As we at Backstage look to where bibliographic metadata comes from, we see lots of data coming directly from publishers. Our own cataloging department has been cataloging thousands of titles each month for publishers, and so we’ve recently been looking towards the publishing industry to learn about how their processes impact the bibliographic data that ends up in our library clients’ catalogs as MARC records.
Over the past year we’ve attended several publishing conferences, and are happy to see that the topic of metadata is now on the table in the publishing world. At Backstage, we provide cataloging services to several publishers who really do understand that for their important library market, metadata in the form of MARC records is critical. Outside of our clientele, though, many publishers have been focusing heavily on their content and authors, leaving their metadata as an afterthought. Several leaders in the retail book world are now extolling the virtues of a clean, consistent catalog with rich descriptive metadata – does that sound familiar to anyone who has been working with library catalogs for the past, oh, I don’t know, two thousand years?
On Sunday, May 22, 2011, at the Independent Book Publishers Association’s annual “Publishing University” conference, Amazon’s Director of Author and Publisher Relations, Jon Fine, and Danny Snow from Unlimited Publishing talked about ways small and independent publishers can be successful selling books through Amazon.com. Jon’s top four tips for success included one topic related to the availability of a title:
- Make sure the title is always “in stock” and always ready to ship, by using print on demand if necessary
and three topics related to the “discoverability” and metadata of a title:
- Have clean and comprehensive basic metadata
- Have your full text available for search engines, using Amazon’s “see inside the book” features
- Use the Amazon Author Pages to connect your readers with their authors
Danny’s top five list included three elements related to the content of the title and its pricing:
- Have a killer title
- Have a killer cover
- Have the item set at the right price for the market, which is debatable and may fluctuate
and two elements related to the metadata:
- Have a subtitle that includes the keyword subjects of your content, and
- Be sure your title has the right “categories” and is tagged with the right shelving codes, i.e. BISAC subjects
Jon went on to say that the book industry used to believe that the cover was what sold the book, but they’ve moved to a new saying: “Metadata is the new cover!”
What does this mean for the library world? Ideally it means that publishers and authors will start taking more interest in creating comprehensive and accurate metadata. In my idea of a perfect metadata world, publishers would join forces with librarians to follow cataloging standards and record formats, but unfortunately I think the standard library metadata format (MARC) isn’t rich enough to meet publisher metadata needs, so ONIX is unlikely to change from the de-facto metadata standard for publishers. But that’s not really the problem – we can move data from ONIX to MARC pretty easily. The problem is making sure the data is created consistently and comprehensively by following the same rules. In library language, this means following AACR2, LCRI, ISBD, PCC, CONSER, and even RDA rules and guidelines for cataloging. It means keeping our catalogs under authority control for standard forms of names and titles, and using controlled vocabularies for subjects (at least the book industry does agree with us on this, with BISAC and BIC codes as the publishers’ equivalent of LCSH).
This is the area where I get blank stares from publishers – they are coming around to the idea of putting data into the right format, but it’s too new to many of them to appreciate the value of rules related to how data is input. And really, it’s only after you’ve been cataloging for a long time and have input lots and lots of metadata that you see the negative impact of inconsistency.
At the end of the day, we at Backstage will be gearing up to educate, educate, educate our new publisher cataloging clients about their metadata in general, above and beyond what their library clients require, and to provide them with excellent services related to their metadata. The great news? As more publishers include even minimal metadata with their titles in the electronic marketplace, they’ll start to see and understand its impact and will implement improvements more immediately and on a higher level – which means less clean-up and enrichment for all the users of that metadata (like librarians) later on in the product cycle. But until then, I’m afraid we’ll continue to see complaints about vendor and publisher records, and we might be improving that data in MARC format for the benefit of library patrons for a long time to come.