in scholarly publishing is talking about it. They will be talking about it for certain at Frankfurt Book Fair. What is Plan S? It’s an initiative of 11 European national research funding bodies that puts pressure on open access publishing business models. A panel of publishing leaders and expert analysts will offer insights to help prepare for Plan S and get smart about the next wave of change in open access publishing.

Again, all of those programs in detail and with further information about locations and times, you can find at copyright.com/frankfurt2018. For all those in the listening audience who will be headed off to Frankfurt, again, have a wonderful trip and a terrific fair.

Beyond the Book is produced by Copyright Clearance Center, builders of unique solutions that connect content and rights in contextually relevant ways through our software and professional services. CCC helps people navigate vast amounts of data to discover actionable insights, enabling them to innovate and make informed decisions.

Beyond the Book co-producer and recording engineer is Jeremy Brieske of Burst Marketing. I’m Christopher Kenneally. Thanks for listening and join us again soon on Beyond the Book.

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