This report does a good job of summarizing the status quo of metadata for books in the context of libraries and the publishing industry. In doing so, the report describes the areas of metadata management where publishers and libraries intersect and where they completely...
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This report does a good job of summarizing the status quo of metadata for books in the context of libraries and the publishing industry. In doing so, the report describes the areas of metadata management where publishers and libraries intersect and where they completely miss each other. For example, more and more, libraries are expecting high-quality metadata (usually in the form of MARC records) for aggregations they purchase from booksellers, whether they be physical books or ebooks. However, libraries and publishers differ in important things like subject schemes. Publishers have a small set of terms (about 3,000) that are used to place books in bookstores, but libraries need much more granularity and use subject schemes with hundreds of thousands of different terms.
The report is too generous in its assessment of ONX, the metadata scheme of choice of publishers and booksellers, calling it "unsurpassed for granularity and definition" (p. 4), even though the author later admits "ONIX has missing data elements" (p. 6).
The most interesting section of the report is the one called "Opportunities." Here the author effectively summarizes emerging standards and organizations that will improve the quality, delivery, and interoperability of metadata in the years to come. Some of the initiatives she describes include the ISNI, the International Standard Name Identifier, and the ISTC, the International Standard Text Code. The ISTC is a system for identifying different manifestations of the same work.
The 22-page report ends with a helpful glossary of terms and acronyms, a who's who and what's what of the current realm of books and metadata.
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