ninestars-admin, Author at Ninestars Digitization Services

Debut Dialogues – Our First CPHI: In Conversation with Ninestars’ Leaders

Ninestars makes its debut at CPHI 2025 in Frankfurt from 28 to 30 October. Ahead of the event, we spoke with Gopal Chandra Shekar, SVP – Creative Excellence – Life Sciences, about how AOTM PACKX is transforming life sciences packaging with AI and automation.

Visit us at Hall 4.0, Booth 4P12 to learn more: https://www.ninestarsglobal.com/CPHI-2025/

As the life sciences community prepares to gather in Frankfurt for CPHI 2025, from October 28 to 30, Ninestars is excited to participate in the event for the first time. We are looking forward to engage with customers, partners, peers, and innovators who are shaping the future of the industry.

This participation comes at a time when packaging is moving from being a backroom process to a strategic driver of quality, compliance, and speed. The growing role of AI and automation is redefining how pharmaceutical and medical device companies manage creative and proofing workflows, ensuring precision while reducing time to market.

At the centre of this shift is AOTM PACKX, our intelligent automation platform for packaging artwork. It brings together creative teams, regulatory reviewers, and production stakeholders in one connected ecosystem—helping companies simplify complexity and build packaging operations that are faster, more transparent, and fully compliant.

Ahead of CPHI 2025, we sat down for Five Questions with Mohan Doshi, Chief Business Officer, to discuss what is driving the change in life sciences packaging, how AOTM PACKX supports this transformation, and why this year’s CPHI holds special significance for Ninestars.

What strategic vision led to the creation of PACKX?

AOTM PACKX was born out of our broader strategic vision to extend Ninestars’ automation capabilities into new markets and verticals where creative, data, and content workflows intersect. Over the past four years, our sustained R&D investments have matured into tangible outcomes—both internally through operational excellence, and externally through client success.

Recognizing the growing need for intelligent automation in regulated and highly creative environments, we saw an opportunity to redefine how business outcomes are measured in terms of speed, compliance, and quality. AOTM PACKX is the result—a focused innovation designed to disrupt the packaging and labelling automation landscape through measurable business impact.

How are life sciences clients responding to automation in regulated creative workflows?

Life sciences organizations are under intense pressure to accelerate global product launches amidst shorter patent lifecycles and evolving regulatory demands. Automation is no longer optional—it’s mission-critical.

Clients see AOTM PACKX as a trusted enabler to achieve faster time-to-market without compromising on compliance, audit readiness, or design integrity. The response has been exceptional, largely because our approach blends deep domain expertise with regulatory sensitivity. We help clients transition from manual, fragmented creative workflows to intelligent, compliant, and scalable automation ecosystems.

How do you see PACKX evolving as part of Ninestars’ larger automation ecosystem?

Ninestars’ automation vision revolves around three pillars—Content, Data, and Creative. While the AOTM platform provides a horizontal automation foundation across industries, AOTM PACKX is a verticalized extension built specifically for packaging and labelling automation in regulated sectors like life sciences.

As we expand AOTM PACKX to cover more use cases—from artwork proofing to multilingual compliance automation—we see it becoming a cornerstone in Ninestars’ larger intelligent automation ecosystem. The convergence of content intelligence, regulatory data, and creative automation will unlock significant value for pharma and healthcare clients in the years ahead.

What does success look like for Ninestars in this space over the next few years?

Success for us is defined by business impact at scale—transforming how life sciences organizations manage packaging and labelling workflows globally.

In the next few years, we envision AOTM PACKX driving measurable outcomes across three dimensions:

Speed: Reducing packaging and labelling cycle times by 40–60%.
Compliance: Achieving near-zero audit findings through automation-driven traceability.
Scalability: Enabling global rollouts across markets and regulatory regimes through a unified automation framework.

Ultimately, success means becoming the preferred automation partner for life sciences brands seeking to balance agility, compliance, and creative excellence.

What are you most looking forward to at CPHI, and how does it align with Ninestars’ broader automation vision?

CPHI provides the perfect platform to engage with global pharma leaders who are reimagining the future of regulated operations through automation. We look forward to exchanging insights on how creative and content automation can directly influence market readiness, regulatory agility, and brand consistency.

For Ninestars, this aligns perfectly with our broader vision—to make intelligent automation a business enabler rather than just a technology initiative. AOTM PACKX embodies that vision by demonstrating how automation can drive measurable outcomes—from faster approvals to compliant global launches—impacting not just processes, but the entire value chain.

Let’s Connect: Visit Ninestars’ booth at CPHI Frankfurt 2025

If you are attending CPHI 2025 in Frankfurt, we would be happy to connect in person. Visit us at Hall 4.0, Booth 4P12 to learn more about AOTM PACKX and how AI and automation are shaping the future of life sciences packaging. For additional information, you can visit https://www.ninestarsglobal.com/CPHI-2025/ or reach us at contactus@ninestars.in.

Stay tuned for more conversations from Ninestars’ leaders as part of the Debut Dialogues series.

Debut Dialogues – Our First CPHI: In Conversation with Ninestars’ Leaders

Visit us at Hall 4.0, Booth 4P12 to learn more: https://www.ninestarsglobal.com/CPHI-2025/

Ahead of CPHI 2025, we sat down for Five Questions with Gopal Chandra Shekar, SVP – Creative Excellence, Life Sciences, to discuss what is driving the change in life sciences packaging, how AOTM PACKX supports this transformation, and why this year’s CPHI holds special significance for Ninestars.

Q1. What’s driving the need for automation and AI in life sciences packaging today?

In life sciences, every label, leaflet, and carton carries critical information — and the cost of even a small error can be huge, both financially and reputationally.

Regulatory changes are constant, markets are global, and timelines are shrinking. Manual processes just can’t keep pace anymore. That’s where automation and AI step in — to handle the repeatable, error-prone tasks, while giving teams more visibility, control, and speed. It’s about creating packaging operations that are not only compliant but also intelligent and scalable.

