Delivering Standards
Case Study
Problem
BRANZ is an independent and impartial research, testing, consulting and information company providing resources for the building industry in New Zealand.
It is responsible for testing building standards and creating and distributing required guidance documentation for builders, architects, consultants and building inspectors on how building should be built.
Their innovative bi-monthly magazine "Build" is required reading for anyone in the building industry. Their articles are decisive, informed and full of richly illustrated, explicit technical detail. Most of the articles are made available online as downloadable PDFs, but this does not make them accessible enough.
To better serve the industry BRANZ saw the need to be able to deliver their content on the worksite as well as into the office. The requirement was to make issues and articles easy to locate and easy to read “on the job” instantly.
Solution
The magazines are digitized using IGP:Digital Publisher. This makes them available as ePubs for general sale and distribution.
The ePubs are made available though AZARDI:Content Fulfilment and accessible through AZARDI Online.
AZARDI Online has an optional metadata and full-text Search engine available. This is particularly valuable for deeply informative technical content. The BRANZ editors provided rich sets of keywords for all articles to take advantage of the search engine and allow users to get to the right results instantly.
Implementation
BRANZ didn't want to do the actual digitization. They felt that their current desktop production system was working well, but needed the digital content to be produced quickly and to exceptionally high standards to match the print product. Their production content is managed on an IGP:Digital Publisher Portal where they have full access and control, and the production services are provided by the Infogrid Pacific production team in India.
The content is sophisticated with highly styled tables, rich and detailed line-art with measurements, illustrative images and powerful keyword context strategies.
Metadata was core to the value of this content. IGP:Digital Publisher has powerful metadata at the work, article and block levels. In this project article level metadata was the powerhouse.
To deliver the content under channel control to their subscribers the solution was the “out of the box” AZARDI: Content Fulfilment system (ACF) using the Collection deliver mechanisms available.
The ePub files are loaded into ACF and are immediately available Online and downloadable to Windows, Apple and Linux Desktops, plus Android and iPad tablets. ACF ensures content is available everywhere on every platform and device. Just what BRANZ needed.
Results
The BRANZ content is available for purchase as ePubs, while the subscription online delivery project is in pilot phase.
Aricles can be easily searched and instantly accessed to subscribers as long as they have an Internet connection.
The keyword metadata strategy was a significant part of the success of the system as it instantly enables article filtering on an exceptionally complex range of articles covering every aspect of building and construction including legal and contracts, labour, materials, standards, best practices and much more.
