Washington Technologies White Papers
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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