Indigenous Thema / ONIX worked examples

The release of EDItEUR’s “Highlighting content and contributors relating to Indigeneity and Indigenous Nations and peoples using ONIX and Thema” and its accompanying documentation that highlights the specific recommendations for ONIX and Thema, as well as its incredibly helpful set of almost 100 international worked examples, are a lot to digest. EDItEUR provides the book industry with what is easily the best documentation available for any standard.

BookNet Canada decided to expand its existing Thema worked examples to do deeper dives into single book examples of content and contributors relating to Indigeneity for several reasons:

• Doing this sort of detailed look is a great training exercise and we want to inspire any company wanting to understand these standards. It’s as simple as two or three people taking a stab at it and comparing their results — you’ll learn a lot and you’ll improve your metadata quickly. There's no single “right” way to do it and even if it’s not central to your job to create the company’s metadata, understanding it is central to the sales process. Describing a book in way that makes it discoverable — in a way that readers can find it — should be built into the entire publishing workflow.

  • Don’t take any example as gospel: Do them for yourself to find new nuances, they’re your books so you’ll know the most about them and that inform your choices.

• The special Indigeneity features in the ONIX standard haven’t always been emphasized so it helps to have them highlighted.

• Looking at how the standard is applied one book at a time is easy to digest and easy to follow making it an essential step to gaining the familiarity necessary to use the options with confidence.

• Finally we’re adding a new addition to our worked examples: If BookNet’s goal is improving discoverability then we need to discuss how search might work to inspire retailers to use the tools we're describing. Feedback from other markets suggests Thema qualifiers enhance discoverability — and provide access to relationships that go beyond grouping the cozies together. Imagine what a cross reference to an ONIX code might bring!