Academic publisher Brill, Netherlands, and UK-based online publishing services provider Semantico Ltd have announced a new collaboration for the design and engineering of a new platform for Brill’s primary source collections. The expected delivery date for the platform is early 2013.
Following a pitch in June 2012, Brill has chosen Semantico to design and engineer the new platform for Brill’s primary source collections. This new platform will consist of thematic collections holding unique materials such as rare books and documents from around the world. These essential research tools in the area of humanities and social sciences are an integrated part of Brill’s product portfolio.
Brill’s new primary sources platform will offer an enhanced user experience to researchers, librarians and scholars. The platform will focus on delivering smooth and fast access to over six million high resolution scans of documents, research data, models, algorithms, and illustrative images. Widely distributed metadata will point researchers to relevant documents and on-site browsing will be free.
The new platform has wider advantages for scholars as it combines primary sources with Brill’s secondary publications. This opens up a new world of possibilities as users will be able to search across the other Brill platforms: BrillOnline Books and Journals (booksandjournals.brillonline.com) and BrillOnline Reference Works (referenceworks.brillonline.com).
Semantico will build the site using its newly launched Scolaris and industry-respected Semantico Access Management System (SAMS). Scolaris is the next generation integrated content platform, engineered to manage the complexities of journals, reference works and dictionaries. Scolaris promotes discoverability by providing intelligent, full-text search powered by Solr and allows rich taxonomy support for faceted search and browse.
The platform will link Scolaris with SAMS to create greater subscription opportunities for Brill. SAMS is the most widely used access management system in its class and will be used by Brill to offer different levels of subscriptions to allow a broader range of customers to discover and engage with Brill content.