Q2. How is AOTM PACKX redefining the creative and proofing workflow for pharma and medical device companies?
With AOTM PACKX, we wanted to bring true digital transformation to an area that’s often been left behind. We’ve built an intelligent platform that brings together creative teams, regulatory reviewers, and packaging engineers in one connected ecosystem.

What makes it powerful is the automation behind the scenes — AI that checks label content, verifies artwork, and ensures compliance automatically. It means less back-and-forth, fewer manual checks, and complete traceability across every version. The creative and proofing process becomes faster, smarter, and stress-free.

Q3. Can you share a specific challenge in life sciences packaging that AOTM PACKX directly solves?
One big challenge we see all the time is managing regulatory-driven label changes across SKUs. An update, say a dosage or ingredient change, can trigger a massive wave of artwork revisions across regions.

AOTM PACKX along with AOTM VAULT simplifies the chaos. It automatically identifies all impacted artworks, links them to the right master data, and pushes them through automated review and proofing workflows. What used to take weeks of manual coordination now happens in a fraction of the time, with far fewer errors.

Q4. How does automation improve both compliance and speed for pharma brands?
For a long time, people believed you had to choose between moving fast and staying compliant. But with automation, you can do both — and do them better.

In AOTM PACKX, every process is built with compliance in mind. Every step is tracked, every approval is auditable, and AI ensures the final artwork always matches the approved data. The beauty of automation is that it eliminates human bottlenecks while actually strengthening compliance. So instead of slowing things down, it builds confidence and momentum.

Q5. What excites you most about being part of CPHI this year?
CPHI is such a vibrant space — it’s where innovation really comes to life in the pharma world. For me, it’s exciting to see how packaging is finally being recognized as a critical part of the value chain, not just a downstream activity.

We are passionate about showcasing how AI and automation can unlock new possibilities — helping pharma and medical device companies launch faster, reduce risk, and create more agile operations. Being part of that global conversation, surrounded by people who are shaping the future of the industry, is something I am genuinely looking forward to.

Are you at CPHI 2025?

Stay tuned for more conversations from Ninestars’ leaders as part of the Debut Dialogues series.

Preserving Knowledge, Powering the Future: A Conversation with Patrick Fleming, Business Director, Digitization at Ninestars

At Ninestars, Patrick Fleming, former British Library director, award-winning journalist, and digital transformation leader, is helping shape the future of digitization. Drawing from decades at the intersection of culture, media, and technology, he reflects on how digitization is transforming libraries and archives: from fragile collections made searchable and accessible, to AI-powered discovery that redefines how we engage with history. For Fleming, the challenge is not just preserving knowledge but making it intelligent, ethical, and impactful for generations to come.

Over the last few months at Ninestars, Patrick Fleming has been bringing his deep expertise in archives, publishing, and digital transformation to shape our digitization practice. A former British Library director, award-winning journalist, CEO, and consultant, Patrick has spent his career at the intersection of culture, media, and technology. His experience leading transformational programs, from the British Newspaper Archive to large-scale library development initiatives, now informs how Ninestars approaches digitization in the age of AI.

We sat down with Patrick to talk about how digitization is changing libraries, archives, and the very way we think about access to knowledge.

You’ve worked extensively with libraries and archives over the years. Tell us a little about the transformative shift you’ve witnessed in the move from physical to digital collections.

Technology and innovation has radically transformed library and archive collections. With AI we are entering the next stage of digital innovation.

Digitisation transforms archives and libraries by enhancing access to collections, ensuring preservation of fragile Items, and enabling digital preservation of born-digital materials.

I have been at the heart of this digital transformation at the British Library. The Library’s newspaper collection, possibly the greatest in the world. grows as a paper collection every day due to legal deposit. Enshrined In legislation legal deposit forces the Library to collect the hard copies of every published newspaper In the UK. Only 2% of the collection of over 180 kilometres of content was digitised when the Library introduced its transformative journey to store, preserve and give access to its newspaper collection.

The game changer for the Library was to find a partner who would provide the innovation required to digitise out of copyright newspapers. DC Thomson won a procurement to start the process and the British Newspaper Archive today has 95 million pages and continues to grow.

Has there been a huge change in how people use libraries today compared to when you started?

Libraries and digitisation specialists like Ninestars continue to evolve internationally. Digitisation has transformed researcher behaviour by providing instant access to vast amounts of material remotely, changing research from physical exploration to online key word searching and data analysis. This shift enables large research questions, facilitates interdisciplinary approaches and poses challenges to the nature of libraries.

Researchers no longer sift through physical documents but rather read materials on screen. Powerful search facilities allow researchers to quickly locate information by searching for keywords across millions of documents. It was painstaking but often failed to capture nuance. A query like “climate change as reported In newspapers before 1988” could return thousands of results, not all of them relevant, now with AI driven digital archives the experiences changes completely. AI models understand context, semantics and intent, instead of matching words, they return answers. They summarise, highlight connections across decades and even suggest related themes. AI In digital libraries adds context, speed, and intelligence. Instead of static repositories, archives become dynamic, exploratory ecosystems as Ninestars are proving with best in-class digitisation transformations. Digitisation has fuelled the growth of digital humanities, creating new Interdisciplinary programs and fostering collaboration between researchers and archives.

How has digitisation changed the role of a librarian? What parts of the job have become easier, and which parts more complex?

Digitisation has transformed the librarians role from gatekeeper of physical collections to facilitator of digital access, shifting focus from preservation to curation and requiring new skills in technology, project management, and Information literacy. Librarians now manage digital resources, develop information literacy programs, teach users advanced search strategies and curate online content. They have become essential educators and technology experts In the digital age.

At Ninestars, we talk about preserving knowledge while making it intelligent and accessible. From your experience, what’s the biggest opportunity and challenges for organizations in embracing deep tech like AI?

AI presents huge opportunities for libraries to automate repetitive tasks, enhance user experience through personalised recommendations and Improved search, support collection development with data analysis, facilitate research with data management and text mining tools and relate dynamic content. Libraries can leverage AI to streamline workflows, optimise resources allocation, and offer accessible services like translation.

What’s one misconception about libraries that you wish more people understood?

