Ingenta expands presence in China
Dedicated staff and features for users in key market
Ingenta, the technology provider which connects the publishing and information industries, recently announced the latest phase in its strategy for providing services in China, on behalf of its 250 publisher customers. The company’s long-term activities in this key market will benefit from a number of improvements, following feedback gathered during Ingenta’s recent presence at the Beijing International Book Fair.
At the heart of the new approach is an emphasis on localised support; Ingenta’s customer service team will be extended to include dedicated staff in China to provide tailored assistance to users of the IngentaConnect platform. The site’s current support materials are being translated into Chinese, and will be extended to address the particular requirements of this user group. Meanwhile, the unique access requirements created by the market’s funding model will be further met by developments to IngentaConnect’s search engine, which will filter out non-subscribed content from users’ search results and return only records with immediately accessible full text. Future developments include the provision of a Chinese interface to IngentaConnect, additional search performance optimisation, and more contextual help for administrative functions around the site such as those undertaken by librarians.
Much of the work is being undertaken in collaboration with The Charlesworth Group. The Group’s Beijing based subsidiary, Charlesworth China, is one of the leading agents for promotion of licences to access on-line content in China, and has already secured deals for a number of customers with content hosted by IngentaConnect. Charlesworth China will carry out translation work and support Ingenta’s Chinese customer service representative. Graham Lawley, Chief Executive of The Charlesworth Group, comments, “Ingenta’s news demonstrates a clear understanding of the needs of Chinese users. We are pleased to see them committing significant resource to supporting this burgeoning market. These developments will make a real difference to the Chinese institutions we work with; therefore, our mutual publisher customers will also benefit from maximised usage.”
Ingenta has offered China-specific services since 2000; many of the company’s publisher partners have taken advantage of its local servers, which enable Chinese institutions to avoid the international bandwidth charges associated with non-local full text downloads. Ingenta’s Chinese servers were most recently upgraded in July 2006, and at this point were moved on to the CERNET network to improve performance, security and resilience. The company provides Chinese versions of its IngentaConnect literature to further support use of its publishers’ content in this growing market.
Please visit the Ingenta stand (Hall 4.2, D416) at the Frankfurt Book Fair for further information.
ENDS
For more information, please contact:
Charlie Rapple
Ingenta plc
Tel: +44 1865 397860
Email: charlie.rapple@ingenta.com
Helen Charlesworth
The Charlesworth Group
Tel: +44 7976 509927
Email: h_charlesworth@charlesworth.com
About Ingenta
www.ingenta.com
Ingenta is the global market leader in the management and distribution of published scientific, professional and academic research via the Internet, and develops and maintains specialist websites and technology services for publishers, self-publishing societies and libraries. Ingenta has been included in the EContent 100, “a list of the 100 companies that matter most in the digital content industry”, every year since 2002.
For publishers of scientific, professional and academic periodicals, journals and reference works, Ingenta provides a suite of publisher services including data conversion, secure online hosting, access control and distribution services. Our Information Commerce Division provides flexible infrastructure and tools to enable publishers to repackage, bundle or price content online at the click of a button.
For libraries and information professionals, Ingenta offers collection management and comprehensive document delivery options. Ingenta’s collection of research content – 20 million articles from more than 10,000 online publications and 20,000 fax and Ariel delivered publications – is accessed by millions of researchers and librarians a month via ingentaconnect.com and other websites.
About The Charlesworth Group
www.charlesworth.com
The Charlesworth Group is a leading global supplier of services to the scholarly publishing sector, with offices in the UK, USA and China. Its wholly-owned Chinese subsidiary was formed in 1999 and currently employs over 130 staff. Core services include data capture and conversion; translation; copy-editing and typesetting. A sales and marketing function was added in 2001 to service the growing demand in China for access to content from international publishers. Charlesworth China has arranged rights and licensing deals with the Chinese academic sector for over 40 publishers, including a number of high profile national site licences for access to on-line content.
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