Rich Kobel, Assistant Vice President of Business Development at Scope e-Knowledge Center, a leading content enhancement and knowledge services provider, presented at the Hot Spot Professional & Scientific Information (Hall 4.2) at the recently concluded Frankfurt Book Fair.
Implementation of a thoughtful smart content strategy is seen to be critical for content providers today. During his presentation, Kobel argued that academic books have not enjoyed much visibility online, indicating that books are largely still packaged as a whole with little or no visibility for chapter level content. This lack of discoverability results in poor citations, lack of recognition and frustrated authors.
He further noted that with rich linking, through citations, keywords, detailed abstracts and robust metadata, online journals have handled the discoverability issue well. Kobel suggested that academic and STM publishers should, in fact, copy the "article economy" that has led to the profound success of the journal space online. He pointed to the creation of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for individual chapters as a relatively straightforward way for publishers to increase book discoverability. Further, effective metadata at the chapter level, including abstracts and keywords, is critical to discoverability, he said.
The presentation is available online at the Scope website at http://www.scopeknowledge.com/Downloads.aspx?id=2.
