Blog

This blog post is from Lettie Conrad and Michelle Urberg, cross-posted from the The Scholarly Kitchen. As sponsors of this project, we at Crossref are excited to see this work shared out. The scholarly publishing community talks a LOT about metadata and the need for high-quality, interoperable, and machine-readable descriptors of the content we disseminate. However, as we’ve reflected on previously in the Kitchen, despite well-established information standards (e.g., persistent identifiers), our industry lacks a shared framework to measure the value and impact of the metadata we produce.

Best practices seem to be having a moment. In the ten years since the Books Advisory Group first created a best practice guide for books, the community beyond Crossref has developed or updated at least 17 best practice resources, as collected here by the Metadata 2020 initiative. (Full disclosure: I co-chair its Best Practices group.)

We’re reviving the Books Interest Group, and inviting new members! After a hiatus, Crossref’s Books Interest Group is back. We’re excited to announce that Emily Ayubi of the American Psychological Association has agreed to chair the group. In reviving the group, our intention is to create opportunities to talk about issues that are important to scholarly book publishers. For example, we hope to explore whether it is time to revise the Crossref best practices for depositing, versioning, and linking book content.