Book: A Futurist's Manifesto

4

What We Talk About When We Talk About Metadata (Laura Dawson)

Laura Dawson is Product Manager, Identifiers at Bowker. She’s a 25-year veteran of the book industry, having worked in e-commerce (Barnes & Noble.com), libraries (SirsiDynix), and publishing (Doubleday and Bantam), and has worked as an independent consultant offering expertise on the digital transition for clients including McGraw-Hill, Alibris, Ingram Library Services, Bowker, and Muze. You can find Laura on Twitter at: @ljndawson.

Introduction

As Brian O’Leary noted in his previous chapter, metadata assumes a critical importance once the content is out of the container. Those of us who make our living in publishing by working with metadata regard its sudden popularity with a mix of amusement (that something previously regarded as so dry is now sexy) and exasperation (what took you so long?). In practice, metadata has been important in bookselling for many, many years. But because a book is no longer a physical object, discoverability via metadata is only just now becoming a front-office problem.

While metadata has been important for a while and is now in a new spotlight, the term still means many different things to many different people.  To address that, I think it’s worth revisiting what the book industry means when it says “metadata.”

A Little History

We’ve come to think of metadata as a collection of attributes—ISBN, title, author, copyright year, price, subject category, etc.  This title-level metadata ...