Brand owners often manage gigantic archives. Newspaper clippings from days gone by are a rewarding source of reusable media content. For example, Catena Company was recently asked to make an archive of 16000 (!) newspaper clippings more accessible.
Fortunately these were not piled up randomly in banana boxes, but they did date from before newspapers were offered digitally. Zealous employees once scanned all those articles. Digitization they called it back then. They even did their best to give each PDF a meaningful file name according to a set structure, with the publication date and subject matter incorporated.
Unfortunately, the digital archive had grown so large that nothing could be found. This had two disadvantages. Firstly, all marketing staff knew it was an impossible job to find a relevant article, so they stopped searching. The extensive archive was not utilized. Too bad, because it contained a lot of valuable content that could easily be reused. Secondly, those few frantic attempts to find that one article someone knew existed anyway, were punished with a lot of wasted time. It couldn’t go on like that. But the archive couldn’t just be given up, could it?
The marketing staff did know OCR, the technology to recognize text in PDFs, but how were they supposed to go about it? Manually re-scanning all the paper newspaper clippings? No way!
Fortunately, there was a much simpler solution for that.
The DAM (a Digital Asset Management system) centralizes all digital assets and simplifies their management and use. What is specifically nice about a modern DAM platform is its accessibility via APIs. That enables integrations with other applications and allows for custom programming of solutions without huge licensing costs. This is where the techies at Catena Company knew what to do….
Using an external application, the PDFs were downloaded via the API, presented to an online OCR service from Adobe and then returned as an additional version in the DAM.
The gigantic archive opened up like Ali Baba’s cave. All the articles were suddenly searchable, a treasure chest for content designers, marketers and storytellers, who now eagerly use the articles from the old box in their marketing communications. The company saves a lot of search time and thus costs, but above all more value is created thanks to the treasure of digital content.
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