Scope e-Knowledge Center (Scope), an SPi Global Company, has announced that they have been selected by the Manchester University Press (MUP) to create book and chapter abstracts for their online publications, which include collections such as Manchester Medieval Sources, Manchester Gothic and Manchester Studies in Imperialism.
MUP is the third largest university press in England. The press has a distinctive brand and it is known globally for its exceptional research in Humanities and Social Sciences. MUP publishes over 200 new titles and new editions per year as well as 7 journals.
Scope, a leading provider of knowledge services, has created abstracts and keywords for the legacy content available in leading university presses. It is for the first time that MUP has awarded Scope a project of this type.
MUP is launching their new publishing platforms, ManchesterHive and ManchesterOpenHive, later this year and felt that it was essential for discoverability to enhance the metadata with keywords and abstracts at the chapter level. Learning that Scope has demonstrable capabilities in enhancing content findability and discoverability, MUP sought Scope's expertise in developing abstracts for books and chapters.
Scope employed its unique technology enabled human curated project delivery model. In-house Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) in Humanities and Social Sciences were immediately tasked with identifying the concepts discussed in the various chapters in the e-books. Following which, an instance was created in Scope's proprietary abstracting and keyword indexing solution, ConSCIseTM, to pick the relevant concepts in the source automatically based on location heuristics, frequency of occurrences, and terms created in Scope's controlled vocabulary repository.
Leveraging their domain knowledge and the learning from similar projects completed by Scope, the SME's curated the key concepts extracted by ConSCIse to make them relevant to the domain and make the chapters more discoverable. They ensured that each chapter abstract was concise, between 3-6 sentences, and did not exceed 150 words.
A similar methodology, but with a difference, was used to build the book abstracts. Along with the SMEs, Scope used in-house senior editors to ensure that the book abstracts were concise, between 5-10 sentences, and did not exceed 250 words. Significantly, they ensured that the abstracts remained faithful to the author's view on the concepts discussed in each chapter of the book.
John Normansell said, "It is important that we ensure the discoverability of the content on our new publishing platforms. That's why we have been exploring ways to add further metadata to our rich backlist. Working with Scope to enrich our online titles with chapter-level keywords and abstracts is a critical part of this strategy".
"This project is a copy book demonstration of Scope's unique approach to project delivery and the value it delivers to our clients", said Tram Venkatraman, President of Scope. "Our judicious application of technology and the domain knowledge of our SMEs has helped our client's to improve content discoverability and enabled their users to make informed decisions on whether to buy a book or a chapter". "Significantly, he added, the success of this project has opened the eyes of the publishing industry to the ROI (Return on Investment) of investing in creating objective book abstracts."
Brought to you by Scope e-Knowledge Center, a trusted global partner for digital content transformation solutions - Abstracting & Indexing (A&I), Knowledge Modeling (Taxonomies, Thesauri and Ontologies), and Metadata Enrichment & Entity Extraction.
