Metadata: Standards Basics for the Independent Publishing Community, with Graham Bell, Executive...

Metadata standards basics for independent publishers

Graham BellEDItEUR

IBPA / BISG webinar series30th April 2014

About me• 20 years experience at the point where

book�publishing and technology meet

• formerly senior manager in IT department for HarperCollins UK• led development of bibliographic, editorial and

digital asset management systems

• involved in e-book, e-audio, print-on-demand

and online projects

• joined EDItEUR in mid-2010, primarily responsible for ONIX development

About EDItEUR• not-for-profit membership organisation

• develops, supports and promotes metadata and identification standards for the book,e-book and serials supply chains

• based in London, but a global membership of publishers, distributors, wholesalers, subscription agents, retailers, libraries, system vendors, rights and trade associations

• acknowledged centre of expertise on standards and metadata for the industry

About EDItEUR• also provides management services to LCC,

International ISBN, ISTC, ISNI Agencies

• EDItEUR has three full-time staff, one FTE part-time staff, plus access to consultants from both the book and serials sectors

• works closely with other standards bodies, to ensure EDItEUR standards meet the needs of their stakeholders too

• EDItEUR member participation is vital, to ensure standards keep pace with evolving business requirements

What is metadata?

What is metadata?• often defined as ‘data about data’, but this is

inadequate in the publishing context

• ‘all the product management information that’s needed to make your business work’• to describe the stuff you publish

• to support commercial processes

• both internal and external requirements

• for the full product lifecycle

• data modelling and communication aspects

Graham Bell

for planning, production management, marketing and collateral, merchandising, discoverability, sales, ordering, invoicing, reporting, analysis…

Graham Bell

about both defining the data, and how you exchange it with your business partners

And what are identifiers?

Identifiers• unique labels for ‘things’ (in IT systems)

• to address

• to disambiguate

• to collocate

• ideally, persistent, meaningless, managed

• to allow unambiguous communication

• identification is contextual• identifiers have specific functions or roles

• and a scope (types of thing can be identified)

Graham Bell

unambiguous communication allows automation, which speeds things up, reduces costs and reduces errors and customer service issues

Graham Bell

identifiers aren’t free of charge (and even if the identifier is free, *managing* it and the associated metadata is not), so they have to have a function and a range of business benefits

Graham Bell

and identifying a book in a supply chain isn’t the same as identifying a book in a library or on an e-reading device (context)

Metadata and identifier standards – critical enablers

for your business

Graham Bell

often criticised as complex and expensive – definitely not the most glamorous job in publishing, and often given to the most junior person. But to a large extent, it is what *makes publishing work*, and the evidence is that investment in metadata pays off handsomely through increased sales, lower customer service issues and a lower cost to serve. We’ll have a look at some evidence for that at the end

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de jure standard, defined by some international body

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not de jure, just a standard that everyone uses (it’s common to say that something is the size of three London buses, or the length of a football field)

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standards can be somewhat aspirational, designed to provide impetus towards process improvement in an industry

• tagging

• edition

• publication date

• series, collection, imprint, backlist, out of print, reissue, trade paperback…

• metadata requires care for semantics

Words in search of a definition

Graham Bell

all organisations and industries generate jargon, terms of art. But meanings vary. And for standards, where you are aiming at being unambiguous, this is a problem – definitions and controlled vocabularies are the key

Graham Bell

we have many industry words where the meaning isn’t entirely agreed. "Tagging" for example – metadata people talk about it A LOT, often as some kind of panacea. "We need more tagging." But do you mean tagging with keywords, HTML markup, XML tags, subject coding… these are all radically different things, all called "tagging"

• tagging

• edition





An SEO expert walks into a bar, pub, tavern,

public house, Irish pub, drinks, beer,

alcohol…

• tagging

• edition





Graham Bell

at least three entirely different common meanings…

• tagging

• edition





Third editionPaperback edition

First edition

Graham Bell

Third edition - different work from the second editionPaperback edition - same work, but different manifestation from the Hardback or Large print editionFirst edition - in book collecting, a 'first edition' is in fact a first impression or first printing (ie is a subset of a single manifestation)

