NP2022_The “Nested Triangle” of Metadata Supply for Open Access Books
Academic librarians want to make research outputs, including Open Access books, fully discoverable to their users and communities in order to develop open and responsible research environments. The key to enabling this is high quality metadata that can be ingested into a variety of content management systems and online discovery interfaces.
Libraries source OA book metadata via content aggregators, library system providers (e.g. a proprietary knowledge base), or directly from OA book providers/publishers. These supply mechanisms form a nested triangle, as metadata flows from the OA book provider to other stakeholders. The complexity of the scholarly publishing ecosystem and established supply-chains for content procurement and metadata creates barriers that inhibit libraries from making OA books fully discoverable.
These barriers relate to three main areas for OA books:
- Lack of readily available high quality metadata
- Problems with ingestion and deduplication of metadata
- Metadata that is not fully open for sharing and reuse
An OA book provider, a metadata librarian, and an iSchool educator will first briefly examine this “nested triangle” of metadata supply for OA books. They will open the discussion to representatives from content aggregators and library system providers to explore solutions for these barriers.
