JISC

The recent, rapid growth in e-books has spawned  the JISC e-Books working group to commission a series of studies examining the potential of e-books in higher/further education and the related barriers to take-up. 

One of the barriers identified was the lack of standardised e-book catalogue records and the lack of interoperability between different e-book metadata records.  In an ideal world it should be easy to catalogue e-books and then reuse the metadata in other user environments, e.g. in a virtual learning environment (VLE).  This is difficult if publishers and libraries use different metadata standards and the resulting records are not interoperable.  

This project (TIME) set out to develop a solution to this interoperability problem.  Rightscom, EPICentre, and Book Industry Communication (BIC) collaborated to develop a testbed ‘transformation engine’.  The engine transforms e-book metadata from a variety of formats into a highly granular and meaningful generic format.  Once in the generic format, it can then be output into the same range of formats.  Input/output formats for the project included ONIX for Books, Dublin Core, MARC, and IEEE LOM.  So if the user has e-book metadata in ONIX format, these records could be transformed into MARC for a library catalogue or IEEE LOM for a VLE. 

The testbed is based on Rightscom’s Core Ontologyx Architecture, an ontology based methodology to support syntactic and semantic mapping between different metadata schemas.  It is designed so it can be expanded to include any number of input and output formats.  During the project 1,900 input records from four publishers were transformed and the resulting output records evaluated.  An OAI-PMH interface was also developed to allow harvesting from the testbed.  At this point, it’s only a testbed, and more work would be needed to develop it into a fully functional system.

Report available electronically only. Read the final report below.