• tagging

• edition





The date on which a retail consumer

may purchase and take possession of

a physical product, or the date on

which a retail consumer may access

and use a digital product

Graham Bell

different definitions of 'publication date' can incite two-hour discussions

• tagging

• edition




Words in search of a definitionThe nominal or approximate date on which the

product is made available in the market, used

largely for planning and business process

purposes. Actual availability to the retailer may be

no more than a handful of days prior to (or after)

this date and – in the absence of a sales embargo –

retail fulfillment to consumers may begin

immediately stock is available. For titles where a

sales embargo is in place, stock must be

sequestered by the retailer until the embargo

expires (or one day prior, for mail order

fulfillment)

• tagging

• edition





Graham Bell

lots wrong with this page, much of it caused by lack of agreement over definitions.Only 1 left in stock, but pub date in six months time... (in fact, this product was published a long time ago, there is one in stock now, and it will be reissued with a new jacket in six months time. The confusion is caused by putting an availability date in the pub date field in the metadata.Note also the confusion over the Series and Imprint names (Canons, The Canons)

• tagging

• edition





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need for more precision and a certain amount of care over the semantics of the metadata - if you ignore this, you build a customer service problem.

Graham Bell

ultimately, standards are about COMMUNICATION and making stuff work without too much friction – automating the dull stuff. And as this shows, standards can have an international dimension. What is ‘standard’ in one country is non-standard in another. So in an international book trade, we need to be concerned with international standards

ISBN

ITSC

ISNI

SAN

MARC

ONIX

BISAC

Themaidentifiers

metadata

Graham Bell

there is an alphabet soup of standards (the great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from…) – two already described in this webinar series (ISBN, BISAC) – going to look at a few of the others (specifically ISNI, ONIX and time permitting, Thema)

ISBN

ITSC

ISNI

SAN

MARC

ONIX

BISAC

Themaidentifiers

metadatapeople

products

places

works libraries

book trade

subject

subject

Graham Bell

identifiers and metadata standards have SCOPE and FUNCTION - ISBN for products, ISTC for works, ONIX for the book trade etc.standards on this list are mostly international (apart from SAN and BISAC, which get limited use outside North America) – sometimes more than one for the same purpose (BISAC, Thema) – standards require management (Bowker manages the SAN, BISG manages BISAC, the Library of Congress manages MARC, Editeur manages ONIX and Thema (and provides management services to ISBN, ISTC and ISNI)

“I am Spartacus!”

Graham Bell

identifiers are used…- to emphasise difference (to disambiguate apparently similar things) – and to emphasise sameness (to collocate apparently different things) – for a specific purpose or domain – you can get remarkably philosophical about the nature of ‘sameness’ (look up Theseus’ paradox, aka ‘my grandfather’s axe’), but it all comes down to ‘interchangeable or not, in a particular context. All metadata and identifiers implie a point of view or context

ISNI public identity identifier

ISNI• International Standard Name Identifier

• ISO Standard 27729 for identification of public

identities of parties in creative industries

• parties may be people, organisations or even

fictional people (for pseudonyms, characters)

• typical use case – identify an author, establish

difference from another author of the same

name, or establish same persona as musician or

actor (possibly of different ‘name’)

• a cross-domain ‘bridge identifier’, linking data

across multiple sources

Graham Bell

specifically "identification of the identities used publicly by parties involved throughout the media content industries in the creation, production, management, and content distribution chains across multiple fields of creative activity"

Graham Bell

Mickey Mouse has an ISNI (0000 0003 5932 6542)

Graham Bell

ISNI is not intended to provide direct access to comprehensive information about a public identity or a person, but can provide links to other systems where such information is held

Richard Holmes

Richard Holmes

Richard Holmes

0000 0001 1768 55420000 0001 2147 5396

Graham Bell

Professor Richard Holmes

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Professor Richard Holmes

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yes really. Two different authors, same name, born within six months of each other, same publisher, same imprint, similar areas of publishing (non-fiction, 18th/19th century history)ISNI can clearly disambiguate

0000 0000 7725 4712

Graham Bell

Julian Cope - amateur archaeologist AND musician. Most fans of the music would not assume the antiquarian is the same person…

What does it look like?

