Welcome to the Metadata Millennium: A Complete Overview of What Metadata Can Do for Publishers
There's a lot more metadata that can and should be included -- information about accessibility features, pedagogical information for educational books, etc. But we'll save that for later.
Three Essential Standards: ONIX, BISAC, Thema
All the supply chain metadata is tracked by a publisher's internal databases. That metadata is often in proprietary formats, which is a fancy way of saying "they just made it all up": the vocabularies and codes and database fields are whatever made sense to that publisher, often many years ago, before there was much thought about anybody outside the publishing house needing to understand them. You can imagine what a mess this can create when that metadata, which is often incomplete, inconsistent, and even incomprehensible, is sent out into the world.
- Places:
- XML