Academics & Publics

Every year IGOs, NGOs, and think tanks publish more than 400,000 high-quality, statistically rich reports to document their research.  It’s a huge publishing feat—equal to 10% of the world’s journal article output.  The publications contain data, tables, and hard research that simply aren’t available elsewhere, backed by highly reputable organizations that deserve to be recognized as publishers.  Their impact is substantive, as evidenced by how often their publications are referenced in academic papers, syllabi, and news sources. But the content is “grey literature,” often hiding and impermanent.

Even harder to find is all the research-and-learning content distributed in topnotch academic blogs, videos, chat groups, faculty websites, podcasts, conferences, and seminar recordings. SlideShare alone has 15 million presentations.  YouTube is referenced more than 740 million times on university websites. 

Then there are the millions of historical items that faculty and libraries digitize and upload every year—books, documents, maps, recordings, photos, letters, diaries, and ephemera— selected for their value in imparting new perspectives and delivering new research.  But where are they, where will they be next year, and who’s aware of them?  Meanwhile, vast swathes from previous years sit unused in archives, waiting to be digitized.  Much of the content is at risk from neglect, flood, fire, and budget cuts.

 Many voices are being lost.

 Much content is uncatalogued, undiscoverable, uncitable, prone to link rot, and likely to disappear.  

 Millions of dollars spent, along with hours invested in creating exceptional content, are being wasted.

Coherent Commons

Coherent Digital has developed a series of tools and resources that work together to:

• Make it easy to capture content: We use manual processes, machine-aided indexing, and AI techniques to identify and index materials automatically.  We ingest content from thousands of organizations daily.  We’re working to enable mobile-phone capture, to make it easy for our community of users to contribute content.
• Make it easy to enrich content: Our automated tools work behind the scenes to catalog and enrich content.  They generate reference images; make audio, video, and graphic representations, including tables and charts, searchable; extract titles, publisher names, and author names; identify languages; check links; and more.  Together with our manual processes, we’re able to enrich YouTube videos to make them suitable for instruction—stable and accompanied by teaching guides—and likewise enrich content contributed by users.
• Make it easy to for users to publish their own content: We’ve created high-traffic, fully featured, community-oriented platforms, so users can discover, share, embed, and deploy content. Our library-grade advanced search tools have multi-field searching with Boolean operators.  We make it possible for faculty to deploy links and uploaded content in under a minute with a choice of permissions levels (just me, my institution, or public).
• Make it easy to share content: We enable users to follow organizations, individuals, and topics and receive alerts when new items are added. It’s easy to create resource lists for syllabi, dynamically populated bibliographies, and even custom portals with personal branding.  

We work with publishers, archives, librarians, faculty, students, and scholars.  We believe that content owners should be able to choose what content is made openly available, and our models allow for that.  We allow content to stay on publishers’ websites; we benefit publishers by driving increased traffic to their sites.