ISNI 0000 0000 7725 4712

for display purposes only

identifies sector of initial reg

check digit may be X

15 decimal (base 10) digits for

persona

Implementing ISNI• strictly, does not identify a person or a name

• person (or party)

• persona

• personality (or presentation)

• ISNIs identify personas, or public identities

• Фёдор Достоевский = Fyodor Dostoyevski

• Richard Bachman = Stephen King (but well-

known pseudonyms can be linked)

• Sue Welfare = ***** *** (allows for anonymity)

/

/

Current status

• 2010 – International ISNI Agencyhttp://www.isni.org

• 2012 –�standard published by ISO

• central registration system developed and operated by OCLC in the Netherlands

• first eight million ISNIs already assigned, based on pre-existing data in VIAF and IPDA

Graham Bell

most current data comes primarily from library authority files

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http://www.isni.org/search

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note search for a MISspelling of the name

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many different presentations of the same name (different spellings, even different scripts, can also have changes of name due to marriage etc) - but all represent the same persona and all have a single ISNI

Benefits of ISNI

• proprietary identifiers are not cross-

publisher, and do not provide certainty over

the entity (is it a person or a persona?)

• ISNI provides cross-publisher, cross-sector

public identity

• developing links to ORCID, ResearcherID,

PlusID, Ringgold

• in future, will likely also identify names of

organisations

Graham Bell

– ORCID: Open Researcher and Contributor ID (all academic researchers and contributors) – ResearcherID: Thomson Reuters proprietary ID (for scientific contributors) – PlusID: Picture Licensing Universal System (for photographers)

A contributor identifieris a�tool to associate

your product with�othersfrom the�same creator

– authoritatively– cross-media

http://www.isni.org

Graham Bell

create links to other products by the same creator, possibly in another domain, making your product more easily discoverable AND avoid spurious links to similarly-named authors (eg self-published author of erotic novels called ‘Jack Higgins’)

Identifiers and metadata

• inextricably linked. Each type of identifier has a minimum set of metadata attributes, whereby any change in the metadata implies a change in the identifier• attributes define what is unique about the

identified thing

• an identifier can be thought of as ‘shorthand’

for one particular set of attribute values

• metadata registries (eg Bowker Books in Print)

hold both the identifiers and the metadata

Graham Bell

minimum metadata set defines what we mean by ‘the same’ and ‘different’ in the particular context of the identifier

ONIX for Books

What is ONIX?

• ONIX for Books is a standard data format based on XML, used to convey a rich range of information about book and book-related products between computer systems in the book and e-book supply chain• publisher to retailer

• direct, or via intermediaries such as

distributors, data collation services, data

registries, wholesalers

Graham Bell

but not much used by libraries (though some DO use it to create their catalog records)

Typical use cases

• a publisher needs to provide information about its catalogue of products to a distributor, wholesaler, retailer or other supply chain partner• includes both current and forthcoming products

• may cover basic product information and a wide

range of collateral material

• scope extends over the full lifecycle for book, e-

book and other products – ie includes post-

publication updates to price and availability

database database

• ONIX for Books is a standardised message specification, not a database• but what you can deliver in your ONIX is

dependent on the design of your

in-house database

• ONIX data model often used to guide design of

internal applications

Graham Bell

ONIX is about communication, generally communication between computers and between databases – not intended to be human-readable (at least not easily) The point about communicating between computers is that you need to be unambiguous and precise

Roots of ONIX

• 1997 EPICS and BIC Basic

• 1998 <indecs> project

• 1998 W3C XML specification

• 1999 ‘Online Information Exchange’ initiative from AAP Digital Issues working party• ONIX developed by EDItEUR, originally in

collaboration with BISG (USA) and BIC (UK)

• March 2000 – ONIX International v1.0

Graham Bell

ONIX as we would recognise it really started with the American Association of Publishers’ Online Information Exchange project, which combined the ideas and data elements from BIC Basic and EPICS with the XML syntax developed and standardised by the World Wide Web Consortium, and published ONIX in January of 2000

