In this episode we look at two upcoming reasons to get your metadata in order (whether you’re a data sender or a data user): I Read Canadian Day and the holiday season.
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Further Reading/Listening
Canadian authors: The whys and hows of identifying them in your data
Give them what they need: A case study of what retailers can accomplish with good metadata
Transcript
Ainsley Sparkes: Hello and welcome to the BookNet Canada podcast, I’m this month’s host, Ainsley Sparkes, Marketing & Communications Manager here at BookNet. This month let’s talk about metadata. There are two good reasons coming up to get yours into shape or, if you’re a data consumer, to think about how you’re using it.
First, chronologically, is I Read Canadian Day — coming up on Nov. 8. And second, as we move into prime bookselling season (Christmas), it’s more important than ever (and here at BookNet we think it’s always important) for publishers to have their metadata on point. And for booksellers to use it thoughtfully to create the best chance of discoverability for book buyers.
Let’s talk about I Read Canadian Day first. You can get more information about this nation-wide initiative to celebrate Canadian books for young people on their site — including resources and event news. See the show notes for the link.
In a series of upcoming blog posts about Canadian books for young readers, we share that “the number of titles by Canadian contributors in our BiblioShare database has been increasing … with an overall increase from January 2020 to October 2023 of 23%.”
Though the number of titles written, illustrated, or edited by Canadians have increased in terms of the metadata, the sales of titles with a Canadian contributor has decreased, down 3% from 2020 to 2022 and down 13% if we look back even farther, from 2017 to 2022. Though to put those numbers in context, the drop could very well be because 2017 to 2019 were exceptional years for Canadian contributors — for example, the popularity of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in 2017, Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life in 2018, and then back to Margaret Atwood in 2019 with The Testaments.
In our surveying of Canadian readers in our Canadian Leisure & Reading Study 2022 we found Canadians reading books by or about Canadians has been trending down slightly from 2019 to 2022. In 2022, 24% of readers had read a book by our about Canadians or locals in the last year, which is down from 30% of readers who did so in 2019.
I Read Canadian Day is a good chance to do a bit of levelling of the playing field for Canadian contributors. But if your data is not up-to-date with your Canadian contributors being flagged as such, you’ll be missing out on opportunities to be included.
Since we also found in the Canadian Leisure & Reading Study 2022 that one third of Canadian readers choose to read a particular book because of the author, there are definitely opportunities to nudge Canadian readers to choose Canadian authors.
Speaking of opportunities for books, last spring, Kieron Smith, Digital Director at UK’s Blackwell’s & Wordery, presented his case study of what retailers can accomplish with good metadata for Tech Forum. You can watch the whole thing to see his whole case laid out with examples (see the show notes for the link), but here are some highlights of what metadata, and particularly Thema, can do for bookstore discovery. Just in time for the ramp up to the holiday season.
Kieron Smith: So, I'm gonna give you a little bit of an introduction. I'm gonna talk a little bit, just a very little bit about Blackwell's and kind of the way in which we are approaching book selling. And then set the scene a little bit more, and then take a step back, I think, and look at some real-world examples. And I'm gonna pull out some specific titles to share with you and look at the metadata of those and kind of what doesn't work there. And I'm not picking on any particular publisher. It could apply to any publisher, big or small actually, but I've just chosen some books that I think are interesting and give a good example of what I'm talking about. And then really go on to talk about the opportunities that Thema offers because I do think there are many, and I think it's a very collaborative opportunity for the trade as a whole, for publishers and book sellers to be able to create something more than we have now. So, without any more delay, I should go on.
Blackwell's has been around for a long time. It's been around since 1879. Obviously, I've not been there the whole time, however long my career history sounded there. One thing that Blackwell's didn't ever do was say no very well. So, it has sold trade titles. It became the leading academic book seller. It's been a very significant mail order player. It's got its own rare books department, secondhand, business to business, and business to institutions with lots of universities as customers, the NHS, etc.
Now, what this has meant is that we've really got a vast range of different customers globally. We've also got some very demanding customers, certainly colleagues, booksellers in Oxford have to deal with dons from Oxford University who do expect you to kind of know the answer. In fact, a colleague said to me once, "The internet is very useful, but I find it's easier just to know things," which I thought was a great quote from a bookseller, and that's kind of what I think a good bookseller is, is a repository of knowledge.
But sort of our aim is to do two things, I think, really. One is to create selections in shops and to create a selection online that interests and inspires and meets the kind of objectives of serendipity that you would expect from a bookseller. But also, it's about discovery. And I think Thema and metadata helps us achieve both things. It helps us create the lists and the selection that we want, but it also gives us the context to help people discover new titles or discover the titles that they want that are related to the interests that they have.
When we talk about Thema, just to go to the real basics, Thema I think is often represented as two distinct things, if you like. It's the categories in terms of the traditional hierarchical tree depicted on the left here in terms of our fiction and related items, fiction, general, and literary. Very hierarchical, very structured, we know, we're very comfortable with it. It's something that the book trade, libraries, etc., have all used for many, many years. And then we've got these blobs, these circles on the right-hand side, which are the qualifiers, which are represented often as separate things. But I think actually what's exciting about this is that it's far messier than that, and that it is really needs to be munged together for us to be able to get the real power from this metadata. And as I said, I'll try and bring this to life a bit because this is also very abstract at this point, and what's useful is kind of visualizing that and explaining it in more detail.