Common misconceptions about libraries include:

They’re just for books. In reality, libraries also offer technology, music, programs, and services.
They’re always silent. Many function as vibrant community hubs with designated quiet zones.
Librarians just read all day. In fact, they manage diverse services, collections, and complex databases.
Libraries are irrelevant. On the contrary, they provide vital access to expensive databases, reliable internet, and digital literacy support.

Libraries today are dynamic community centers and social anchors, offering far more than print media. They provide learning opportunities, resources, and a safe haven for people of all ages.

What are some of the biggest trends and innovations you see for libraries on the horizon?

AI Is on every Librarian’s lips. Its full scope and International acceptance is still unknown. AI offers Insights for medicine, strategic planning and a host of industry wide uses.

And since we are talking about libraries and archives, is there a book that had a profound impact on you growing up?

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf had enormous Impact on me.

At Ninestars, Patrick’s experience reinforces our belief that preserving knowledge is only half the story. The real transformation lies in making it intelligent, accessible, and impactful for generations to come.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the future of digitization. Let’s talk at contactus@ninestars.in

The Role of AI in Enhancing Accessibility in Digital Libraries

As digital libraries expand their reach across the world, the mission is no longer just to digitize collections—it’s to make knowledge accessible to everyone, regardless of ability, language, or location. In 2025, artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a remarkably powerful enabler of inclusive access in digital libraries.

Here’s how AI is transforming accessibility from a checkbox into a core design principle.

Reimagining Accessibility in the Digital Age

Historically, accessibility in libraries focused on physical access—ramps, large-print books, or audio formats. In the digital era, accessibility extends far beyond and now means:

Navigating complex archives using screen readers
Accessing content in multiple languages and formats
Ensuring metadata and structure support discoverability for all users
Creating a seamless experience for users with visual, cognitive, or mobility impairments

Traditional digitization approaches often fail to address these needs comprehensively. This is where AI steps in.

AI-Powered OCR: Making Text Truly Searchable

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has long been used to convert scanned documents into searchable text. However, conventional OCR tools struggle with poor print quality, handwritten content, or non-Latin scripts.

Advanced AI-driven OCR, like the kind found in platforms such as AOTM, offers:

High accuracy across 70+ global languages and scripts
Support for right-to-left (RTL) languages and complex document layouts
Improved recognition of handwritten manuscripts and poor quality texts

For users relying on screen readers or text-based navigation, this level of precision ensures they can access content that would otherwise remain locked in image scans.

Multilingual Translation and Transcription

Language is often an invisible barrier in digital libraries. AI can remove it by:

Automatically translating content into multiple languages

Providing real-time transcriptions for audio or video archives

Generating multilingual metadata to expand discoverability

By doing so, AI not only breaks down geographic silos—it makes global heritage, research, and literature accessible to linguistically diverse audiences.

Metadata Enrichment for Better Navigation

Without strong metadata, even the most valuable documents can remain hidden in digital archives.

AI tools now enable:

Automatic tagging based on entity recognition and context
Intelligent summarization for quicker content previews
Classification based on genre, era, subject matter, or format

This metadata isn’t just useful for general users—it’s crucial for those using assistive technologies who rely on structured navigation to understand content and context.

Text-to-Speech and Audio Integration

For visually impaired users, AI-powered text-to-speech (TTS) systems provide a lifeline to digital content. Today’s AI models can:

Read scanned books aloud with human-like intonation
Adjust pronunciation based on context (e.g., acronyms vs. abbreviations)
Support regional accents and dialects in multiple languages

This has opened up new ways for users to engage with archives—whether listening to historical texts or consuming academic papers on the go.

Adaptive Interfaces and Personalization

AI allows digital libraries to offer personalized, adaptive user experiences, such as:

Interface adjustments for dyslexic users (e.g., font type, spacing)
Content reflow and contrast enhancements for low-vision users
Predictive search and smart filters based on user behaviour or learning preferences

In essence, every user can experience a library that feels designed for them—not a one-size-fits-all platform.

The Road Ahead: AI as an Equity Engine

As digital libraries continue to grow, AI will play an essential role in:

Democratizing access to knowledge across socio-economic divides
Preserving cultural heritage in native scripts and languages
Supporting inclusive education through accessible digital archives

To achieve this, institutions must view accessibility not as a compliance metric, but as a foundational pillar of digital transformation.

Scalable Accessibility Starts with Intelligent Digitization

At Ninestars, accessibility is built into the foundation of digital transformation.

Our AI-driven solutions help digital libraries:

Digitize complex documents with precision OCR
Automate multilingual tagging and smart classification
Ensure compatibility with assistive technologies
Scale accessibility across millions of pages—accurately and efficiently

Building a library for everyone? Let’s talk about how Ninestars can help you make it possible. Get in touch at contactus@ninestars.in.

From Braille to Bytes: Digitizing Resources for Visually Impaired Users

From the invention of Braille to the rise of audio recordings, the path to access has always been long for visually impaired readers. Today, digitization for accessibility is reshaping that journey, powering screen readers, text-to-speech, and adaptive formats that make knowledge truly usable. At the heart of this transformation are inclusive digital libraries, where AI ensures content is not just preserved but personalized and accessible to all.

Did you know Louis Braille was just 15 when he invented Braille, the tactile writing system for the visually impaired, in 1824? Despite its transformative impact, fewer than 10% of people who are blind and partially sighted can read Braille. With an estimated 2.2 billion people globally living with vision impairment and 36 millions of them blind, that leaves so many without access to written knowledge.

The Long Path to Access

For centuries, visually impaired readers relied on Braille or audio recordings, both transformative but limited. Braille production was slow and expensive, while audio materials were bulky and scarce. Access to knowledge remained inconsistent for many.

Digitization as a Turning Point

Digitization for accessibility became a game-changer. By scanning books, newspapers, and manuscripts, libraries began converting printed content into digital formats. That made it possible to create screen reader–friendly text, synthesize speech, and adapt documents for visually impaired users. This turning point laid the foundation for inclusive digital libraries. But digitization is only a part of the story. Formats like Accessibility EPUB have been pivotal in ensuring that eBooks themselves are designed to be inclusive. We’ve explored this in detail in our blog Making Digital Journals and Books Accessible with Accessibility EPUB.

