ProQuest

Increased productivity leads to more content - and more revenues

ProQuest, a division of the Cambridge Information Group, creates specialized information resources and technologies for libraries and researchers worldwide. For the past five years, the company has used Nstein's TME (Text Mining Engine) to assist in organizing, categorizing and writing abstracts for a growing body of news, dissertations and academic papers. Nstein allows the automation and standardization of these tasks so reducing Editorial involvement.

One person tags 10 journals a day.
Nstein tags 2100.

Nstein's semantic analysis automates the tagging process

Prior to Nstein, the company had 70-80 people manually indexing 700 journals a day (a ratio of 1:10). With Nstein, the company was able to automate processes and triple the number of journals indexed, while redeploying resources. The number of articles indexed daily, after automatically eliminating duplicate content (de-duping), is around 75,000. At a time when so many publishers are experiencing subscribers shrinkage, ProQuest's subscriptions are up. The company is not certain whether the more granular classification is the cause or not, but it does know that users are finding information more quickly and with greater precision!

A focus on value creation

"In addition to improving the quality of our tagging, automating these processes resulted in significant cost savings, which were channeled into adding value to our product offerings," explained John Taylor, Vice President of Product Development and Technology for ProQuest. "We increased the amount of content aggregated from 700 journals to now nearly triple that. Further, we created a stronger taxonomy to increase the depth of classification, allowing end users to find the exact content they're looking for with greater precision and speed."