Koshland Science Museum and Web Site Opens to the Public

The Marion Koshland Science Museum and Web site not only provides some of the best science materials on the Internet today, it allows visitors, especially educators, to find the specific materials they need quickly and easily.

Objective Consulting, Inc. provided a number of J2EE based tools to help manage the museum's site and make the content more interactive. A dynamic events calendar, rotating fun fact highlights and knowledge management services help ensure visitors know about the impressive online and in-person museum activities. Content and version management tools allow the museum to easily and safely make changes both at scheduled times and on an ad-hoc basis.

The museum is operated by the National Academy of Sciences, a private, nonprofit organization created by a congressional charter in 1863 to advise the government on scientific and technical matters.

Online Syndication of National Independent Bestseller Lists

Objective Consulting, Inc. has announced the online syndication of the Book Sense Bestseller Lists. These lists, generated from point of sales data at over 400 Independent Bookstores, are the most timely national bestseller lists available in the United States.

Standard RSS and XML will be used for the syndication, allowing both web sites and personal news aggregators to easily include and display weekly bestseller lists. The initial six lists are: Hardcover Fiction, Hardcover Non-Fiction, Paperback Fiction, Mass Market and Children's bestsellers. Syndication of specialty lists such as Business, Technology, Science Fiction/Fantasy and others are planned for the future.

Visit our Bestseller List RSS demo page for more information.

Going All Digital Offers Opportunity For Growth

Often, cutting costs means cutting services. OCI can integrate online publishing solutions to help you add services while potentially cutting costs. For example, our Print-on-Demand tool adds a brand new level of customization to online publications while allowing organizations to phase out costly printing and mailing.

With this tool, the American Booksellers Association eliminated their print publication and increased the value of their online offerings. The ABA has provided timely news to their members through their website for years, but now users can select exactly the articles they want and print them or save them to disk. The tool is easy to use and creates professional looking newsletter format PDFs, making it an attractive alternative to costly print runs.

Read more about the implementation of this project on our Bookselling This Week Print-on-Demand Project Page.

OCI works with BookSense.com To Promote Independent Bookselling and the Lord of the Rings: Return of the King Release.

Last December, the third movie in the Lord of the Rings trilogy was released. In anticipation of the release, BookSense.com ran a promotion designed to drive traffic from the BookSense.com site to retail stores and vice versa. When visiting the site, visitors who obtained game pieces answered trivia quesitons and entered their promotional code to enter the sweepstake drawing. Building on the success of previous projects, Objective Consulting, Inc. worked with BookSense.com to realize their vision of using the enthusiasm generated by the movie to increase awareness of and sales by independent booksellers. Modifying and reusing tools from past promotions decreases the overall cost of the project and increases BookSense.com's return on investment.