OBS News

We at OBS saw the XML spider approaching twenty years ago, and talked about it at the Summer Publishing Institute at the University of Virginia in 1997. Today, Enterprise Content Management systems are a multi-billion-dollar industry that’s growing at 15% per year.

XML-spider

Figure: “The XML Spider”: With a database of content tagged in XML, a publisher can code once and use many times, opening up new revenue streams through re-purposing their content. Please note: this is an archival document showing XML-centric workflow that was created by Laura Fillmore in 1997 as part of her presentations at the University of Virginia Summer Publishing Institute. It’s in need of updating!

A major instance of just such an update came recently with the Copyright Clearance Center’s acquisition of Ixxus, a publishing solutions provider. Together, the CCC and Ixxus are creating a revolutionary content management system that enables publishers to create a live hive of inter-operable content, chunked to the least common denominator. This “single source of truth” serves to centralize and standardize the publishing process, from file management to workflows to distribution and beyond. Pedagogical interface (PI), here we come!

 

 

 

 

LOL RE: Kids, Cursive, and the Future of Communication

Public elementary schools appear to be eliminating the teaching of cursive writing. Early introduction to block letters today apparently only readies youngsters to recognize letters on a keyboard and begin typing ASAP, thumbing in texts and tweets on screens, rather than serving as a precursor to learning cursive writing as a primary means of documentation →

One World-Wide Webification

The big news to come out of BookExpo America (BEA) in Chicago this month is the early sounds of a merger of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), managers of the publishing industry’s EPUB standard, and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web) and CEO →

Future Library Project

Talk about the publishing cycle, long-form! Last fall, Margaret Atwood delivered her new novel “Scribbler Moon” to the Future Library Project (http://www.futurelibrary.no/), to be read in 100 years after it is printed on some of the thousand tiny new trees that the project has just planted in the forest outside of Oslo, Norway, home of →

Accessibility>ASCII: ADA Expected To Get New Teeth in July

When the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was introduced in 1990, compliance for the hearty band of e-publishing pioneers at that time meant converting desktop publishing files and HTML files into plain ASCII, to render their content machine-readable, thus offering disabled readers the  “full and equal enjoyment” of their content, as well as the “effective →

OBS at the London Book Fair

Having traveled the world as a publishing innovator and leader, OBS president Laura Fillmore is no stranger to hopping the pond. That said, she is very much looking forward to attending the London Book Fair this month — especially the Research and Scholarly Forum. The London Book Fair is one of the world’s largest and most influential publishing conferences, and is →

What’s Old is New: Mandela Lives On in OBS Archives

At first glance, the OBS Archives Site appears to be an outdated list of hyperlinks with layout and formatting reminiscent of the early 1990s. At that time, Mosaic browsers and hyperlinks were completely reforming our ideas about creating and sharing information. The Internet was just entering into the public consciousness. The world was changing, and →