Project

Conversion of entire publication history to online content

Goals

Creation of new electronic assets for deployment through online hosting and linking arrangements

Background

Since 1932, Annual Reviews has offered comprehensive collections of critical reviews written by leading scientists in 29 distinct disciplines.  A nonprofit organization, the Annual Reviews mission is to provide the worldwide scientific community with a synthesis of primary research literature. Their publications are among the most highly cited in scientific literature, ranking within the top ten publications for their respective disciplines.

In 2002, Annual Reviews decided to move the entire corpus of their publication history online. Spanning 70 years and over 475,000 pages, Annual Reviews selected Document Solutions, Inc. (now Appligent Document Solutions) to perform the conversion project.

Challenges

• The highest possible scanning accuracy.
• Color and grayscale images to be preserved with minimal loss of quality.
• Smallest-possible files to facilitate on-line deployment to users around the world
• Each page to be “branded” with an Annual Reviews logo and link to the Annual Reviews website

Service

Using the PDF MultiResolution process invented by Document Solutions, Inc. specifically for academic journals conversion, DSI completed over 98% of the project in 3 months. Once the vast bulk of the legacy content was processed, DSI delivered a comprehensive inventory database to assist Annual Reviews staff in locating missing volumes. In six months, all index data collection and data-processing was complete, and the entire Annual Reviews publication history was ready to go online.

Benefits from using Document Solutions Inc.

• DSI’s specialized archive-grade processes ensured quality.
• DSI’s MultiResolution process integrated over 5,400 individual color and half-tone images into over 475,000 bitonal (black and white) pages.
• DSI’s high-quality scanning and MultiResolution process ensured the smallest possible PDFs.
• DSI added logos and weblinks to each page.
• DSI provided concept development and operational consulting in a variety of areas derived from DSI’s advanced expertise with the PDF format.

Outcome

“We were initially skeptical that our older content would have any value online at all,” says Ike Burke, Director of Publications for Annual Reviews. “Already, we’re seeing a couple of hundred downloads per month of even the oldest content – articles from the 1930s and 1940s! For quality, cost-effectiveness and dedication to their client, I cannot say enough about how wonderful it was working with DSI!”