A Case Study on Business Journal Indexing for a Large US Based Company

The Customer

The client is a US based company who wanted to outsource the indexing and catalog-building of their existing journal archives. The most crucial requirement for the client was faster access to important information within a quick turnaround time.

The Challenge

The client approached Flatworld Solutions to carry out their indexing and catalog building requirements since they found our catalog building and indexing services to their liking. Additionally they also appreciated our outsourcing process since it matched their company values and their long term growth strategy.

We faced a number of challenges during the catalog indexing and building activities with the client. Some of them include the volume of the documents to be indexed and the diversity of the subjects to be indexed. This meant that the creation of indexes was not a merely mechanical job; the workforce at Flatworld Solutions needed to think intelligently to accomplish this task.

The professionals and subject matter experts at Flatworld Solutions are well-equipped to handle the various elements of a project. Their prime responsibilities include analyzing the relevance of the indexed terms for the intended audience and verifying the correctness of the main headings read by the reader.

Additional tasks for these professionals included the relevance of the material, effectiveness of the subheadings, visibility of the font type, openness of the index and the organization of the matter in the subject. Some of the decisions taken during this phase included whether the matter was applicable, specific or ample? Should the organization of the matter be in alphabetical or chronological order? What is type and size of the font to be used? and so on.

The Solution

At Flatworld Solutions, we believe in providing the best quality services to our clients. The projects are handled by subject matter experts and the implementation team includes domain experts, qualified domain specific engineers and technical editors. The team of subject matter experts is groomed to meet the international quality standards throughout the process. In this project the subjects in the archive which needed to be documented were very diverse in nature. Hence the multiplicity proved to be a blessing in disguise for this project.

We employed a very clear-cut and quick methodology to begin with the project. The first phase of this process was to select articles for indexing which best suited the type of information. The second phase included the identification of keywords which formed the fundamentals of the article. This also included capturing relevant company names and names of the personnel.

Right through the process our domain experts were able to comprehend the importance of the news which was used to write abstracts and extracts and refine the existing titles. Besides this, our indexing experts neatly categorized the keywords pertaining to the different sections of the article. Our experienced design and presentation team added the final touches by implementing the final index/catalog in the format specified by the client. Automated software was used to increase the accuracy and speed of the tasks.

The Results

With a lot of devotion, we were able to gear up our rate of articles from 300 articles per week to 1000 articles per week in a span of 60 days. The end result was a client who was more than satisfied with the output accuracy and quality. The client has now outsourced the entire indexing and catalog building tasks to Flatworld Solutions. At this point in time the client has also started outsourcing German journals in addition to the English journals.

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