Everything You Thought You Knew About Metadata…
…But Were Afraid to Ask
January 2013 By Thad McIlroy
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It's no surprise that there's a lot of confusion around metadata for books. It's complicated. If only they hadn't used the "M" word—metadata. It reeks of digital complexity. And then you read the standard definition: "Metadata is data about data." Gee, thanks. As if your eyes hadn't already glazed over.
To put it another way: Metadata is your book online.
Online, your customers can't grab a copy off the shelf, read the back cover blurb, and thumb through the pages to scan a selection of the text. That's all metadata now: The back cover becomes the title description. The advance reviews are carefully tagged for online. "About the author" is now a separate web page on Amazon.com. And that's the easy part!
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More challenging are, for example, making sure that the online preview doesn't waste precious pages on the prelims; that your author Brian Smith doesn't link by mistake to Brian W. Smith, author of My Husband's Love Child—a Novella; that the video shows up online; and many more concerns.
Basic metadata is pretty easy, but ONIX, the metadata standard, now defines more than 200 fields. And these days there's intermediate metadata, and then there's advanced.
Today we're going to test your skills: Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced.
You Think You're A Beginner
You've got the basics in hand—if you're in the U.K. you know they're called BIC Basic in the U.S., it's BISAC Core Data Elements. Did you know:
Companies Mentioned:
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