Okay. Right. Into the real detail now. There's nothing like a bit of ONIX to keep everyone awake. Now, this is so a really great title, a history non-fiction title looking at East Germany during the Cold War. What have we got in that data? Well, we've got qualifiers, so that's great. So, the publisher has submitted some. And we've got Thema subjects. So, the Thema subject codes very much the classical hierarchical tree. And we've got three of those in there. Now, the qualifiers really repeat what's in the classification subject tree. So, we've got Eastern Europe, which is a little bit of a narrowing down from European history. And then we've got 20th Century 1900 to 1999. We've got some elements in here, Cold War. So, it's not bad, it's not in a terrible place, but it could be better.
We end up like most retailers utilizing, at this point, the primary classification from the first one on the list, basically, so European history. Not great. That's a very large bucket. What the publisher could have done is added some qualifiers to this, utilizing... I mean, for example, you could narrow it right down to the Cold War period using a time period qualifier. And you could even go to East Germany, so you could say East Germany during the Cold War period. As you can see, that's brought us right down.
Now, the really fantastic thing about qualifiers, and you think about the way that I kind of put the circles on top of the hierarchy is if you're interested in East Germany and you're interested in the Cold War period, and you want to look beyond the hierarchy where you've ended up in this history bucket, you know, you may well be interested in philosophers from Eastern Germany or fiction, architecture, but they all sit in very different parts of the hierarchical tree quite correctly. I'll come back to that in a minute. But the qualifiers give us the ability to say, "Well, actually I'm interested in other broader things within East Germany," and they can coexist at the same time.
And I think this is where it starts to get really powerful because our interaction with real human customers is that they come in and they say, "Well, I'm doing a project on East Germany, or I'm reading about East Germany, or, you know... What other titles could you give me?" And it's, you know, most book sellers like the quote I had from Peter at the beginning saying, "Well, I know things," there is only so much we can know, unfortunately. I can probably recommend 3 or 4 titles on East Germany, but actually, if I had access to a load of qualifiers, I would be able to take a list of 20 and then perhaps recommend five rather than just the two or three I remembered.
Now, the other issue at the moment is that we find publishers will use the hierarchical tree in order to try and get their books in front of other audiences rather than using the qualifiers. So, and I say I'm not picking on a particular publisher at all, this is very common. My little highlights moved a bit there, so apologies for that. I've taken here part of the hierarchical tree, which is the Cold Wars and proxy conflicts which is down here. And we've wandered into having a couple of books completely mis-shelved because that's a non-fiction category, yet I've got Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy here and a book by Heather Morris as well. Yeah, I can see the connection and perfect for a qualifier, not history titles. And if you wandered into a physical bookshop and found them in history, I think you'd probably question the expertise of the book seller, unfortunately standing behind the till.
And this isn't just an online piece. Booksellers in our shops, in the independent shops that I talk to all the time are always making lists. I'm in a booksellers association group on Facebook, and you can guarantee every single day there will be another bookseller asking a question, "Does anybody have some example titles for this particular customer, or this age group, or this type of theme?" Or, "I'm not an expert in X, can anyone suggest some titles?" And they just don't have access to this data outside of the tree at the moment.
Blackwell's itself has quite a few NHS customers, and for them, every single month our account team will put together four NHS surgeons, for example, a list of new titles that are very specific to a very expert field. And we have to do that by building up lists from the publisher and looking AIs, and looking at all the data we can find. And again, this would really make that very helpful. Not internet. Surgeons are not using the internet every day to search for these books. They need us to be able to do that. Super important, obviously, because it literally could save lives.
So, to summarise, Thema is a powerful tool which can enable people across the industry to truly deliver on the promise of delivery. Judicious use of both subject category, four if you must, and qualifiers up to six, can expand the audience for your titles, or if you're a book seller, help you find them in the first place. Successful management of metadata on titles is a crucial part of ensuring a title is successful and only going to get more important, especially with AI coming down the road.
Ainsley: So there you have it, many reasons why metadata is so important and examples of how it can help with getting the right books to the right readers.
Before I go, I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge that BookNet Canada’s operations are remote and our colleagues contribute their work from the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Ojibwa of Fort William First Nation, the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, the Wyandot, the Mi’kmaq, and the Métis, the original nations and peoples of the lands we now call Beeton, Brampton, Guelph, Halifax, Thunder Bay, Toronto, and Vaughan. We encourage you to visit the native-land.ca website to learn more about the peoples whose land you are listening from today. Moreover, BookNet Canada endorses the Calls to Action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and supports an ongoing shift from gatekeeping to spacemaking in the book industry. We hope that our work, including this podcast, helps to create an environment that supports that shift. We'd also like to acknowledge the Government of Canada for their financial support through the Canada Book Fund. And of course, thanks to you for listening.
Insights into the behaviour of Canadian book borrowers.