Session 3E: Smoothing the Supply Chain: E-book Metadata Improvements in Action
This session is a discussion among scholarly e-book publishers, platforms, libraries and library service providers, and preservation organizations to report on pain points in transmitting and managing metadata—and update on cross-industry solutions for the issues. The session focuses on the challenges of meeting the needs of key stakeholders at different phases of the e-book lifecycle, the most common metadata standards, and recent efforts to define practices for e-book metadata communication. Recent activities, such as the BISG (Best Practices for Product Metadata) and the NISO E-Book Metadata Working Group, which is creating a Recommended Practice, have articulated multiple, often contradictory, purposes for e-book metadata. Each distinct stakeholder in the e-book landscape has specific requirements for its own processes. There is no single authority for e-book metadata, and no definitive version. There is a plethora of internal and shared standards used by participants in the supply chain, for which crosswalks may or may not be available. Supposedly standardized fields may be used in different ways by different parties. Metadata connected to e-books and required by stakeholders is created in a fragmented way as pre-publication metadata are revised, and different parties enrich the metadata to suit their customers and patrons. The session will describe the work underway at NISO to provide minimal requirements for e-book description to support sales, discovery, delivery, deaccessioning and preservation; provide examples of use in different metadata schemas such as ONIX, MARC, Dublin Core, and BITS; and ensure that recommendations can be implemented in effective and efficient ways.
