• Meet the Department

“Sometimes, they think we’re IT”: Meet the Metadata Department! | October 7, 2016

by Hillary Doyle (Scholastic)

In brief, what does the Metadata team do?

We make sure all of the information related to a book – title, author, summary, price, subject categories, trim size, cover, and a whole lot more – gets to our online retailers, so that our books can be purchased online. Since the data is coming from a number of sources, and being entered in by dozens of editors, we also set data quality standards with our Metadata Style Guide. That helps make sure our product information is complete and accurate, uniform across different imprints, and optimized for search.

What is one thing that people generally get wrong about your department?

Sometimes, they think we’re IT. Which I get; even re-reading my answer above, it sounds a lot more tech-y than it actually is. We primarily curate the data, making sure it’s as clean as can be and sent on time. We liaise with metadata vendors, who handle the real tech-y stuff: converting the raw data into ONIX, which is a format used across the industry, and assuring distribution to all retailers as appropriate.

What is the most difficult thing about working in Metadata?

Best practices tend to shift regularly, moving both with technology and with demands from retailers and consumers. Those changes can mean tweaks along several points in the flow of data: in our own internal systems, in our curation workflow, in the database and distribution systems run by our vendors, and then in retailers’ systems. These are all managed by different parties, so there’s a lot of coordination involved, and then questions about how to handle our growing backlist. The best way to avoid any problems is to try to future-proof against possible industry shifts, but those aren’t always easy to see coming.

What is the best thing about working on the Metadata Team?

You get to work with everyone! Really. Everyone. All of Editorial and Design, for the full title list and covers. Marketing, Publicity, and Sales, for tweaks to copy that might boost a title, and for retailer needs. Production for coordination with files, especially for ebooks. Operations for some systems maintenance stuff and spec data. You also get a full sense for your house’s pub list – the range of everything that’s hitting the shelves, season to season and month to month, which is always fun. You really get familiar with all your books.