AI: Expanding What’s Possible

If digitization was the first step, artificial intelligence has now made those digital archives smarter and more responsive:

AI in digital libraries powers OCR that can read faded, historical texts accurately.
AI-driven digital archives enrich metadata, tagging names, places, and themes automatically.
Natural Language Processing allows summarization and paraphrasing, making content easier to consume.
Text-to-speech and language translation open content to global audiences instantly.
Generative AI enables conversational search—ask a question, and the archive delivers synthesized answers.

Combined, these tools transform inclusive digital libraries into dynamic, personalized experiences for visually impaired users.

Real-World Change

Some national libraries are leading the way. For example, in India, digitizing Braille books and educational materials has improved accessibility dramatically. Schools and libraries now provide inclusive digital libraries that serve learners more inclusively.

At the same time, global platforms are ensuring that content isn’t just digitized but truly accessible, closing the gap between preservation and usability.

Ninestars’ Role in Shaping the Future

At Ninestars, we understand that accessibility is not an add-on, it must be built in. With decades of experience in digitization, we deliver AI-powered solutions that make collections both preserved and accessible. Our digitization solution ensures clean OCR, structured metadata, and output formats ready for assistive technologies. We help clients build inclusive digital libraries that serve everyone.

What’s Next for Accessibility?

The future of access lies in combining digitization with intelligence. Imagine asking an archive:

“How did people respond to the Great Exhibition in 1851?”

Instead of scanning dozens of pages, a visually impaired student could hear a summary with key documents cited. That’s what inclusive, AI-driven digital libraries enable.

The story of accessibility is ongoing. From Braille to digitization to accessible formats like EPUB, each step brings us closer to a future where everyone has equal access to knowledge. To dive deeper into the role of EPUB in shaping accessible publishing, see our blog Making Digital Journals and Books Accessible with Accessibility EPUB.

Want to know more about digitizing for accessibility? Drop us an email at contactus@ninestars.in

AI and Generative Search: The Next Leap for Digital Libraries

Digitization was only the first leap for libraries. The next frontier is AI and generative search — transforming static digital collections into living, intelligent archives. Instead of sifting through endless results, users can now experience contextual discovery, summarization, translation, and intuitive pathways that make knowledge more accessible than ever.

At Ninestars, we know this future is only possible with strong foundations. Having digitized over 20 national libraries worldwide, we combine scale with precision — from OCR and metadata enrichment to AI-driven workflows that unify global standards. For us, digitization and AI are not just about preservation, but participation — bringing cultural heritage to life for researchers, students, and readers everywhere.

The journey of knowledge preservation has always mirrored the evolution of technology. Stone tablets gave way to manuscripts. Manuscripts were replaced by the printing press. And now, in the digital age, information in libraries and archives are no longer limited by walls or shelves. The knowledge is accessible and searchable from wherever you are.

Digitization was the first leap. Millions of books, manuscripts, newspapers, documents, and photographs were scanned and stored in digital formats, ensuring their survival for future generations. But vast digital repositories alone are not enough if users cannot easily find or interact with them. This is where AI in digital libraries becomes the natural next step.

From Digitization to Intelligence

For decades, researchers relied on keyword-based search to navigate collections. It worked, but often failed to capture nuance. A query like “climate change as reported in newspapers before 1988” could return thousands of results, not all of them relevant.

With AI-driven digital archives, the experience changes completely. AI models understand context, semantics, and intent. Instead of matching words, they return answers. They summarize, highlight connections across decades, and even suggest related themes.

How AI is Transforming Digital Libraries

AI in digital libraries adds context, speed, and intelligence. Instead of static repositories, archives become dynamic, exploratory ecosystems.

Smart Search and Discovery: AI understands meaning, not just words. A researcher looking for “climate change coverage in 1970s newspapers” can find relevant articles even if the sources use different phrasing.
Contextual Understanding: OCR made text searchable, but AI can analyze themes, relationships, and sentiment over time.
Automated Metadata Enrichment: AI extracts names, places, and dates automatically, improving discoverability.
Language Accessibility: A 1910 French newspaper can be instantly translated for an English reader.
Personalized Research: AI guides users differently—a historian studying migration and a student learning about World War I will each get tailored paths through the same archive.

Generative Search: A Leap Beyond

If AI powers intelligence, generative search brings it to life. Unlike traditional search that lists documents, it creates synthesized answers.

Imagine asking:
“What was public sentiment about railways in 19th century Europe?”

Instead of making the user comb through hundreds of documents, AI-driven digital archives can summarize perspectives across sources and present a coherent narrative. Knowledge becomes conversational, not static.

The Next Step After Digitization

Digitization laid the foundation. Clean scans, OCR, article segmentation, and metadata enrichment make the application of AI feasible. Ninestars has deep expertise in these building blocks, perfected while working with leading institutions like the National Library of Australia and the Royal Danish Library. Large-scale programs, processing over 11 million pages in Australia and 32 million in Denmark, prove that scale and accuracy go hand in hand.

Once digitized, the libraries can prepare the collections for AI in digital libraries. Poor-quality scans or inconsistent metadata can limit the application of AI, which is why digitization and intelligence must go together.

How Ninestars Helps Libraries To Integrate AI Pre or Post Digitization

At Ninestars, we see digitization and AI as inseparable. Our Intelligent Automation Platform (IAP) already uses AI for OCR, metadata tagging, and automated quality checks. We are also building solutions that make archives AI-ready, including:

AI-enhanced OCR and content structuring
Metadata enrichment powered by machine learning
Cloud-native workflows ready for integration with generative search tools
Future-ready archives designed to adopt evolving technologies

For libraries and archives worldwide, the opportunity is clear: digitize today, and prepare for an AI-powered tomorrow.

What Generative AI Means for Users

For students, it means a shortcut to discovery—clear, contextual summaries instead of endless lists. For historians, it surfaces forgotten voices in millions of pages. For casual readers, it creates intuitive pathways through culture and history.

This is the true promise of AI in digital libraries: turning preserved knowledge into active discovery.

