Keywords
Citation
Calvert, P. (2004), "Digital Book Production and Supply Chain Management", Online Information Review, Vol. 28 No. 2, pp. 164-165. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520410531727
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2004, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
This book in the C‐2‐C Series is of considerable interest to librarians and information managers. The central point is that as book production changes from a linear sequence of operations to an organic interchange between several players, the role of book numbering, catalogue records, and other metadata, can all be used to make the supply chain more efficient.
There are three chapters devoted to metadata. The first is mainly descriptive, illustrating how good metadata helps Internet resource discovery – though one would hope that information managers know this already. A chapter by Tsembas provides an overview of metadata frameworks, especially the Dublin Core and how it fits in with other metadata schemes. The rather forgotten MPEG‐7 gets good coverage here. The third chapter describes metadata for the book industry, such as the various EDFI standards, ONIX and the DocBook system.
Book numbering, which seldom receives much attention, is given full attention is a fine chapter by Dean Mason. The three problems in the current ISBN scheme of a limited pool of numbers, the difficulty of defining a publication in the digital environment, and the effects of the first two problems on how easily existing metadata schemes can utilise any new numbering standard, are all tackled here. Granularity, which allows for the cutting and splicing of text, poses new problems for any finite numbering system. Mason wonders whether the Digital Object Identifier might be better than an ISBN, partly due to its greater flexibility, and partly because it may aid with copyright control.
Another chapter by Mason reminds us that the familiar catalogue record is not yet dead. If the book supply chain becomes as organic as has been predicted, the catalogue record could play a very useful role in the exchange of information between players. It will have to carry extra data to do so, but for this XML can help. MARC would still be used to store bibliographic data, but MARC within an XML record that contained book production and retail data would work.
Overall, this is a very useful publication recommended to all librarians working in technical services.