Benefits of Adopting PRISM Specifications

Tracking content through its life-cycle—the creation, management, use, aggregation, syndication and reuse of digital assets—is a costly, ad-hoc endeavor unless industry-wide standards are followed. But when industry agreement about how an asset is described, exchanged, and displayed affordable tools will emerge and the efficiencies of automation can be realized across the industry. PRISM is one such industry standard. PRISM specifications define a standard, cross-industry framework for describing, exchanging, and reusing content in both print and electronic publishing contexts using XML metadata and content encoding.

What are the benefits of adopting PRISM specifications? Benefits can be considered from the view of the publisher (content provider) who must create, manage, use, syndicate and re-purpose content and from the view of the aggregator who receives, organizes, and redistributes content from many sources.

Benefits to the Publisher

• The adoption of an industry standard metadata framework for the creation, management, use and distribution of content reduces the time and expense it would take a publisher to develop their own framework, provides a built-in level of usability and confidence and enables publishers to use off-the-shelf tools rather than expensive, custom publisher-specific tools.
  
  
• The use of standardized metadata can help streamline the workflow from creation to production to distribution by eliminating the requirement to re-key and categorize content at each workflow step. This lowers costs, reduces errors, positions the publisher to automate labor-intensive tasks, and directly facilitates archiving / re-purposing within the organization and delivery of the content to aggregators and secondary content distributors..

Benefits to the Aggregator

• The use of a single, industry-standard format for extraction and acquisition reduces the errors and costs of tracking and deploying multiple formats to communicate with multiple business partners.
  
  
• The use of a single format for all organizations speeds the aggregator's processing of content and speeds the integration of new business partners into the workflow. If a new partner is using a format that the aggregator can already handle, little if any process change is necessary to transmit content between partners. The value and accessibility of the content will also be increased because time to market is reduced.
  
  
• The use of a common industry content interchange format reduces the barrier to entry for all publishers and content aggregators. This is especially valuable for smaller organizations.

PRISM Benefits Everyone!

According to one large aggregator, it is expected that when they start receiving “PRISM XML” the serial content received from publishers could go on line in as little as a week. Huge cost savings result for the aggregator and the publisher - because both have been able to develop reliable conversion, delivery and acquisition processes that require little or no human intervention. And both sides make more revenue because the content is available to the subscribers/public more rapidly. Since research has shown that online content is most valuable within a week of its original publication, this is very important.