Cambridge University Press Case Study

Data Mining CDROM Catalogue

Company Profile

Cambridge University Press (CUP) is the printing and publishing house of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1534, the world's oldest press is today one of the largest educational and academic publishers producing nearly 2,500 books and over 150 journals a year in print and electronic form, which are sold in some 200 countries. CUP is an international publisher, with over 24,000 authors in 108 countries.

Business Requirements

CUP wanted to replace their annual paper catalogue with a CDROM version containing around 18,000 records with full searching capabilities for fields such as author, title, ISBN, keyword, publication date and format. They also required the CDROM to provide browsing and drill down by publishing area, subject and series with full contact information. Various items needed to be displayed including cover images, contents, contributors, and comparable titles. Other requirements included printing options with order forms that could be faxed back to the Cambridge office, and exporting facilities for specified fields and records.

Our Solution

Beacon designed and implemented a CDROM database using file storage and a tool to populate this database using data contained in CUP’s Oracle database. The tool was also able to retrieve other data, such as images, so they could be written to the CD. We implemented the full search functionality as required by CUP using string compare to data in the files, and also implemented a shopping basket and linked contents to the CUP web site. In order to fully meet CUP’s requirements, we tested the CD on different PC platforms, namely Win95, Win98, Win2000, and NT.