Roots of ONIX

• 1997 EPICS and BIC Basic

• 1998 <indecs> project

• 1998 W3C XML specification

• 1999 ‘Online Information Exchange’ initiative from AAP Digital Issues working party• ONIX developed by EDItEUR, originally in

collaboration with BISG (USA) and BIC (UK)

• March 2000 – ONIX International v1.0

Graham Bell

the original AAP specification – superseded within three months by ONIX International version 1.0

Roots of ONIX

• current status• managed by EDItEUR and international

steering committee

• June 2003 ONIX v2.1 – most widely deployed

• April 2009 ONIX v3.0 – growing in importance

• widely used in North America, Western Europe, Japan, Russia, parts of Eastern Europe, Korea, growing in China

• used by small and large organisations alike

support

for 2.1 will be

reduced at

end of 2014

ONIX business benefits

• standard is free of charge to use

• for publishers – enables supply of rich metadata in a single, standard format, for all downstream needs

• for distributors, retailers – efficient, timely delivery and aggregation of data from multiple publishers

• a shared ‘language’ enables unambiguous electronic communication

<Contributor> <SequenceNumber>1</SequenceNumber> <ContributorRole>A01</ContributorRole> <NameIdentifier> <NameIDType>16</NameIDType> <IDValue>0000000121479135</IDValue> </NameIdentifier> <PersonNameInverted>Sjöwall, Maj��</PersonNameInverted> <BiographicalNote textformat="05"><p>Maj��Sjöwall is a poet. She lives in Sweden.</p>��</BiographicalNote></Contributor>

3.0

Graham Bell

'A01' is part of that shared language or controlled vocabulary - in ONIX, this is called a codelist. A01 in the codelist means ‘author’

Graham Bell

this is the author's ISNI

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note a limited amount of XHTML markup can be included within the data

Graham Bell

a snipped of ONIX 3.0 describing an author…

ONIX 3.0 data elements• message details

• identity and authority

• record details

• product identifiers

• 1. descriptive details

• product form

• special features

• packaging

• physical size

• DRM, usage constraints

• trade classification

• product parts

• collection titles

• titles

• contributors

• conference

• edition

• language

• extent

• subject

• audience

Graham Bell

ONIX 2.1 can carry most (but not all) of the same datayellow highlights show the most vital data fields

ONIX 3.0 data elements• 2. collateral details

• supporting text

• cited material

• supporting resources

• prizes

• 3. content detail

• 4. publishing details

• imprint and publisher

• contact details

• lifecycle dates and status

• copyright details

• territorial sales rights

• 5. related material

• related works

• related products

• 6. supply details

• market-specific details

• suppliers

• discounts

• prices and tax

Graham Bell

Of course you COULD do it like this… – but if you publish more than say 20 books a year, this very quickly gets to be unworkable and error prone

Implementing ONIX

• apparently complex, but modular & consistent

• not too large for a single developer with simple software such as Filemaker

• implemented in many off-the-shelf solutions• what should you be looking for?

http://www.ipg.uk.com/?id=4815

• BISG best practiceshttps://www.bisg.org/product-metadata-best-practices

Graham Bell

Something forward-looking, which implements ONIX 3.0, ISNI and maybe even ISTC, as well as the usual ISBN and your internal identifiers or project numbers * An approach that treats books, e-books and maybe even mobile apps together, rather than making e-publishing a semi-detached afterthought * A database which makes it simple to manage data once, for all products based on a particular work. If you are publishing the hardback, the paperback and three different varieties of e-book, you don’t want to do every task five times * A system that allows you to manage a far richer set of data than you currently aim for. * This richness might extend to the use of neatly formatted descriptive text and a full set of ‘foreign characters’. * An application that supports other parts of your business process or workflow. * An offer that matches the scale of your ambition. Some applications make sense only for the largest indie publishers, while others work well in companies where the staff can all sit on a single sofa. This is in part about functionality and pricing, but it is also about the level of support you get, and the choice between a traditional software purchase and an online service.