Challenges Along the Way

AI is not magic. Damaged documents, faded text, or unusual typefaces can complicate results. High-quality digitization remains critical. Another challenge is trust. Researchers need assurance that AI isn’t “hallucinating.” The best AI-driven digital archives always link back to original sources, ensuring transparency.

The Road Ahead

Generative AI is still in its early stages for libraries, but the potential is enormous. Imagine querying, “What were the public health measures during cholera outbreaks in the 19th century?” Instead of a list of documents, the system delivers a synthesized narrative with citations. Or asking, “How did jazz spread through Europe in the 1920s?” and instantly seeing a cultural timeline.

This is not science fiction—it is already beginning.

From Preservation to Possibility

Digital libraries began as preservation projects. They are now evolving into intelligent systems that not only safeguard knowledge but amplify it. AI in digital libraries and AI-driven digital archives are not replacing researchers or librarians; they are empowering them.

At Ninestars, we believe this is the natural next step after digitization. Libraries and archives that embrace AI today will define how future generations interact with history, culture, and knowledge. It’s time to act on integrating AI into library services and reassert the role libraries have historically played in building future-ready knowledge economies.

From Noise to Knowledge: How to Create Actionable Summaries from Long-Form Broadcast Content

In October 1947, the first televised U.S. presidential address reached millions of Americans in their living rooms, a feat that once seemed impossible. Cut to May 2025, streaming services in the US achieved a historic milestone by surpassing cable and broadcast television combined in total TV viewership (source: Nielsen report). It marks a significant shift in how audiences not just in the US, but around the world, consume video content. Today, a podcast episode can command more attention than a primetime news slot. And yet, in this content-saturated era, the problem isn’t access, it’s actionability. How do you extract meaning from the mass? More importantly, how do you transform that meaning into momentum?

For professionals in media monitoring, digital intelligence, or content transformation, this isn’t a rhetorical question—it’s a daily operational challenge. Whether you’re capturing executive keynotes, dissecting multi-hour webinars, or decoding panel discussions, one truth remains: most of the gold lies buried under hours of passive content. It’s not enough to transcribe. To drive real value, we need actionable summaries. These are not mere recaps. They are insight engines. They bridge the chasm between content and consequence.

So how do you move from spoken sprawl to structured significance? Let’s walk through the architecture of a truly actionable summary—one that doesn’t just distill, but directs.

Start with Strategic Intent: Know Why You’re Summarizing

Before diving into content, pause. This is where most teams go wrong—they jump straight into transcription or highlight-collection without asking the foundational question: Why are we summarizing this in the first place?
Every summary has an audience and a purpose. A senior executive scanning a Monday morning brief wants decisions and direction—not a blow-by-blow of who said what. A content strategist, by contrast, might be looking for reusable ideas, quotable sound bites, or narrative themes. A team lead could need a recap to align stakeholders or guide action. Each use case demands a different distillation lens.

Ask:
• Who is this summary for?
• What should the reader do with it?

Intent determines everything—from tone and structure to what you keep in and what you leave out. A public-facing summary might emphasize shareability and brand tone, while an internal one zeroes in on next steps, blockers, and outcomes. Without strategic intent, even the most accurate summary risks becoming noise.

Transcribe and Clean: Get to Usable Text, Not Just Text

Transcription is where it starts, not where it ends.

Tools like Descript, Otter.ai, Whisper, or Zoom’s built-in transcription features can get you the raw material. For domain-specific use cases—legal, pharma, AI—you might benefit from fine-tuned automatic speech recognition models. But regardless of the tool, raw transcripts are messy.

Your job is to clean them, not just read them. Remove filler words, false starts, and repetition. Strip out “umm,” “you know,” and mid-sentence corrections. Off-topic tangents? Gone. This isn’t censorship; it’s curation.

Highlight the essentials:
• Speaker names and roles
• Repeated keywords or themes
• Timestamps for high-value moments

Think of this step like cleaning raw data before analysis. You’re not interpreting yet—you’re simply preparing the ground.

Impose Structure: Segment Conversations into Idea Buckets

Long-form audio and video rarely follow a linear script. Speakers jump back and forth, circle around the same points, or interrupt each other. Your job is to restructure the chaos.

Avoid segmenting purely by timestamp. Instead, group by intent and theme:

• Problem framing
• Context or backstory
• Key insight or revelation
• Strategic decision
• Proposed solution
• Data or evidence
• Audience reactions or questions

This isn’t just an editorial exercise—it’s a cognitive map. Use color codes, tags, or markup to cluster these thematic zones. It’ll not only help with clarity, but also allow AI-assisted tools to better identify insight-rich zones in the future.

Mine the Gold: Extract and Discriminate Ruthlessly

Now comes the heavy lifting: insight extraction.

You’re not summarizing everything—you’re pulling out what matters. That includes:

• Data-backed insights
• Emerging patterns across speakers
• Strategic shifts or pivots
• Points of tension or conflict
• Memorable, quotable lines

But here’s the trap: not every “interesting” comment is actually useful. Run everything through a ruthless “So what?” filter.

Ask:
• Does this drive the narrative forward?
• Does it inform a decision, signal intent, or clarify direction?
• Is it share-worthy, actionable, or strategically relevant?

This is where domain knowledge becomes indispensable. Summarizing a legal panel? You need to understand regulatory nuance. Parsing a B2B AI discussion? Know what constitutes hype versus genuine signal. Without subject-matter understanding, even AI-generated summaries fall flat.

Synthesize, Don’t Just Summarize: Drive Toward Action

A great summary doesn’t merely replay what was said—it connects dots and charts next steps.

Instead of:
“Speaker A noted that email open rates are declining.”
Say:
“Speaker A reported a 40% YoY decline in email open rates, prompting a recommendation to reassess outbound channel strategy.”

Use language that implies action:
• “What this means is…”
• “The implication here is…”
• “Next steps should include…”

Highlight decisions, shifts in direction, and calls to action. Link insights to broader themes. Show how what was said translates into what needs to happen. This step is where summaries shift from passive archives to dynamic planning tools.

