This presentation was provided by Rebecca Culbertson of the California Digital Library at ALA 2017 during the 11th Annual NISO BISG Forum, Delivering the Integrated Information Experience.

1. NISO 11th Annual NISO-BISG
Forum ALA 2017
Metadata as Applied to Books,
Newly Enriched Content and
Emerging Formats

2. Ebook Metadata Working Group
• Goal is to write a best practices document
• Describe “the minimum metadata requirements necessary to
describe ebooks
• To support sales, discovery ,delivery, deaccessioning, and
preservation

3. Phase 1 (completed)
• Starting just last February, nineteen of us met at least once a month
using conference calls
• We are building a Work plan as we go along
• Split into 3 subgroups that had conference calls on a biweekly basis
• ebook identifiers, dates, and authorities
• From the perspective of different stakeholders
• Did a comparison of the way that the relevant data elements are
handled in the most common standards

4. Phase 1.2
• Looking at the transmission of metadata and its related workflows
• Starting with enunciating pain points again from the perspective of
the different types of stakeholders, including
• Libraries & consortia
• Publishers and their service providers
• Data aggregators

5. Pain Points—lots of them!
• eBook metadata often transmitted in collections. Often the vendors
don’t do a good job of keeping their lists of titles up to date
• When defining a collection from multiple providers the vocabularies
need to be the same
• Normalizing data across multiple ISBNs
• Since libraries want TOCs and book images it would be good if they
could ingest ONIX files instead of just MARC

6. Specific deliverables
• NISO Recommended Practice in regard to best uses for metadata in
the supply chain of ebooks.
• List, description, and meaning of each metadata element
• Use or avoidance of existing metadata standards—need to ensure the
usefulness of each metadata element for the purposes articulated
• Clarification of the supply chain, as necessary