Converting Over 100 Years of Content for H.W. Wilson

H.W. Wilson, an icon in the library community since its founding over a century ago, has dedicated itself to providing the world’s highest-quality reference materials. H.W. Wilson publishes more than 60 reference databases that meet research needs around the globe, including full-text periodicals databases, biography databases, index and abstract databases, collection development catalogs, and reference monographs.

Challenge Bringing a Century’s Worth of Printed Data into the New Millennium

The sheer volume of printed text produced by H.W. Wilson posed an unprecedented challenge: digitizing, and making Web-searchable, every periodicals index and all other reference resources published by H.W. Wilson since its inception in 1898. This meant transforming a massive database containing nearly 18 million records and directing readers to every important periodical article and book published during the 20th century.

This project would go far beyond transferring data from print to electronic form. The H.W. Wilson staff of librarians and subject specialists would have to carefully review and revise antiquated subject headings to simplify searches using contemporary terms. Additionally, personal names used as subjects would have to be updated and standardized to ensure the retrieval of all records on specific individuals.

Solution Custom Conversion of Legacy Data to XML

Aptara had already demonstrated its ability to handle large-scale content transformation projects for H.W. Wilson when it converted a number of indexes, including a Humanities and Social Sciences Index Retrospective spanning the years 1907 to 1984 and containing more than 1.3 million records, and the Index to Legal Periodicals Retrospective, which contained approximately 600,000 records and spanned the years 1908 to 1981.

H.W. Wilson turned to Aptara again for its ability to efficiently transform static data into dynamic digital content. A highly-skilled technical workforce and state-of-the-art integrated production facilities enabled Aptara to seamlessly scale-up operations to meet this unprecedented challenge:

• Legacy data was converted to XML in accordance with the proprietary DTD developed in conjunction with H.W. Wilson.
• Content was seamlessly converted into XML-encoded data before loading it onto Wilson’s Internet service, WilsonWeb.

Results A Century of Important Periodical Articles and Books – Online and Fully-Searchable

• Researchers have precise information at their fingertips from a 100-year period of American history that simply cannot be obtained elsewhere.
• The data is available in a variety of special H.W. Wilson reference databases that focus on historical information.
• The new retrospective products are offered in conjunction with previous versions so that users have access to information from the initial year of the retrospective product, decades ago, to the very latest editions of today’s periodicals cited on current WilsonWeb databases.