PUBLISHING

DATABASE PUBLISHING
What are the advantages of shifting to a hybrid publishing workflow? First of
all, it will make much more efficient the process of creating a publication with
multiple output formats. But this is only the beginning: when the hybrid workflow
is comprehensively applied, when you really ‘change your life’, many new
possibilities will open up. The most important of these, database publishing
using a content management system, will be briefly discussed here.
A database is a collection of independent, yet mutually related, objects. These
objects can be everything from structured texts to images of eighteenth-century
paintings. An important point here is that we need clear structures that
go beyond the short-term use of the database. Consider for example a company
mailing list. We may take a person’s full name and address as a single
object. But if we wish to select by postal code or any other subcategory within
the full name and address, or if we want to add more information to the
person’s name, such as age, e-mail address and previous purchases, we have
to define a more detailed structure of objects and sub-objects, including their
interdependencies (for example, a house number requires a street name and
vice versa), whether or not they are mandatory (age may be optional), and
so on. This makes building and maintaining the all-encompassing database
difficult and time-consuming.
The best option is therefore to explicitly define the goals of the publication
program as well as any practical limitations. The four publishing genres discussed
in this publication all have their own requirements regarding the creation
and distribution of publications. An art catalog requires clear descriptors
for the identity of the artist, the materials used, the sizes, the image source,
copyright, keywords according to established lists, etc. Other collections of
images may require other data.
In pure text databases we also have to be careful. On one hand we have the
data related to the author’s name, affiliation, address, etc. But it becomes a
different proposition when illustrations and diagrams are included and perhaps
even shared between publications. If this is the case, we might consider
a special section in our database that pertains only to illustrations and their
descriptions. The same is true for bibliographical references and the collection
of hyperlinks used in the text. Therefore we would advise that various
objects such as image or text entities are provided with as many consistent
metadata (field descriptors) as possible.
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