Design for the End User: Choose the Right Summary Format

The same content can and should look different depending on its audience.

Executive Brief

For internal use. Straight to the point.
• Title + Duration
• 3–5 line summary
• Bullet insights
• Action items
• Optional: timestamps or speakers

Narrative Blog Summary

For public-facing thought leadership

• Contextual hook
• Narrative arc (problem → insight → shift)
• Embedded quotes
• Key takeaways
• CTA or reflection

Social Carousel / LinkedIn Thread

For amplification
• One big idea per slide/post
• Supporting quote/stat
• Link to full content

Don’t force a one-size-fits-all. Build modular summaries that can be easily repurposed across formats. This increases both utility and reach.

Bring in the Bots—But Keep Humans in the Loop

AI can assist. But it can’t own your summary workflow.

Use tools to:
• Suggest summary structure
• Identify recurring themes
• Auto-generate highlight quotes
• Recommend formats

But always review and refine. AI doesn’t understand nuance, irony, or subtext the way a human editor does. Especially in high-stakes domains—finance, health, policy—you need human judgment to ensure accuracy, clarity, and relevance.

The ideal setup is human-in-the-loop: machines accelerate, humans refine.

Beyond the Summary: Seed a Repurposing Ecosystem

The biggest ROI of a well-crafted summary? Its reusability. Once structured, summaries can be:
• Snippets for internal newsletters
• Input for knowledge bases
• SEO blog material
• Slides for sales decks
• Talking points for execs
• Onboarding guides for new hires

A good summary isn’t an endpoint—it’s a starting point. Build a system where content can scale into multiple assets with minimal friction. This is how organizations stop wasting long-form content and start turning it into competitive advantage.

In Closing: You’re Not Just Summarizing. You’re Building Strategic Intelligence.

Summarizing long-form broadcast content isn’t clerical. It’s editorial. It’s strategic. Done well, it transforms passive conversations into active direction. You’re not shrinking content but sharpening its focus.

When this process is systematised, long-form content stops being a burden. It becomes a goldmine—fuelling decisions, informing content strategy, and giving teams the clarity to move forward.

In a world awash with noise, those who can extract signal, and turn it into action, will always have the edge.

Checklist: What to Look for in a Modern Artwork Automation Platform

In regulated industries, the label is your last line of defense—and your first impression.
Legacy tools can’t keep up with today’s compliance, speed, and scale demands. This checklist walks you through what truly defines a modern, intelligent artwork automation platform—from AI-powered proofing and regulatory enforcement to scalable global collaboration.
If you’re in pharma, CPG, or medical devices, this is the guide you can’t afford to skip.

In regulated industries such as pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and consumer packaged goods (CPG), packaging is not just design—it’s a critical function tied to safety, compliance, and reputation. One wrong label can result in recalls, regulatory action, or worse, patient harm. As global compliance demands and product portfolios grow more complex, legacy processes fall short. The need for automation is no longer a nice-to-have efficiency measure; it’s a competitive necessity.

This checklist breaks down what defines a modern, AI-powered artwork automation platform for packaging and labelling—and how to evaluate one that fits the rigorous needs of regulated markets that you operate in.

Intelligent Proofing and Error Detection

Why it matters: Human oversight alone is no match for the volume and precision needed in regulated artwork production. Typos, colour mismatches, dieline errors, or outdated regulatory copy can sneak through even in high-functioning teams. The result? Costly recalls, compliance violations, and reputational damage.

What to look for:

AI-driven content comparison: Can the platform automatically compare the approved source file to the final artwork using OCR and image recognition? It should highlight text changes, font mismatches, and layout shifts.
Colour and dyeline validation: It must detect technical errors—wrong Pantone codes, placement deviations, or faulty barcodes.
Automated compliance flagging: The system should proactively catch potential compliance violations based on pre-set rules or regulatory templates.

Takeaway: Choose a platform that acts like a second set of eyes—faster, more accurate, and tireless.

End-to-End Collaboration in a Unified Workspace

Why it matters: Labelling and artwork development involves multiple stakeholders – regulatory, marketing, legal, quality, packaging vendors. When teams rely on fragmented tools, email threads, or shared drives, version chaos is inevitable.

What to look for:

Role-based workflows: Ensure the platform allows tailored workflows for regulatory teams, marketers, legal reviewers, etc., with permissions and responsibilities clearly defined.
Real-time collaboration: Look for tools that support live annotations, comment threads, and simultaneous review—across geographies.
Audit trails and version history: Every change must be traceable, timestamped, and reversible. This is critical for both accountability and audit-readiness.

Takeaway: The platform should centralize all activities, eliminate confusion, and increase velocity without compromising control. A modern collaborative artwork review tool should bring structure and clarity across your labelling lifecycle.

Built-In Regulatory Intelligence

Why it matters: In pharma and related industries, packaging isn’t just marketing – it’s a regulated deliverable. Labels vary by country, language, product strength, and therapeutic area. A modern artwork automation platform must be compliance-first, not design-first.

What to look for:

Country-specific rulesets: Can it support country-wise compliance logic and adapt to local regulatory updates?
Validation gates: Before a label is finalized, the system should run automated checks based on current compliance templates.
Audit-readiness: It must be easy to generate evidence of approval timelines, stakeholder inputs, and validations.

Takeaway: Choose a platform that doesn’t just facilitate compliance – it enforces it. Look for AI in regulatory packaging that delivers automated decision-making built on global requirements.

Seamless Integration With Your Existing Stack

Why it matters: Most enterprises already have PLMs, ERPs, DAMs, and regulatory systems in place. An artwork platform must integrate rather than disrupt, ensuring seamless data flow across your digital supply chain.

What to look for:

APIs and connectors: Ensure compatibility with your existing systems—SAP, Oracle, Veeva, or custom tools.
Single source of truth: The platform should ingest approved data (like regulatory texts, product info, images) from master sources and apply it contextually.
Cloud-native infrastructure: For remote collaboration, scalability, and global deployment, cloud-based platforms offer resilience and flexibility.

Takeaway: A modern platform must fit into your digital ecosystem—not require a complete overhaul. Look for packaging compliance software that complements your infrastructure.

