Download |
About this Recommended Practice
As we write this recommended practice, e-books are still evolving as technology and as cultural artifacts. The format, transmission, and applications of book metadata are changing. Metadata workflows and data exchange are becoming ever more automated, massive in scale, and networked. In this fast-changing environment, it is crucial for the various producers and users of e-book metadata—publishers, retailers, libraries, service providers, and preservation agencies—to develop awareness and become conscious of one another’s standards, practices, and purposes.
The working group that developed this recommended practice benefited immensely from having representatives from these different types of stakeholders. Our first lesson in this project was the recognition of how little we understood about each other’s work. The saying, “Librarians are from MARC; publishers are from ONIX,” emerged as a useful shorthand. Our second lesson was the discovery of how many issues stem from this mutual ignorance. In many cases, decisions about metadata that seem trivial to one party cause serious problems for another and generate errors that are perpetuated across the metadata network. It became very clear to us from the experience of our own collaboration that the purpose of this recommended practice must be to create a shared understanding and, wherever practical, an alignment of practice among those of us who work with e-book metadata, to the benefit of all readers, researchers, and authors.
The proposal approved by the NISO Content and Collection Management Topic Committee (now the Information Creation & Curation Topic Committee) in May 2016, and approved by NISO Voting Members in July 2016, provided the impetus for this project. The original statement of work lists six components covering desired outputs:
- Describe the minimal metadata requirements necessary to describe e-books in order to support sales, discovery, delivery, deaccessioning, and preservation.
- Identify the most effective and efficient way for metadata to be moved through the entire supply chain.
- Address how metadata records and transfer of information may be used to describe updates to metadata records and record sets.
- Develop rules for matching e-book metadata from multiple sources for deduplication purposes.
- Provide examples of recommended practice using common metadata standards.
- Explore ONIX and MARC tools and identify if it is necessary to issue recommendations around conformance tools. (…)
Referência: NISO RP-29-2022, E-Book Bibliographic Metadata Requirements in the Sale, Publication, Discovery, Delivery, and Preservation Supply Chain | NISO website. (2022). Retrieved 22 February 2022, from http://www.niso.org/publications/rp-29-2022-ebmd
