Case Study: United States Government

Content Imperative

Paper publications alone do not answer the immediate, highly specialized, international needs of the government. An XML-tagged “subdoc” publishing system promised to liberate critical information from hundreds of thousands of documents and make it available anywhere, anytime, in any electronic format.

To this end, in 2005 a large branch of the U.S. Government sought out OBS as a subcontractor to research, organize, and conduct a full day of high-level briefings on the state of online publishing in the private sector. We first conducted a needs analysis, and after three months of research, identified industry leaders to offer our government client a productive day of “nontechnical” presentations showing how private industry had advanced online publishing in the previous 13 years. Topics included state-of-the-art search engine development, print-on-demand capabilities, metadata strategies, and the latest on standards-based taxonomies, as well as profiling and security technologies.

OBS’s Role

  • Set up and run a full-day conference on online publishing industry best practices for senior military publications professionals
  • Create web sites and online publications for the Library of Congress Publishing Division
  • Present as a senior subject matter expert at the Library of Congress/University of Virginia “Publishing in the 21st Century” conferences