Case Study: Large Volume XML Conversion for a Magazine Publisher

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Digitizing 59 Years of Commentary, the America's Premier Monthly Magazine

Project:XML Conversion

Industry:Magazine Publisher

Client: Commentary Magazine, New York, USA

Commentary is America's premier monthly magazine that talks about opinion and pivotal voice in American intellectual life. The magazine was first published in the year 1945 by America's Jewish Community. Since then the magazine has been steadily engaging awareness about large, interrelated issues and questions relating to fate of democracy in America, state of American and Western Security, Future of the Jews, Judaism and Jewish Culture in Israel and many other socio-political issues around the world.

Client Requirements:

Commentary turned to SunTec Digital for the digitization of massive quantities of its 59 year old publications into XML format. The entire conversion project had to be completed at 99.995 percent accuracy.

The client wanted to ensure that team SunTec Digital conducts the conversion in highly rapid, cost-effective and high quality way, up-keeping with its brand and reputation.

Since handling the project in-house would have been a costly affair, the company quickly realized that the key was to find a partner with the right experience and technical skill set.

Key Challenges:

They sought a partner to help them through high quality content transformation for vast quantities of children books with features like
The project required conversion of 59 year archives of the Commentary magazine.
For supreme quality XML conversion, the client specified a detailed DTD following which, we had to remove all the obstructive elements from the files such as ads, tables of content, header bars, & any and all text errors.

The client supplied us input material in the form of scanned PDF files.
The images and illustrations required high level of optimization as per the defined standards.
The challenge here was to achieve 99.995% accuracy with the archival quality scanned pages of the magazine.

Solutions:

When approached by Commentary, SunTec Digital had already established itself as a reputed digital conversion service provider in the eBook marketplace. Proven production, technology capabilities, and hands on experience at handling huge conversion projects backed SunTec Digital in grabbing a good deal with the client.

Team SunTec Digital added tremendous scale to production which included conversion of thousands of magazine publications in a very limited period of time. Our flexibility enabled us to scale-up the conversion operations so that we could take on large quantities of content, in order to move magazines through the system quickly.

Impact:

With low costs and quick production times, we helped Commentary quickly and efficiently venture into the eBook marketplace. As a result of our highly dependable services, almost 60 years of Commentary back issues are now available online that were once accessible only as hard copy archives.