Frankfurt Book Fair Day 1: Go Beyond Your Content

Trusted, valuable content has never been more important. With over 250,000 attendees and more than 7,000 exhibitors, the Frankfurt Book Fair is driving that message home, having Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel and France’s President Emmanual Macron open the session.

Macron talked about the “Europe of Culture,” and how culture binds us all together. He called on Angela Merkel to “fight for our books and our culture” and defend the rights of authors and journalists. And much to the delight of everyone attending the Book Fair, said that there is “Nothing more effective than the book.” Angela Merkel refected his words and said that “the book opens up doors” and can help us “understand a rapidly changing world.”

To build on the excitement and energy of the show, and curate the top news, I will be blogging for each of the three days, providing highlights of activity from the show, and profiles of what vendors are doing to help you meet your goals.

Frankfurt Book Fair Day 1:

MarkLogic’s Theme for the show is “Go Beyond Your Content: Use All Your Data”. We’re talking with our many customers, partners and leaders in the information industries about not just creating their great and valuable content, but also using data to help get that content to their customers and to understand its value.

This theme is more critical than ever. With so many threats and new ways to access both consumer and paid content, understanding your customers and how they use your content is critical to maintaining the value of that content and the trust that publishers have with their communities.

Note: At Frankfurt our booth is in Hall 4.2 which is always a hub of the more technical discussions at the fair.

STM Association Frankfurt Meeting

Using data to connect with customers was highlighted at the STM Association’s Frankfurt meeting, the sold out, pre-event warm up for the community of scientific, technical and medical publishers. This community has been at the leading edge of adopting and using technology and in fact were some of MarkLogic’s first customers.

On the What’s Happening Panel, Daniel Pollack of Delta Think used data to analyze the impact of the Open Access movement that now accounts for 20 percent of journals, but only 6 percent of revenue in STM. While his findings were eye opening, Daniel asked the community for more data: “only with more [publisher usage] data can we really understand the impact.”

Andrew Preson from Publons talked about using data to help make peer review a more measurable academic output. To date the efforts have been largely behind the scenes. But with their platform to register and record reviews, they can not only highlight individual’s contributions, but also start to see trends. The graph in the picture shows the distribution of reviewers by subject area. In some disciplines, the number of reviewers are evenly distributed. While in others only a small portion of the population do most of the work.

Wouter Haak from Elsevier brought this back to the customer in a review of Research Collaboration Networks. These researcher communities have had a big impact on the distribution of research, sometimes outshining the authoritative resources available. Haak had a call to action to better understand what is behind these patterns: “we need to capture usage [data] so we can improve our platforms.”

EBCONT Helps Thieme Connect to Their Customers

Joining us at on booth this year is EBCONT Group. Alex Deles, CEO of EBCONT Group IT Companies and Juergen Ritschka-Kohl, Division Manager MarkLogic Solutions have been partners to MarkLogic going back at 6+ years and regulars at the MarkLogic events around the Frankfurt Book Fair (both daytime and nightime). Alex and Juergen know what they are talking about: check out this talk from MarkLogic World on his team’s work on the PRASA South African railway project.

Over the years, Alex and his team have helped MarkLogic customer Thieme with their digital transformation — most recently updating the already successful Certified Nursing Education product.

This product was an important digital product in the Nursing community, but it presented the education content in preset courses. This made it hard to re-purpose and re-use content and tailor the additional content to the nursing professionals that use the system.

Thieme re-imagined the product to be more of a platform and connect the content with the nursing professionals including integrating search across all of Thieme’s content. This included their high-quality medical content in e-books and e-journals but also the online media and web-based certification.

Getting this content connected and being able to deliver it to the right student meant connecting the users to the content. The EBCONT team first took an existing Thieme and put it into operations using MarkLogic Semantics. They then used MarkLogic’s capabilities to integrate the data and create the links to the ontology. This data platform enabled the team to build professional led interfaces to explore the content and power learning management based certification.

Describing the new Thieme CNE, Alex said: “This is a big change for the nursing professionals. The CNE products now let professionals certify themselves and the organizations take control of the certification of their teams.”

The products have been a big success for both Thieme and their customers. The new Thieme CNE has already won two awards:

• German Educational Media Award: Digita – Deutscher Bildungsmedien Preis
• Best Workflow Solution: Fachmedium, Beste Workflow-Lösung
• Comenius Education Media Awards: Comenius Edu Media Auszeichnungen

With content connected to users, Thieme’s customers are now able to leverage far more content on the way to getting certified and more easily stay current with the leading content from every part of their profession.

Diversity on the Agenda

In addition to data, both the STM meeting and the Business Club at the Book Fair both highlighted the topic of diversity. At the STM meeting, Tracey Armstrong, CEO of Copyright Clearance Center said they sought to “assert the proposition that diversity benefits the industry and is a business imperative.” The panel’s discussion of practical steps, including understanding the complete picture inside your company, setting goals, and nurturing talent show that the diversity is not just ont eh agenda, but that there are active steps in the industry to address diversity and help organizations realize the many benefits of a truly diverse workforce.

Visit MarkLogic!

I can’t wait to see what the next 2 days will bring. If you are at the fair, stop by and visit with us! We are in the action packed Hall 4.2 and will be glad to talk about Going Beyond Your Content.

And if you are online following along … stay tuned for Day 2!

Blogging from Frankfurt,

— Matt Turner CTO Media & Publishing