Last Thursday, publishing professionals met in Philadelphia for the 6th annual RSuite CMS User Conference. Brian Howard from Book Business highlighted a number of the key takeaways, including the following:

In Lisa Bos’ talk on metadata, she used the example of Oxford University Press, whose Oxford Index provides customers tools to drill deep for the content they’re seeking. She noted that OUP captures “twenties of items of metadata for each product,” clarifying that by product she didn’t mean books, but chapters of books. The richer your metadata, the more opportunities there are for your customers to find your products.

On the issue of what publishers’ products are called in the digital age, Evan Owens of the American Institute of Physics (AIP) said: “We’re an ‘article’ publisher; ‘issues’ are an artifact of the past. It’s article first.” Discussing the benefits of implementing a strategic CMS, AIP’s Owens noted that implementing RSuite was “an opportunity to step back, clear the deck and think about what we want to achieve.” He noted that early adopters — AIP was online early — can get in a rut, and that like lots of early Internet adopters, “everything was in a file system and there wasn’t an infrastructure to manage things.” As with publishers using file systems, there was “no version control; anyone in the building could change a file at any time, and I couldn’t do anything about it.” Implementing a CMS allowed AIP to protect its most valuable asset.

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