Concurrent 5A: Zen and the Art of Metadata Maintenance: Strategy and Tactics for Discovery and Sales
Metadata is the lifeblood of publishing in the digital age and the key to discovery. Metadata is a continuum of standards and a process of information flow; creating and disseminating metadata involves both art and science. This presentation offers insights on publishing-industry best practice for metadata management, process improvement steps, practical applications such as keywords, and challenges concerning eBooks. Metadata permeates and enables all aspects of publishing, from information creation and production to marketing and dissemination. This session underscores how it is essential for publishers and all others involved in the publishing industry to understand the metadata ecosystem in order to optimize a title’s presence, popularity, and sale-ability, while it explores the frontiers of the expanding metadata universe. Even as metadata has become a key component in propelling discovery and sales, and an increasingly strategic function of the publishing enterprise, metadata is becoming increasingly interconnected, crowd-sourced, and employed in new ways across the information spectrum, evolving from the enterprise of illuminating meaning and significance in an individual title to enabling linkages between a broad network of objects and resources.