Graham Bell

Here's a typical publisher system, one used for many years by HarperCollins in the UK. It provides…– granular data – industry-standard semantics– ONIX 2.1 and (recently) ONIX 3.0 – simple to edit – integrated into workflow and business process – so that you can be ON TIME with the data - and that means providing the full data at least four months before publication, and often up to 8 months) advice - manage and use the data for your OWN INTERNAL PURPOSES, then the ONIX data becomes a simple step, almost a by-product of good business practice

Thema – the subject category scheme for a global book trade

Thema

• launched at Frankfurt Book Fair last year, and version 1.0 released November 2013

• already gaining real traction• endorsed by International Publishers

Association, BISG, BookNet Canada and

organisations in a dozen other countries

• works alongside BISAC (but likely to replace some schemes in other countries)

• interactive http://editeur.dyndns.org/thema

Graham Bell

more than two years years of discussion and piloting prior to launch. Support of North American book trade via BISG and BookNet Canada was critical

Graham Bell

20 top-level categories2500 lower level, more detailed subcategories arranged in a hierarchy1500 qualifiers that can be used to refine the meaning of the main categories

Graham Bell

low-level categories are detailed enough to allow good merchandising and discovery, but not TOO detailed that they are difficult to understand and use

Graham Bell

here you see the hierachy from FICTION, to CRIME AND MYSTERY, to POLICE PROCEDURAL

<Subject> <MainSubject/> <SubjectSchemeIdentifier>93</SubjectSchemeIdentifier> <SubjectSchemeVersion>1.0</SubjectSchemeVersion> <SubjectCode>FFP</SubjectCode></Subject>

3.0

Graham Bell

this is the Thema subject code in a snipped of ONIX 3.0

A global scheme• managed by EDItEUR with international

steering committee – same model as ONIX

• designed to reduce national biases

• multi-lingual

• national extensions for extra detail

• mapping from BISAC to Thema for backlist• including large-scale auto-mapping

http://www.booknetcanada.ca/blog/2014/4/24/

introducing-bncs-bisac-to-thema-translator.html

Graham Bell

newly-launched (free) bulk mapping facility

Graham Bell

while Thema itself is free to use, mapping is available as part of licensed BISAC code scheme (free for BISG members, but a paid-for license for other organisations)

Increased revenues

Graham Bell

metadata and identifiers aren't trivial or inexpensive. They need management, time and care. So why do we do it?

Showing 13–24 of 841,539 results

Graham Bell

metadata is (in part) about ensuring your books are discoverable. Searching on Google is easy. Yet few people go beyond the second page of results

‘Titles that meet the BIC Basic standard see average

sales 98% higher than those that don’t meet the standard.’

Graham Bell

– for High Street sales, the effect is less (35% increase in sales, which itself is not at all trivial) – for online sales (of physical AND e-books), the effect is greater (175% increase, nearly triple!)

• based on a study of the top-selling 100,000 ISBNs in the UK in 2011

Graham Bell

effect varies by sectornote that this is not a comparison of 'no metadata' against 'good metadata'. It compares 'good metadata' against 'not quite as good'. Even small increases in metadata quality, accuracy, completeness and timeliness make a huge difference to sales and revenues

‘[For online sales, products] with progressively increasing

amounts of enhanced metadata see progressively increasing average sales.’

http://www.nielsenbookdata.co.uk/controller.php?page=1129

Graham Bell

the single most effective data element is the front cover

Graham Bell

this data comes from the Nielsen study published in 2012

‘Research has proven that the more information customers have about a book, the more

likely they are to buy it.’

‘ONIX provides a way to transmit this information in a clean and seamless way across multiple trading partner relationships.’

https://www.bisg.org/onix-books

‘Didn’t we used to havea sales team.’

Graham Bell

books used to be sold by people – sales teams employed by publishers to sell books to retailers, and retail staff employed to sell books to consumers

Metadata is all you have

…at least in thegrowing part of the market

Graham Bell

now, metadata is all you have……for MOST sales (ie for all online sales of physical products and for all e-book sales)

[email protected]

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Metadata: Standards Basics for the Independent Publishing Community, with Graham Bell, Executive...

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