Booknet Canada

Maybe this isn’t code breaking Robert-Langdon-style, but the new BISAC code list that came out in November 2009 is reflected in BNC SalesData now.  After it was released, it was integrated into R.R. Bowker’s bibliographic database and then from Bowker into BNC SalesData around the middle of April.

Here is a refresher on why we use BISAC, why you see the categories you see in and where you see what.

The BISAC subject code list was selected as the classification tool for BNC SalesData to help describe the content of a work back in 2004. Developed and maintained by our sister organization in the States, BISG, BISAC was viewed then and today as the best option for a general classification list for the whole industry.  BIC in the UK also uses a similar list.

With each modification of the BISAC list, there are additions, modifications and sometimes deletions to the nearly 3700 unique codes in the standard. In the November edition, several subjects were added to the list making them available for bibliographic managers across the industry to start using and we are already seeing  many of these in the data.

In BNC SalesData, you, too, can see the new and modified codes reflected in several ways, and I will use the examples to illustrate when we show the full text BISAC code explicitly, and cases where we “roll up” the codes to the broader category for searching purposes.

Bestseller Lists
The BISAC subject code displays in every bestseller list as a “BNC Subject” in the Bestseller list with Primary and Secondary subjects broken out into two columns and then a third column for the actual alpha-numeric BISAC code.

If you are looking for a particular subject in your results, you can see the differences in the subjects by looking at the BISAC codes:

In this case CGN004120 is Manga/Fantasy while CGN004050 is Manga/General. We roll all eleven of the Manga tertiary subjects:  fantasy, historical fiction, romance, science fiction, sports etc into the Manga/General category in terms of the written out display for two reasons. The first is a technical issue. To display the tertiary subjects on the screen in the lookup is a display issue. There are just too many of them to show effectively.  Second, the codes are not applied to enough books to provide useful results that you could use to make decisions on categories to develop.  So, we roll all subjects up to Comic and Graphic Novels/Manga and provide sorting so that you can, if you choose to, bring together all the same BISAC codes.

You can choose to sort in this manner on the Title Trend and Titles by Markets reports as well.

Title/ISBN Report
On the Title/ISBN or Title Detail report, you can see the full BISAC subject code written out as well as the BNC Subject, or rolled up subject. The latter is available on the Bibliographic Detail view of the data.

Market Share Report
In the Market Share report, the subjects selected as rows or column headings can be drilled into to display the primary and then secondary subjects.

Additions vs. Modifications

In some cases new secondary subjects are added and called out in the subject list. A couple of examples are:
JUVENILE FICTION / Activity Books and JUVENILE FICTION / Nursery Rhymes. These categories have grown and can now be selected as a separate, search-ready categories. They may be found in the subject tree under Juvenile Fiction on the Create a report form:

In some cases, subjects have been modified and the change is now reflected in the text description only. In these cases, no changes need to be made to any reports you are running. The mapping to the new text happens automatically.

A good example is the Nature category. There have been several updates to language to reflect the growth in the ecological subject classification scheme. Nature/Animals has been broadened to include several other categories instead of a general catch all for animals that weren’t called out before. Nature/Fish has been replaced with Nature/Animals/Fish.  For the purposes of any existing searches, because your query contained the Fish BISAC code, NAT012000, your searches will continue to return Fish titles.  However, if you were building the query today, Fish or other variants would have to be wildcarded in the title using asterisks (*) to ensure that you weren’t returning results on all other animals. A similar change has occurred for Nature/Plants. Flowers and Trees are now categorized as a tertiary subject under Nature/Plants.

To see all the changes between the last version and the new one, the full BISAC subject list is available for sale from the BISG’s Publications section of their website. Also comes with a handy guide about how to assess your content to apply the subjects.

*Remember* that if you are classifying your books using ONIX, BNC SalesData only shows the first subject that is submitted on the record. If you are seeing something other than the subject that you want on the record, please let us know by submitting a correction through the Title/ISBN report or by emailing salesdata@booknetcanada.ca

The next release of BISAC is slated for November.

One of the most popular question topics from BNC SalesData users is bibliographic data: where is it sourced; how is it updated; and how can errors in the data be corrected? Since we love nothing more than to rhapsodize over bibliographic data and metadata in the supply chain, we’ll climb up on our soapbox and share all the details with you!

SalesData imports its bibliographic data from RR Bowker Books in Print, and we work together with Bowker to ensure that the Canadian market information is up-to-date and reflected in the import files for SalesData. Update files for biblio data are processed every evening. Bowker, in turn, sources its data directly from publisher and distributor uploads and ONIX files. 1-2-3, simple as can be, right?

It seems simple, but in fact Bowker is collating and prioritizing data from numerous sources, and generally there are
several data sources for the same title record: the originating publisher; US distributors; Canadian distributors; international distributors.  And ONIX, that universal standard of biblio data communication, largely dictates the format of the data but the content of each feed can be more flexible and changeable. Add several different systems importing, exporting and interpreting that data, and the occasional error is going to appear.

