Managing eBook Metadata in Academic Libraries: Taming the Tiger

Managing ebook Metadata in Academic Libraries: Taming the Tiger tackles the topic of ebooks in academic libraries, a trend that has been welcomed by students, faculty, researchers, and library staff. However, at the same time, the reality of acquiring ebooks, making them discoverable, and managing them presents library staff with many new challenges.

Traditional methods of cataloging and managing library resources are no longer relevant where the purchasing of ebooks in packages and demand driven acquisitions are the predominant models for acquiring new content. Most academic libraries have a complex metadata environment wherein multiple systems draw upon the same metadata for different purposes. This complexity makes the need for standards-based interoperable metadata more important than ever. In addition to complexity, the nature of the metadata environment itself typically varies slightly from library to library making it difficult to recommend a single set of practices and procedures which would be relevant to, and effective in, all academic libraries.

Considering all of these factors together, it is not surprising when academic libraries find it difficult to create and manage the metadata for their ebook collections. This book is written as a guide for metadata librarians, other technical services librarians, and ancillary library staff who manage ebook collections to help them understand the requirements for ebook metadata in their specific library context, to create a vision for ebook metadata management, and to develop a plan which addresses the relevant issues in metadata management at all stages of the lifecycle of ebooks in academic libraries from selection, to deselection or preservation.

Explores the reasons behind creating records for our resources and challenges libraries to think about what that means for their contextDiscusses the complex nature of academic libraries and the electronic resources they require Encourages librarians to find their own way to manage metadata

• Chapter1: Understanding eBooks, Metadata and Managing Metadata
• Chapter 2: EBooks as a disruptive technology
• Chapter 3: Designing a method for managing eBook metadata
• Chapter 4: Acquisitions – the often overlooked metadata
• Chapter 5: Understanding eBook acquisitions in academic libraries
• Chapter 6: Acquisitions Metadata – tools and methods for eBooks metadata management
• Chapter 7: Access and discovery – a focus on creating access metadata
• Chapter 8: Discovery Metadata – An introduction
• Chapter 9: MARC 21 Discovery metadata: Original and copy cataloguing
• Chapter 10: Bulk processing: Working with record sets and updating metadata
• Chapter 11: VII Maintenance of eBook Metadata and Troubleshooting
• Chapter 12: VIII Metadata for Preservation and Deselection
• Chapter 13: IX Special Topics in eBook Metadata
• Conclusion