Built to Scale Across Global Teams

Why it matters: As portfolios expand and teams operate across time zones, the system must work as well for a single product update in Germany as it does for a product launch spanning 15 markets.

What to look for:

Multi-language support: From Arabic to Mandarin, the platform must handle diverse scripts, right-to-left formatting, and local legal text.
Template reusability: Can components be reused or modified for different SKUs, geographies, or strengths—without starting from scratch?
Performance at scale: It must support thousands of SKUs and artworks without slowing down or failing.

Takeaway: Don’t just plan for today’s needs. Choose a platform that scales as your business expands—and supports comprehensive label lifecycle management.

PACKX Checks Every Box — and Then Some

Many platforms claim automation, but few deliver compliance-driven intelligence at scale. PACKX is purpose-built for industries where precision and regulation are non-negotiable, such as life sciences, CPG, and medical devices, PACKX offers:

AI-powered proofing and auto-validation
Compliance-led templates and workflows
Region-specific logic and approval routing
Seamless team collaboration with full traceability
Scalable infrastructure for enterprise-grade deployment
Integration-ready APIs to connect with your PLM, ERP, and regulatory stack

Whether you’re facing recurring artwork delays, regulatory pressure, or costly errors—PACKX brings clarity, speed, and trust to every label. It’s more than a tool; it’s a complete pharmaceutical label automation solution designed for the future.

Don’t Just Automate—Elevate Your Entire Labelling Ecosystem

In regulated industries, the label is your last line of defense—and your first consumer impression. A simple packaging error can trigger costly recalls, regulatory sanctions, or worse, risk patient safety.

A modern artwork automation platform isn’t just about digitizing steps or saving time. It’s about creating a connected, intelligent, and compliant labelling ecosystem that keeps pace with market complexity and regulatory change.

Ask yourself: Is your current platform protecting you—or exposing you?

Use this checklist to evaluate where you stand. Then, choose a platform partner who doesn’t just promise automation but delivers resilience, accuracy, and scale—like PACKX, the leading solution in Pharma artwork management and medical device labelling platforms.

Why OCR Accuracy Matters: The Cost of Mistakes

In the fast-paced digital world, where data is the backbone of decision-making, businesses increasingly rely on Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to process and extract information from vast amounts of documents. OCR is considered one of the key enablers of digital transformation, enabling organizations to convert physical documents into accessible digital data.

However, not all OCR solutions are created equal. While basic OCR systems can help read and extract text from scanned documents, their accuracy can vary widely. The OCR accuracy impacts the overall quality of extracted data and processes that depend on it, and ultimately the business’s bottom line.

Inaccurate OCR = Business Risk

Inaccurate document processing leads to errors in data, causing operational disruptions, increased costs, and damage to a company’s reputation. OCR accuracy matters, and here’s why the cost of mistakes can be significant:

Financial Implications of OCR Errors

For many businesses, OCR errors aren’t just an inconvenience—they can translate into direct financial losses. Most organizations rely on automation platforms that include OCR as a foundational component to process financial documents, invoices, and contracts. However, if the OCR component is inaccurate, it can create cascading errors throughout the automated workflow.

Invoice Errors: Consider a scenario where a finance team uses an Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) system to process invoices. If the OCR layer misreads an invoice total, payment terms, or vendor information, the company could accidentally overpay or underpay. Worse still, missing key fields like taxes or early payment discounts can delay processing and impact cash flow.

Contract Misinterpretation: In legal workflows, OCR is often responsible for the first step—digitizing and extracting key terms. If inaccuracies occur here, they can carry through contract review tools or compliance checks, leading to flawed interpretations, legal exposure, or missed deadlines.

Operational Costs: Poor OCR accuracy increases the need for manual review and correction downstream. Even in sophisticated IDP workflows, time and resources must be diverted to catch and fix mistakes. This reduces productivity and weakens the ROI on automation initiatives.

Customer Experience at Risk

The accuracy of OCR within automation workflows directly impacts how customers experience your services. An error introduced by OCR early in the document lifecycle can ripple into customer-facing processes—leading to delays, incorrect communication, or billing issues.

Invoice and Billing Issues: Customers receiving invoices generated from inaccurate OCR outputs may find incorrect totals, missing details, or wrong references. While the system may automate document generation, the quality of that automation depends heavily on the OCR’s ability to extract data correctly in the first place.

Delayed Service or Errors in Orders: In industries like retail or logistics, OCR powers the initial intake of forms, order sheets, or shipment requests. If the OCR component misinterprets these documents, it can lead to downstream automation triggering incorrect actions—like sending the wrong items, scheduling delays, or duplicating orders.

A flawed OCR layer in your automation stack may be invisible to customers, but its effects certainly aren’t. Inaccuracies erode trust, delay service, and ultimately harm customer retention.

Legal and Compliance Risks

In highly regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, and legal services, accuracy in document automation isn’t optional—it’s a matter of compliance. OCR plays a foundational role in these workflows, powering data extraction for systems that manage tax records, patient files, and contracts. If OCR introduces errors early in the automation pipeline, the consequences can be legally and financially severe.

Healthcare Compliance: In healthcare, OCR is used within automation platforms to extract patient data from forms, insurance documents, and medical records. Any error at the OCR stage can lead to incorrect or incomplete data flowing into electronic health record (EHR) systems. This could trigger HIPAA violations, impact patient care, or erode trust.

Financial Reporting: In the financial sector, OCR is often the first step in processing documents like tax returns, compliance filings, and audit reports. An inaccurate OCR output can corrupt downstream data analytics and reporting tools—leading to compliance breaches, audit flags, or regulatory penalties. In high-stakes environments, even a single field misread can cause substantial risk.

Reduced Efficiency and Increased Error Propagation

OCR technology streamlines operations by reducing manual data entry. But when OCR accuracy is poor, it does the opposite—creating bottlenecks and increasing the likelihood of error propagation throughout your automated systems.

Manual Interventions: When an OCR engine misinterprets content, teams often have to manually verify and correct outputs within the broader automation flow. This manual intervention defeats the purpose of deploying automation in the first place and slows down processing times, reducing overall ROI.

