The following case study is based on a client demo by Gwen Travis, Manager, Digital Publications at the American Society of Hematology.
The Challenge
After migrating their journal content to Silverchair in 2020, the American Society of Hematology sought to improve searchability, accessibility, and discoverability across all their content. This required bringing over publications that didn’t fit the traditional XML structure for journals and books. ASH wanted their two news magazines to not only be displayed in an attractive way but also to be searchable along with the rest of their publications.
One of their annual publications, ASH News Daily, had 500 articles of legacy content while ASH Clinical News, their monthly publication, had over 5000 articles in the backfile. Both publications exist in print and digital formats, which meant incorporating their legacy content while also setting them up to publish new content online.
The above image shows the easy-to-use process with Composer when importing documents. It has a simple dropdown menu for document type.
The Solution
Silverchair’s new tool, Composer, enables the authoring, loading, and publishing of exactly this kind of “semi-structured” content, allowing publishers to host all their content in one place and reap the benefits of discoverability, improved user experience, and streamlined workflows for their staff. To aid with the loading of the legacy content, Silverchair teams scripted the import for ASH News Daily from WordPress, avoiding a long manual process.
Within Composer, ASH can organize their content via publications. Gwen Travis of ASH stated that Composer was “very easy to navigate,” especially when creating the layout for articles. Previously, advertisements and social media links pulled in unwanted characters when transferring articles. With Composer, these issues were easy to address in the body of the text without needing to go into the source code. On ASH News Daily, the keyword search feature helped readers locate content from past years by creating different tags. Now, news content can be located through the site search bar and through keyword search.
This image depicts how keywords can be tagged at the top of the page to give the reader more accessibility to content they are looking for.
The Process
“Composer is very good at helping you minimize mistakes, and the import feature is very easy to use.” –Gwen Travis
Composer gives publishers flexibility on how to import their existing content and data. Silverchair helped map ASH’s WordPress posts, mapping Composer keywords to WordPress categories, and mapping body content from one interface to the other. Composer offers users an overview of the information entered after mapping, which users may then save. If a user would like to reuse previously entered data formatting for a new data import, they can easily do so through built-in functions. This feature saves time, so users do not have to go through the mapping process anew for each import. Composer also shows a preview of what the content layout will look like before it is published.
Above: An image of the review page before publishing.
As an early adopter of Composer, ASH has found the tool to be an incredibly useful and user-friendly addition to their suite of other platform tools, saving time while also making their content even more discoverable. At the same time, they have been able to give valuable feedback to Silverchair’s product team, helping ensure that the tool will continue to evolve through a robust and user-driven roadmap.