Every so often we like to let you know how things are going in BiblioShare land, the land where all metadata can live happily, merging with their fellow ONIX friends, covers, interiors — you know, the whole entourage of the book world.
How can I say this without sounding too nerdy? It's been awe inspiring to watch the BiblioShare database fill and our services spread out over the nation. Ok, that does sound nerdy, but it’s true! Since 2010, the BiblioShare dataset has continuously grown and contributed to numerous projects in the industry. The collected data has allowed us to do wonderful research like the insights included in Noah Genner's blog post about the effect COVID-19 has had on publishers' publishing schedules.
We’ve also been able to understand the preparedness of Canada's literary captains to generate ONIX 3.0 records and feeds, a change that's taking place across the globe and impacting every book market.
And our numbers also have a story of their own:
Since our last post in 2017, BiblioShare has added 1,313,480 distinct records to its dataset. We’re now at 3,887,853 records! That means the dataset has grown by approximately 38% over two years. And of those 1.3 million records that got added to BiblioShare, approximately 15% of them were sent as ONIX 3.0. Not bad, but still a long way to go before the 3.0 data can faithfully replace any 2.1 data that is being used in end user applications like BNC CataList (although we’re annotating the data that is used in CataList with some data from 3.0 records).
But hopefully, most of you reading this know that BiblioShare provides more than just ONIX data. If you didn’t know this, well, you do now. BiblioShare continues to add data that sits outside of ONIX but is practically just as vital in supporting your texts as the ONIX metadata itself.
Below you see that supporting materials like covers and excerpts continue to grow at a reasonable rate:
Cover images: 2,860,584
Interior images: 278,285
Excerpts: 16,793
Author images: 8,883
Back cover Images: 7,317
Samples: 1,320
Reading group guides: 265
Teachers guides: 1110
Tables of contents: 100
And finally, what purpose would a database filled with all of this goodness have if organizations or individuals couldn't access the data and use it in ecommerce or other applications? Well, we have services that can give you access to all of this — in most cases for free! (In other cases a customized extract is required, which we are more than happy to comply with — for a fee!)
In 2019 our web services were kept pretty busy with close to 66 million requests for data. This number doesn’t include any of our own software platform usage (BNC SalesData, BNC CataList) which also employs our web services. But rest assured we use BiblioShare data quite a bit! You can read all about the different services here.
So certainly value will continue to pour in and out of BiblioShare in 2020. There are a lot of different ways to leverage this data and there’s also a lot of interesting research to be done. If you have an idea about something, why not let us know? At any rate, hopefully, when next I write about the BNC BiblioShare metrics I’ll be congratulating you all and saying: "Hey, you did it! ONIX 3.0 data is now more available than 2.1". This is our dream. Hopefully, it's yours too — fingers crossed!
The format preferences of Canadian buyers, borrowers, and readers.