Case Study > Business Journal Catalog Indexing

Outsource2india developed a business journal indexing solution for a leading US based organization that improved their reputation as an easy-to-use business journal in the reader’s eyes.

The Client

A leading US based company and a major player in the worldwide arena decided to outsource indexing and building catalogs of their existing journal archives. They desired faster access to important information without any waste of valuable time.

The Challenges faced by Outsource2india

O2I was approached by the company to take over their organization’s indexing and catalog building activities. O2I was chosen because our outsourcing process and practices in general and our indexing services in particular matched their company values and their long-term growth strategy.

The main challenge lay in the sheer amount of documents that were to be indexed and cataloged. Not only were they huge in number but also addressed diverse topics and subjects. This meant that the assignment of creating indexes called not only for high manpower involvement but also engaging enormous amounts of brainpower as well.

Our professionals and subject matter experts are trained to look at various attributes while doing projects. Basically, they see if the indexed terms are appropriate for the intended audience, and check if the main headings are relevant to the needs of the reader etc.

Other questions that our professionals ask themselves: is the material identified pertinent, specific, and comprehensive? Not too general yet not too narrow? Not inane or improbable? Are the subheadings useful? Are subheadings concise, with the most important word at the beginning? Is the type large enough to be easily read? Do the index pages look open and not crowded? Is the organization — alphabetical, chronological, or other — accurate, clear, and consistent? Based on the answers to these pertinent questions O2I chalked out a plan for the proposed task.

The Solution

We believe in bringing maturity and quality the client doorstep so all our projects are designated to the subject matter experts. O2I’s implementation panel consisting of domain experts, qualified domain specific engineers and technical editors took charge of the task in hand.

The diversity of our subject matter experts was deliberate since international quality standards had to be maintained throughout the process. In addition, the subjects addressed in the archive to be documented were highly diverse in nature hence multiplicity of our panel of experts and implementation team was essential.

The process adopted by Outsource2india was simple and non-time consuming. The first step was to select suitable articles for indexing based on type of information content. Identifying relevant keywords that represent the core concept of the article as well as capturing relevant company and personnel names was the very important second step.

Throughout the process, our domain experts understood the essence of the news to write extracts/abstracts and to refine titles. Then our indexing experts classified the keywords under relevant sections depending on the nature of the article.

Finally, our experienced design and presentation personnel presented the final index/catalog in the format required by the client.

We also made use of automated software to enhance the pace and accuracy of creating indices.

The Results

In the first phase of the project, Outsource2india scaled up from 300 articles per week to over 1000 articles per week in a time frame of 60 days!

The result was a satisfied client who has granted the entire indexing and cataloging task to Outsource2india making this an on-going project. In addition to English journals, O2I has also started indexing German journals.

Outsource your Research and Analysis Services to O2I

O2I has been in the business of research and analysis outsourcing and other outsourcing services for the past seven years. If you would like to find out more about outsourcing Research and Analysis services to O2I, please fill in the inquiry form, and the Client Engagement Team at Outsource2india will contact you within 24 hours.