From the course: Learning Metadata for Book Publishing
Contributors
- [Narrator] Every title has at least one contributor. In the majority of cases, the main contributor is an author, however, contributors can also include editors, illustrators, artists, corporations, and other people involved in the production of the book. It is important that you include the names of the contributors to your title in your metadata. The name you give to a contributor is the name that will show up on the retailer websites. So you should carefully consider the names that you put into your metadata. Don't make the mistake of including the actual name of an author when the author wants to be known by a pseudonym. In ONIX, as with the title of the book, you should also include the contributor information in your ONIX file. You include the contributor information in the contributor composite. Within the contributor section, you define information about who the contributor is, what role they play, and other information about them that you want people to know. In this example, we're providing information about John Avery Lomax. We give John Avery Lomax's name. We also provide the inverted version of his name for alphabetization, and give titles or suffixes that apply to him. In addition, we can also provide dates when we was born or died, or other things that happened to him during his lifetime. We can include a biographical note, which in this case is very long and is written in HTML. And as I scroll down, you can also see that we can provide website information, including his website, social media links or things like that, contributor places, for instance, where he was born or died, or cities that he lived in during his life. While you do have to provide the role of each contributor in your ONIX file, retailers often don't list the distinction between author, illustrator, and other roles, and some just don't list anyone except authors. What name you use can be important too. Let's look at an example of how the author's name affects the searching on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. This is an example on how authors can be tracked and included in a metadata management application. Retailers handle the inclusion of the degree references in different ways, as we see here. The publisher has included the degree reference in their metadata management application and that information is being sent out to their trading partners in their ONIX file. When we look at this title on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, we find that Amazon includes the suffix but Barnes and Noble does not. This can lead to some potential issues. Look what happens when we click on the author's name, which is a link on the Amazon title information page. Because Amazon includes the Ph.D in the name, the search only reveals books that include that suffix. In this case, just this one book. compare that to what happens when we do the same thing on Barnes and Noble. Now we see a larger list of books. This is because the same author published different books with different publishers and the other publishers did not include her degree notation in their metadata. Maybe you want it this way but just be aware that this is a potential issue. If you search for the author name without the suffix on Amazon, you get the longer list of books from this author as well. So you need to be careful about how you include contributor information in your data.
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