Pressroom

Fresh Meadows, NY: In an ongoing effort to find creative approaches to meet clients' needs, Data Conversion Laboratory, Inc. (DCL) implemented the METS/ALTO XML schema for select online collections of Alexander Street Press (ASP).

While Alexander Street Press successfully uses very sophisticated XML Document Type Definitions (DTD's) for many collections, it wanted a more cost-effective route to deliver the large scale collections that their customers are looking for. ASP and DCL put their heads together to find a solution and found it with METS/ALTO.

The METS/ALTO schema provides many of the benefits of XML coding without some of the intricacies that XML demands. METS/ALTO lets you store images of documents along with the image coordinates corresponding to the text, allowing users to see the complete original page. The text is used for searching, but the original document is viewed. The advantage over text behind image is that article titles and section titles can be tagged in the text allowing more accurate searching results.

"We have seen conversion costs cut approximately fifty-percent (50%)," says Stephanie Garrett, Production Manager, ASP. "We are excited that we can deliver significantly larger collections to our customers at a cost that makes sense for everyone."

"Through our experience with METS/ALTO we knew Alexander Street Press would see significant throughput improvement and production savings and are happy to see that the predictions were fulfilled," said Mark Gross, DCL President and CEO.

DCL has been a world leader in document and data conversion for some thirty years. Founded in 1981, DCL is experienced in various data and document conversion methodologies, including high-performance standards like METS/ALTO, as well as Word-to-PDF conversions, eBook conversions, and more.