Cascading Errors in Integrated Systems: Inaccurate OCR doesn’t just cause isolated issues—it affects every downstream system that relies on its output. For example, if OCR misreads a figure in an invoice, that faulty data could influence accounting entries, tax computations, and audit readiness. The more deeply integrated your systems are, the more widespread the impact of a single OCR error becomes.

The Importance of Choosing an Accurate OCR Solution

To avoid the aforementioned risks, it’s crucial to choose an OCR solution that provides high levels of accuracy. While standard OCR technology can help with basic text recognition, it’s often limited in its capabilities to handle complex documents or ambiguous data. It’s vital to look for an OCR system that incorporates advanced AI and machine learning capabilities, like AOTM OCR, that can:

Adapt to Complex Documents: Recognize text in multi-page documents, complex layouts, and even handwritten notes.
Understand Context: Provide deeper contextual understanding to accurately extract and categorize data.
Automatically Correct Errors: Use AI to detect and correct errors in real-time, improving overall accuracy.
Process Multiple Languages: Offer multi-language support to extract data from documents in different languages with high precision.

By implementing an advanced OCR solution with AI-powered capabilities, businesses can ensure that their document processing is as accurate, efficient, and error-free as possible.

The Cost of Mistakes vs. The Value of Accuracy

OCR mistakes may seem minor at first, but their ripple effects can impact a business in many ways: from financial losses and customer dissatisfaction to legal liabilities and operational inefficiencies.

In today’s business environment, where data is gold, OCR is a critical component of automation and digital transformation. But the true value of OCR technology isn’t just in its ability to extract text—it’s in how accurately it does so. Choosing the right OCR system, like AOTM OCR, ensures that businesses extract, process, and utilize data with maximum precision, minimal errors, and greater efficiency.

Digital Preservation Challenges: Why METS and ALTO Are Essential for Large-Scale Archival Projects

Imagine discovering a centuries-old manuscript, brittle and broken at the edges. Now imagine being tasked to digitize and add it to your library’s collection—not just as a scanned image but as a fully searchable and preserved digital asset. That’s the kind of challenge libraries and archives worldwide face as they move from print to pixels.

These digital preservation initiatives are sometimes large scale, running into several years because it isn’t simply scanning. Without proper structuring, metadata, and text encoding, digital collections risk becoming unsearchable, unusable, or even obsolete. That’s where METS (Metadata Encoding & Transmission Standard) and ALTO (Analyzed Layout and Text Object) come in.

The Scale of the Challenge: Libraries as Data Giants
Major libraries and archives house millions—sometimes hundreds of millions—of items, with ongoing digitization efforts processing thousands of pages daily. Large-scale projects require more than high-resolution scans—they need interoperability, structured metadata, and full-text accuracy for users to meaningfully engage with the content.

Here’s the problem:

A simple image-based digital archive lacks context. A TIFF scan of a rare book is just a picture unless it’s properly indexed.
Poor OCR (Optical Character Recognition) results mean users can’t search the text accurately—especially in historical or non-Latin scripts.
If metadata isn’t standardized, collections become data silos, limiting interoperability across institutions.

METS: Bringing Structure to Digital Archives

METS is like a blueprint for digital objects. Instead of just storing a document, METS binds together multiple components—images, OCR text, metadata, and structural relationships—ensuring that a digitized book or newspaper is more than just a stack of files.

Why METS Matters:
Structural Mapping – Defines the order of pages, chapters, or multi-volume works.
Preservation Metadata – Ensures long-term digital viability by tracking technical details and provenance.
Interoperability – Enables seamless exchange across repositories (Europeana, HathiTrust, DPLA, ProQuest, JSTOR).

Think of METS as a librarian’s guide for the digital world—a way to organize and ensure long-term usability of complex digitized collections.

Why ALTO is the Unsung Hero of Searchability

OCR alone isn’t enough. Standard OCR might extract text, but it loses layout details—crucial for newspapers, tables, and manuscripts. ALTO fixes that.

What ALTO Does Differently:

Retains Text Layout – Captures columns, footnotes, and even marginalia, making digitized newspapers or periodicals look like their physical counterparts.
Improves Search Accuracy – Maps text positions to original layouts, reducing OCR errors.
Supports Multilingual & Historical Texts – Handles complex scripts, Fraktur fonts, and even handwritten materials.

Example: As the Exclusive Partner for ProQuest’s Historical Newspapers Program (HNP) since 2001, we have digitized iconic publications like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many more. Using METS/ALTO, we have structured 28 million pages across 55 newspaper titles—some dating back to 1764—ensuring that every article, photograph, and advertisement is fully searchable and meticulously preserved. Our solutions not only safeguard history but also create revenue opportunities through content distribution and digital accessibility across tablets, smartphones, and emerging platforms.

Fun Fact: Digital Archives Are at Risk—Even Digital Ones!

Did you know that NASA lost the original high-resolution recordings of the 1969 moon landing? The tapes were overwritten due to poor archival practices. Digital doesn’t always mean permanent—without proper structuring (like METS/ALTO), even digital archives can disappear over time.

Future-Proofing Archives with METS & ALTO

In an era where digital libraries are growing exponentially, METS and ALTO are non-negotiable. They make sure that today’s digitization efforts remain accessible and meaningful for decades—even centuries—to come.

For libraries, archives, and cultural institutions, the choice is clear: Digitize, but do it right.

Ninestars: Bringing Structure to Digital Archives

At Ninestars, we go beyond digitization—we ensure archives are structured, searchable, and future-proof. Our solutions include AOTM OCR, indexing, and metadata enrichment to enhance content discoverability.

With METS, ALTO, MARC, and Dublin Core-compliant workflows, we’ve digitized 1.2 billion pages to date, making vast collections accessible across libraries, enterprises, and institutions. Our expertise spans subject- and keyword-based indexing, AI-powered OCR for handwritten texts, and contextual OCR in 71 languages for unmatched accuracy.

From national archives to rare manuscripts, we help organizations preserve history while unlocking new revenue and digital opportunities. Let’s talk.