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.”

“NISO is very grateful to Ravit, Alistair, and all the members of the E-Book Metadata Working Group for developing this Recommended Practice, as well as to everyone who took the time to comment on it,” says NISO’s Executive Director, Todd Carpenter. “Implementing these recommendations will benefit the whole e-book community — from authors to readers, from publishers to retailers, vendors, and libraries.”

The Recommended Practice is freely available at http://www.niso.org/standards-committees/ebmd

About NISO

NISO, based in Baltimore, Maryland, fosters the development and maintenance of standards that facilitate the creation, persistent management, and effective interchange of information so that it can be trusted for use in research and learning. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages libraries, publishers, information aggregators, and other organizations that support learning, research, and scholarship through the creation, organization, management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and across the entire lifecycle of information standards. NISO is a non-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). For more information, visit the NISO website (https://niso.org)