On a tear: At the behest of the Boston Globe, MerlinOne developed this electronic tearsheet system that e-mails advertisers indicating that a web site has an image of the page where their ad appeared.

Image archiving is now just one more rabbit in MerlinOne's hat

NEW ORLEANS -- Trans-mu-ta-tion: The process of changing one thing into something else, often more valuable.

If you haven't looked at MerlinOne lately -- the company, not the wizard -- it's time for a visit. For starters, MerlinOne Inc. is the company's new name (it was originally called T/One).

Known for its photo archiving solutions -- it was founded by a bunch of photography types -- the company is well into text archiving and electronic tearsheets for advertising. And the photo tools? Well, they are still around, but there is a much broader range than you may remember.

The newest gadget to come out of the cauldron has nothing to do with photography and quite a bit to do with other things the company picked up over the years, and came about when the company was doing some other work at the Boston Globe.

"The Globe said, 'We need to do electronic delivery of tearsheets,'" Dave Tenenbaum, president and founder of MerlinOne of Quincy, Mass., said here at NEXPO. "This wasn't for photos, but for paid ads. So we whipped a prototype together."

As most of you know, newspapers don't get paid until the advertiser is delivered official proof that an ad has run, in the correct place, at the correct time and with the correct type. This has led to an army of people doing things that -- in the current vernacular -- don't ad value to the proposition. Instead, people in the accounting department are getting additional copies of papers, tearing advertisements out, matching them up with the paperwork and sending them off.

"You create a whole host of costs," Tenenbaum said, "You have papers to tear, someone to tear them, courier costs, postal costs, all sorts of costs."

With the new system, now in trials, the Globe sends MerlinOne files in the Adobe Acrobat portable document format (PDF), along with the ad order and some other information in a standardized eXtensible Markup Language (XML) format. The system can put together a package and post it on a web site, sending a message to the advertiser so he or she knows where to look at the ad.

"The ad order knows when the ad ran, the pagination system knows what page it was on, we send the page the ad was on, the page before and the page after," Tenenbaum said. "It has the nameplate of the paper, the day it ran and the ad insertion order."

The initial plan is to keep 13 months of ads on-line, so advertisers -- and the paper's sales and accounting representatives -- can sign on and see the ads, both old and new. MerlinOne will be hosting the site for now, as it does with some other products, and co-brands it so advertisers can come in through Merlin's site or that of the newspaper.

The company also has done quite a bit of work on its archiving system, adding tools for text archiving as well as making accommodations for the increasingly digital world of photography.

The Trax photo assignment database allows staff members to create an assignment through a web browser, doing all the things that standard photo assignments do, but keeping them in a database instead of scraps of paper scattered hither and yon.

Scrounger Enterprise builds on the existing Scrounger system and is designed to suck photos off digital cameras, flash memory cards, Zip drives or wherever else they may be stored, tie itself into the Trax database and marry the information to the photos. The information is then stored on servers instead of the multitude of CDs common to so many photo departments and news libraries.

"The Scrounger system is analogous to shooting and processing the film and laying it on a light table," Tenenbaum said. "The photographer comes in, puts in the PC card and it scrounges the photos off."

The photographer can scan the bar code on the assignment form, and Scrounger goes off and grabs the assignment information out of Trax. If there is caption information (your photographers do fill out the caption information fields, right?), then that is sucked in, too.

The New York Times, Tenenbaum said, already has about a half a terabyte of data in its Scrounger, relegating stacks of CDs to the trash bin and freeing up some premium space in the cramped newsroom.

In addition to the geeky side of things, it has benefits that photo editors are glad to see. Photo editors like it because it allows them to see everything that was shot on an assignment, not just what the photographer wants them to see. "It brings contact sheets back, which we've been trying to do for years," said Dave Frank, a photo editor at the New York Times.

And more is on the way. When photos hit Scrounger, an e-mail will go to the editor who placed the assignment. That e-mail will contain a link to the photos -- presumably after a photo editor has trimmed them down -- so the editor can look at them through a browser.

Scrounger runs on a set of clustered servers -- currently Compaqs -- running Windows 2000.

The transmutation has taken other forms, too. Once known exclusively for its photo archiving tools, MerlinOne now is well into text archiving. In fact, Tenenbaum said, most of the upgrades he's selling these days are to add text archiving to sites that are pleased with the photo products.

The company still maintains its considerable photo archiving system, which got a significant leg up almost two years ago, when the Associated Press announced that it was pulling its photo archiving system off the market (see The Cole Papers, November 1999). The powers-that-be at Merlin aggressively went after the members of AP's Preserver Users Group, showing off their wares.

That archiving product, now known as Merlin 4 Visual Asset Management System, handles more than just photos. It is fully acronym-aware, able to handle files in such formats as JPEG, TIFF and PDF (with text searching), text and almost any other format you may use in production. And MerlinOne is moving into the application service provider (ASP) area, adding a version that it can host on its servers.

Taking its acronym awareness a step further, MerlinOne is helping publishers move into e-commerce with MerlinSell and MerlinNet, ASP services that can resell items from the photo archive as well as handle reprints and related tasks.

Not bad for a couple of photography wizards.

-- S.E.B.

MerlinOne Inc., (617) 328-6645, e-mail: info@merlinone.com.

From THE COLE PAPERS, August 2001, Copyright © 2001, All Rights Reserved.