Managing eBook Metadata in Academic Libraries: Taming the Tiger. By Donna E. Frederick. Amsterdam: Chandos, 2016. 280 p. $78.95 paperback (ISBN: 978-0-08-1001516). Chandos Information Professional Series.
This volume is part of the Chandos Information Professional Series, designed to provide easy-to-read and practical coverage of subjects that are of interest to librarians. The book is written for newer librarians and librarians transferred to technical services, but it is meant to be useful to anyone working with e-books and the metadata associated with them. The approach of the book is to guide the reader through the various definitions, concepts, and approaches related to metadata management so that they can be applied in the reader’s library. This is not a how-to guide on managing e-books, but rather a guide to help the reader examine the metadata and e-book environment at their own library and create their own management plan using the principles, practices, guidelines, and standards presented in the book.
The book is divided into nine chapters, taking readers from basic concepts to special topics in e-book metadata, and it includes a bibliography and index. Frederick uses the introductory chapters to define the terms used throughout the book (e.g., e-books and metadata) and offers the perspective that e-books are a disruptive technology for academic libraries, or, a tiger that needs to be tamed by designing a library specific method for managing e-book metadata. Frederick uses analogies and real library situations to explain library technical processes to a new or new-to-technical services librarian.
For the purpose of this book, e-books are defined as electronic monographs including digitized documents, maps, and music scores, streaming music, video, audio, and podcasts. “Metadata are structured information which represents a resource or service. This information is used to store, discover, retrieve, use and/or manage that resource in the present and over time” (3). The introductory chapters outline the best practices for planning metadata and also offer practical advice, such as to avoid customizing e-book records for user-friendly display in the integrated library system (ILS) or library management system (LMS), but instead to customize the ILS or LMS to display all e-book records in a user-friendly way. Frederick not only introduces the reader to thinking holistically about managing e-books, but also reveals the reality of working with e-books in academic libraries. Librarians often have to learn through their own trial and error. Mistakes made in the past will be discovered and new mistakes will be made as librarians traverse this complex metadata environment.
The book contains helpful questionnaires to guide the reader in asking the appropriate questions of their own library to collect information regarding the cycle of e-book metadata from selection and acquisition to discovery and maintenance over time. Managing e-book metadata in academic libraries is not just about batch or bulk loading bibliographic discovery records into the catalog, but a comprehensive system supporting a greater range of library processes.
Of particular note is chapter 4, which focuses on the often overlooked metadata of acquisitions. E-books appear on the surface to be acquired just like hard-copy books, but librarians must also consider access fees, licenses, renewals and cancellations, consortia purchasing, demand- or patron-driven acquisition, and platform and vendor changes. Frederick outlines five principles for creating acquisitions metadata and provides hints to applying those principles. Although the principles may seem like common sense, they are often not followed in practice, and the book does an excellent job of reminding librarians why it is important to use controlled vocabularies, provide clear guidelines and instructions to staff for creating and using the metadata, focus on future as well as present needs, and always keep the big picture—the library’s larger systems—in mind. In addition to acquisitions metadata, access metadata must be recorded following the same best practices, making sure the people involved with creating and using the information know where and how it is recorded.
Frederick anticipates that many experienced librarians will skip directly to chapter 6, but the introductory chapters should be considered essential reading as they inform the reader of how “managing record sets is integrated within the framework of a larger eBook metadata management plan” (144). Catalogers must keep in mind that e-books cannot be physically browsed for, so high-quality discovery metadata are essential whether creating original records, copy cataloging, or loading record sets. Record sets from vendors or publishers typically need to be customized with a program like MARCEdit, but generally the quality of record sets provided by vendors and publishers has increased significantly over the years. The record sets cannot just be loaded and forgotten about, so the metadata-management plan must address tracking of the record sets. “This process of recording information for tracking purposes is somewhat similar to what libraries have done historically to deal with the check-in of their print journals” (151). The book focuses almost exclusively on MARC metadata, and it also introduces readers to Knowledge Bases and Related Tools (KBART) for use within discovery services.
E-book metadata maintenance extends beyond discovery metadata into preparing for and troubleshooting platform changes, loss of rights, access issues, and subscription changes. Preservation metadata are also discussed for e-books with perpetual access from vendors in light and dark archives and for locally hosted digital monograph collections (e.g., electronic theses and dissertations). Even though the deselection process for e-books is underdeveloped, Frederick uses a case study to illustrate the challenges of deselection and deduplication with an emphasis on the need for well-planned acquisitions and access metadata to assist in decision making.
Managing E-book Metadata in Academic Libraries: Taming the Tiger is an excellent introduction to e-book metadata management; it offers practical advice on the management of all types of e-book metadata and working through the issues that come with e-book collections. Readers will be prepared to tame the tiger in their own libraries by knowing what questions to ask and what information needs to be gathered to create their own e-book metadata-management plan. Frederick often reminds the reader that they are not alone and provides resources and toolkits shared openly by librarians and other tiger tamers to help one another. By focusing on principles, best practices, guidelines, and standards, the author has written a book relevant to academic libraries of all sizes, as well as a great introduction for students to the complexities of managing e-book metadata.—Jennifer Fairall (jfairall@siena.edu), Siena College Library, Loudonville, New York