Frankfurt Book Fair 2019 Day 1: Big Ideas to Move the World

The Frankfurt Book Fair is getting underway! With over 7,000 exhibitors and more than 280,000 visitors expected to attend, it’s the world’s biggest stage to promote some of the big ideas shaping the world.

At the opening ceremony, Book Fair CEO Juergen Boos announced the theme of “Create Your Revolution” and speakers stressed the critical role of culture and books, including guest nation Norway’s Prime Minister Erna Solberg who said, “reading is crucial for a society with a just social order.” Big ideas indeed!

STM Frankfurt: Big Ideas on a Big Stage

At the STM Frankfurt conference on Tuesday, Annie Callahan, CEO if Taylor & Francis, gave a rousing review of the ‘radicalization of our times’ and a strong case for the role of ‘substantiated, advance knowledge’ of the academic and scientific communities to deliver human centered progress. Challenging the attendees from the major academic publishers, she said that only collaborative action can deliver the needed collective wisdom.

Following Annie, the innovation panel picked up the theme to challenge the status quo. Jayne Marks, Vice President of Publishing at Wolters Kluwers Health, talked about going beyond just putting books online to a wider program of change across the organization. Sam Herbert, co-founder of 67 Bricks, added that there are many types of innovation and that while publishers are terrible at structural innovation, they need to start now because ‘they are in a race’ with competitors and start-ups building for tomorrow.

Data Conversation Laboratory Joins the Team

Joining us at Stand K35 for the first time this year is Data Conversion Laboratory – also known as DCL.

In nearly every business, and especially in the information industries and publishing, content structure and semantic enrichment are the building blocks of innovation. DCL helps these organizations unlock the potential of their content by transforming content and data using AI, machine learning, and natural language processing.

One very cool example is the team’s work with the New York Public Library (NYPL) around the records of the US Copyright Office. As more and more works roll off copyright and with some of the most famous exemptions expiring, there is more content and works than ever that can be freely accessed by the public.

As part of its mission to make information publicly accessible to all, NYPL obtained the historic records of the U.S. Copyright Office, which go all the way back to 1891. These records exist as PDF-based image scans, and the first phase of the project focused on the records from 1923 to 1964 (about 450,000 pages!).   The goal was to transform those scans to usable data that the Library will ultimately put online so that anyone can research available works and also use the data to better understand how copyright impacts what the Library can share of the works themselves.

This project combines many of DCL’s areas of expertise — not just advanced and complex content conversion, but the creation of usable data and content that will be the foundation for an organization like the NYPL to better serve its customers. For more information, check out the case study here.

Come by and have a chat with the DCL team of Marianne Calilhanna, Jeff Wood and Greg Fagan at the MarkLogic Stand 4.2 K35 and ask them about this and other great projects they are doing to help publishers get the most out of their content!

MarkLogic at Frankfurt: 10 Years!

This year marks the 10th anniversary of MarkLogic’s participation in the Frankfurt Book Fair.

I wasn’t able to attend in 2009 (and there don’t appear to be any pictures from that bare bones booth), but I did attend in 2010 and created this slideshow of the event.

Surprisingly, not that much has changed in how it looks. Its the conversations about data, digital transformation and the role of publishing that have come a long way. View the video here.

Experts Up Next

Tomorrow at the MarkLogic Booth we begin our Expert Office Hours. James Wonder, a true digital innovator  with his work at AIP and the Citation Network, is up first. Come by 4.2 K35 between 2pm and 4pm for a chat with James.

Also, check out our blog for Day 2!

Blogging from Frankfurt,

~ Matt Turner, CSO Media at MarkLogic