We’ve made a few improvements to BiblioShare Webform based on great feedback from publishers who use the tool. We’ve added new fields to give you broader access to the ONIX standard and – for you CataList users – to make some data easier to transfer to BNC CataList. We’ve also added new selection functionality to help you customize your exports.
The full details on how to use these new features can be found in our help documentation under What’s New in the BiblioShare Webform? Below is a short run-through of the major changes that are now available on the site.
New CataList-friendly ONIX Fields
Webform now has several new fields that correspond to fields available in BNC CataList. This should hopefully make life a little easier for folks who use Webform to generate data for display on CataList. For those who don’t use CataList, these fields will still come in handy because they are often requested by retailers.
Multiple Related Products
The Related Product composite in ONIX allows publishers to identify relationships between products and to expose the nature of these relationships to their downstream partners. Publishers can now identify up to three related products for a single record in Webform.
Expected Ship Date
Expected Ship Date (also known as “expected availability date” or “release date”) allows you to specify the date on which shipping from the supplier to retailers is expected to begin or resume. This data element also allows you to provide further instruction when a product is currently unavailable. For example, if your title has a Product Availability code of “31 - Out of Stock”, then you can provide fuller information about when this product will be back in stock by entering an Expected Ship Date.
Promotion Campaign
Your promotions efforts can impact initial buys of your books. Keep your downstream partners current about this information by including it in your ONIX feeds. The new Promotion Campaign field in Webform allows you to enter free text to describe your promotions efforts for a title.
Additional Subject Schemes
We’ve added support for two up-and-coming subject schemes: Thema and keywords.
Thema
Thema is a new global subject classification system for books that is especially suited for international trade. We recommend using it in addition to BISAC because it serves as a common language for when you’re dealing with partners whose markets don’t use BISAC. It is a flexible standard that provides more granular classification for every distinct national market. This granularity is especially useful in the Canadian context, as it provides a large variety of geographical and cultural qualifiers that can be used with main subject headings. Webform does not currently support the use of qualifiers but it will do so in the future.
For more information on Thema, please visit the EDItEUR website.
Keywords
Keywords are words or phrases that describe a book’s content and are especially geared to trading with web-based partners who could potentially use them to power search functionality on their sites. Keywords do not follow a structured scheme like BISAC or Thema, and so offer a large amount of customization when it comes to classifying your books. We recommend using keywords in addition to BISAC and Thema.
Keywords should not repeat titles, contributors, BISACs, or other terms that are already present in your metadata. Instead, they should be used to fill in the gaps. Separate your keywords with semicolons and keep your total character count in this Webform field to a maximum of 250 (including semicolons).
Select and Export Multiple Titles
You can now export selected multiple titles to XML or BNC BiblioShare. Simply use the handy checkboxes beside every title to select the necessary titles and export them using the Import/Export tab as per usual. The resulting export will be limited to the titles that you selected.
Let us know what you think of the new features and send us a request if we’ve missed a change you’d like to see.