In the immortal words of Douglas Adams, don’t panic! For quick fixes within the SalesData system, we have a Correction Form in the Title/ISBN page.You can click through on the ‘Report a bibliographic error’ link, enter your change and click submit.  Your change suggestion has to go through a manual approval process, so it may be 2 business days before a change will go live.

This method is also time consuming, and is ultimately only a band-aid solution. While it will make a short term correction in the SalesData system, it does not correct the error at the source. If the error exists in a publisher ONIX file, the manual correction will be overwritten by update imports - the correction will also need to be made in the publisher and/or distributor’s records.

If you see a group of your titles with errors, it is more efficient to just send us a note at salesdata@booknetcanada.ca with some details about the titles that look incorrect to you. We can investigate and often make corrections systemically, eliminating the manual change process, and saving time for everyone. Submitting your ONIX files to BiblioShare can speed up our investigation as well, because we can refer directly to your source data.

You are the experts on your own titles, so let’s work together to keep biblio data on the right track!

Changing the design of the bestseller report creator in SalesData was no easy task. The problem: how do you provide users with the ability to do advance searches in an interface that allows lots of criteria? You have to consider the best practices of designing when trying to solve this problem but as so many things in software development there are always exceptions. As far as my thinking is concerned (and to be honest my thinking doesn’t amount to a hill of beans here) a key design goal is to keep user actions transparent. Have you ever done something on your computer and then months later said how do I get this to stop doing this? If you hide away preference selections or criteria, you take the chance that users will be confused by their results.

When it came to SalesData bestseller creation we wanted to speed up the creation of a report and make it a less nested process. As you may recall from the old system in order to do a subject search you had to click on a lookup button and then select through a couple of different list boxes in order to drill into the BNC subject tables. Then you would click another button and the text box back in bestseller creation screen would be populated with your selections. If they happened to be wrong or you wanted to refine them you had to go through the whole thing again. Weren’t lookups slow, tedious and confusing?

What you do now is simply click on the Advanced button and presto you see the subject tree. You expand and select the nodes on the tree to add to your criteria -and all of this is done right before your eyes on the very same page as your other bestseller report criteria. If you want to edit your choices, no more slow server calls or screen rendering, just remove a subject or select another. It couldn’t be easier.

Now back to the design problems and best practices. How do you best allow users to navigate between a basic search criteria and an advanced search criteria? What affordances do you create to signal the outcomes? What do you do when you close the advance criteria form? Do you clear the input? What if you left the box open with the criteria showing and when you closed it it went to the basic search? What if you loaded a new page for the advanced criteria?

Well, the solution that our design team came up with was I believe a very elegant one. On the bestseller report you see an Advanced button beside each field for entering your criteria. If you click on the Advanced button you see the Advanced criteria for that field. And as in the subject example above it may be you need to make a selection, or as in an author search you may have to type your text and then decide is it an AND or an OR query. Simple! Fast! and Elegant! Once you have entered or selected your criteria the Advanced box with your input stays open.

If you want to go back to the Basic search then you have to signal this by clicking a clear button and then you can click on basic. Why two steps? It brings us back to that crazy and exciting world of usability. You want the user to make a clear choice knowing the implications. In a lot of software you will get lots of pop-ups saying are you sure, Are you really really sure? You’ll lose everything are you sure sure?? And that is annoying -right? So why not just click clear and be done with it. No pop-ups needed -no hide and seek allowed.

Getting access to your Peer-to-Peer data just got easier, not to mention up to 48 hours earlier!

Not sure what we mean by Peer-to-Peer data? A peer relationship in BNC SalesData allows a retailer to permit direct subscriber access to the retailer’s point of sale numbers for a subscriber’s own titles.

The new version of BNC SalesData includes quick and easy links to sales data as soon as a peer retailer’s POS files are loaded for the week.This means you can see retailer links appearing in the Status Box on the home page as early as Tuesday morning.

To access Early Preview Data, simply click through the link in the Status Box on the SalesData home page. This automatically returns a Top 100 report for the retailer; if you want to see more rows, you can refine the report and increase the number of rows being returned.

Here are a couple of tips for getting the most out of the Early Preview feature:

• Pay attention to the ‘week ending’ dates on your reports.Once a retailer’s data is posted to BNC SalesData in preview, reports parameters for those retailers will default to their newest week of data. All Market reports will default to the previous week of data until all retailers have been loaded and weekly processing is complete.
• Consider asking additional retailers if you can access their peer data. Earlier availability of POS information from key outlets may be worth the additional investment.
• Build and save reports for your Peer-to-Peer retailers. Set your report to email automatically – automated reports are sent as soon as data is loaded.
• Accept that there may be occasional delays in Early Preview Data availability. Statutory holidays, technical issues, even staff illness can cause delays in individual retailer reporting times.

Have fun with your early data, and enjoy less stressful Thursday mornings!

Next week: Using the Create Report Form