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Washington Technologies White Papers

Washington Technologies White Papers

BNA Uses SGML to Gain Competitive Advantage

Donna Ives, Director of Data Administration, The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc.

The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. ( BNA) and its subsidiaries provide labor, legal, economic, and regulatory information to business, professional, government, and academic users. BNA is the oldest fully employee-owned company in the U.S. and the largest private publisher of specialized reports and information services in the nation's capital.

When BNA started publishing over 50 years ago, editors wrote typesetting instructions by hand for the Linotype operators. In the 70s they used computers to embed two-digit "locator codes" in the text. In 1980 we switched to proprietary (Atex) coding. In 1985, with the purchase of a Datalogics system to produce our looseleaf publications, we began using unparsed SGML-like coding. For the past three years, while struggling to migrate thousands of pages of legacy data to BNA-standard SGML, we have been wishing there was such a thing as "undo" so we could recover from the blunder of using unparsed data!

In 1993, BNA decided to use parsed SGML to produce BNA publications. Why? To make the coding scheme system-independent; to help organize the content; to support the sharing and reuse of the data, especially for electronic products; to recognize data as an asset. Quite frankly, we were tired of changing coding schemes over and over again, and of paying for the major cost of data conversion and retraining Editorial and Production employees every time we changed our publishing system.

Has using SGML worked for BNA? You bet! We enjoy a competitive advantage because our products get out faster, we can build in search and retrieval features, we have reliable extraction tools, we can link to related information, and the discipline imposed makes our products more user-friendly because our data is organized coherently. Is everybody happy? Not always -- some of our staff are downright ... well let's just say irritated. Learning a new way of coding, changing how people do their jobs, and most of all imposing discipline and standards takes a lot of work. But the benefits of producing many products from a single source saves time and money. If we had a time machine and could go back to 1993, we would not change our decision to go to SGML.


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