scope:

Purpose and Scope

The overarching goal of this recommended practice is to promote shared understanding and ongoing communication about the most fundamental e-book metadata elements among all the different types of stakeholders. This recommended practice provides a guide to creating and using e-book metadata as consistently as possible across the different types of stakeholders, who must also adhere to the existing standards and communities of practice applicable to them.

An effort to improve communication and consistency is necessary and timely. Individual organizations generally have consistent practices internally. Pairs of organizations that regularly exchange metadata generally understand each other's guidelines well enough to translate and communicate effectively. However, the scale of metadata exchange has expanded to massive numbers of records, along complex non-linear workflows, across networks of diverse organizations, and over significant periods of time. Taking a broader view to encompass this new reality, we found ambiguity and confusion over even the most common metadata fields and very different practices for seemingly simple workflows, such as announcing obsolete titles.