British Library picks Innodata Isogen for publisher digitisation

The British Library has selected Innodata Isogen as its development partner for its Publisher Digitisation Service. This new service claims to offer a 'one-stop-shop' for publishers who digitise and publish archive material from journal collections.

Under the agreement Innodata Isogen will provide data conversion, including XML mark-up and enrichment, to British Library customers. In addition, Innodata Isogen will provide, where needed, content-related consulting services to customers of the digitisation programme. Innodata Isogen and the British Library will jointly promote the programme.

Mat Pfleger, the British Library's head of sales & marketing said: 'Our strength in content and primary digitisation, coupled with Innodata’ Isogen’s knowledge; technological expertise and production capabilities can deliver a real benefit for publishers embarking on digitisation programmes.'

'We’re proud to have been selected as the British Library’s development partner,' added Jack Abuhoff, CEO and chairman of Innodata Isogen. 'With more than 388 miles of shelves, holding 150 million items, the British Library is able to greatly assist publishers in finding and then digitising materials. We can then convert this digitised data into web-ready formats at massive scales and build searchable XML repositories.'

A recent study commissioned by the British Library found that 20 to 25 per cent of the material downloaded from STM publishers’ platforms are at least five years old. However, many publishers face a huge hurdle when they attempt to digitise those backfiles – they don’t have access to the original content. Some academic and scientific publishers have had to source as much as 75 per cent of their archival content from third parties before it could be digitised.