by Beth Staats
Quick Summary
The new Recommended Practice, NISO RP-29-2022, E-Book Bibliographic Metadata Requirements in the Sale, Publication, Discovery, and Preservation Supply Chain, was approved January 29 and published February 10, 2022.
(reprinted from NISO announcement)
Today sees the publication of the NISO Recommended Practice, E-Book Bibliographic Metadata Requirements in the Sale, Publication, Discovery, Delivery, and Preservation Supply Chain (NISO RP-29-2022). This document, prepared by the E-Book Metadata Working Group and approved by the NISO Information Creation & Curation Topic Committee, incorporates feedback received from publishers, retailers, libraries, service providers, preservation agencies, and others who are using e-book metadata.
The Recommended Practice focuses on several key areas for e-book metadata — defining the minimal requirements for sales, discovery, delivery, electronic holdings management, and preservation purposes; identifying the best way to transmit metadata through the supply chain; updates to titles and holdings; developing rules for e-book metadata deduplication purposes, and sharing a variety of examples of recommended practice implementation.
The Recommended Practice focuses on key metadata elements — titles, names, dates, book identifiers, and subjects — to enable basic functions of e-book metadata that apply across all stakeholder organizations: identifying a book, matching records for the same book or version, and distinguishing records that refer to different books or versions. The goal is to provide principles and examples that support shared understanding and, where possible, alignment of e-book metadata practices across sectors, complementing existing e-book best practices and guidelines, such as those published by BISG, EDItEUR, and W3C.
“Ensuring that all stakeholders have a shared understanding of standards, practices, and purposes for the metadata they use is crucial,” says Working Group co-chair Ravit David of Scholars Portal, University of Toronto, “especially since the format, transmission, and applications of e-book metadata are constantly changing, and workflows and data exchange are increasingly automated, massive in scale, and networked.”
Ravit’s co-chair, Alistair Morrison of Johns Hopkins University, notes, “Involving a broad and diverse group of stakeholders, both in the Working Group and through the public comment period, has enabled us to ensure that our recommendations can be widely adopted and used throughout all sectors of the information community.”
The Recommended Practice is freely available at http://www.niso.org/standards-
