Welcome to the Metadata Millennium: A Complete Overview of What Metadata Can Do for Publishers

The recent AAP EPUB 3 Initiative published a white paper that provides good background on best practices for making EPUBs accessible, including references to a host of helpful resources. Some of the best of these are from Benetech's DIAGRAM Center: for example, guidelines on how to provide good image descriptions and "Top Tips for Accessible EPUB 3" are useful and cover the proper use of metadata.

A Closing Note On The Metadata Millennium:
Publishers spent half of the last millennium perfecting and expanding how to render, produce, and deliver content as books. While that work is clearly not over, the focus has shifted in this millennium to metadata: how to manage the information about the content to make it more valuable to its authors, its publishers, and its consumers. I hope this article has helped you see the enormous potential metadata offers.

Bill Kasdorf is general editor of The Columbia Guide to Digital Publishing and vice president and principal consultant for Apex Content Solutions, a leading supplier of data conversion, editorial, production, and content enhancement services to publishers and other organizations worldwide.