ABSTRACT
When I talk to production and managing editors or chief product officers at publishing houses about the benefits and challenges in the era of digital publishing, they cannot imagine accomplishing their goals today without the dramatic improvements in the production processes that technology has made possible. And they embrace the increased opportunities to reach new markets and audiences-especially those that prefer to consume information on electronic devices. But they regularly struggle with how best to label, organize, and store their digital assets so that they can keep track of them, locate them, and quickly know how and when they were created. More often than not, especially with publishers who have a long history of print-only publications and have only recently begun to implement a digital strategy, many of their assets may not be in any type of digital format, but rather stuck in a physical library somewhere. Often both physical documents (slides, manuscripts, mechanicals, original art and photography) and digital files are dispersed in many different locations, and production editors may find it no easier to locate digital files than older, non-digital materials.
