BookNet Canada Project Manager Tim Middleton recaps the highlights from 2023 for the BNC BiblioShare project, including the addition of two new team members, the exciting APIs the team is working on, usage stats, and more. Link to presentation recording and slides: https://bnctechforum.ca/sessions/new-from-booknet-canada-for-2024-bnc-biblioshare/ Presented by BookNet Canada on April 22, 2024, with support from the Department of Canadian Heritage.

1. Tim Middleton: Hi and welcome. Thanks for tuning in to this year's
BiblioShare talk at Tech Forum 2024. My name is Tim Middleton, and I am the
Product Manager for BNC BiblioShare here at BookNet. Before I get started,
BookNet Canada and its operations are remote and our colleagues contribute
their work from the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the
Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, the Wyandot, the Mi'kmaq, the Ojibwa of
Fort William First Nation, the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations, which
includes the Ojibwa, the Odawa, and the Potawatomie, and the Métis, the
original nations and peoples of the lands we now call Beeton, Brampton,
Guelph, Halifax, Thunder Bay, Toronto, Vaughan, and Windsor. We encourage
you to visit the native-land.ca website to learn more about the peoples whose
lands you are joining from today. Moreover, BookNet endorses the calls to
action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and supports
an ongoing shift from gatekeeping to space-making in the book industry.
The book industry has long been an industry of gatekeeping. Anyone who
works at any stage of the book supply chain carries a responsibility to serve
readers by publishing, promoting, and supplying works that represent the wide
extent of human experiences and identities in all that complicated
intersectionality. We at BookNet are committed to working with our partners in
the industry as we move towards a framework that supports space-making,
which ensures that marginalised creators and professionals all have the
opportunity to contribute, work, and lead. In spirit of that acknowledgement, I
confirm BookNet's and my own responsibility to mend the Sacred Hoop with
Canada's Indigenous peoples, to be an ally to all Black, Indigenous, and people
of colour, and to unite and work alongside one another.
If I had to sum up the year from the perspective of the supply chain, then I
would say it was like watching one of my favourite TV shows just as it gets
crazier and crazier. Perhaps "Breaking Bad Season 6: The Supply Chain" or
"The Wire: Following the Supply Chain." You can imagine the writers in the
writers' room pitching the ideas. First, we had Season 1: The Pandemic Season.
You can hear the writers in the backroom laughing saying, "No one will believe
this." Season 2: The Suez Canal Crisis. Again, laughter in the writers' room,
and then that huge thing gets stuck. And now in Season 3: The Apocalyptic
Season, War, Drought, and Catastrophe. Backroom writers are really pushing
the envelope here.

2. One thing on my mind at BookNet is how to survive all of these crazier and
crazier events happening in the supply chain. And one of the best ways to
survive the apocalypse, in my humble opinion, is to have the right people
around you. BookNet is an organisation that believes in having the right people
and getting work done. This brings me around in a roundabout way to talking
about one of our bigger new things for BiblioShare in 2023, and that is our two
new product coordinators. If you haven't met them already, then meet Stephanie
Small and Shuvanjan Karmaker. They both come to BookNet with a passion for
reading, metadata, and technology. For our BiblioShare team, that means a lot.
We are appreciating the ability to move with a little more agility on support and
projects, which leads us to the Golden Fleece of meaning. Some of the areas
that Stephanie and Shuvanjan have been working in are deepening their
understanding of the ONIX standard so that they can support our clients with
their ONIX needs. To date, the two of them have helped us carry forward
support for BiblioShare projects and users. For CataList especially, Shuvanjan
and Stephanie are bridging the two platforms in a more official capacity. That's
very helpful for both of our teams. Another huge task that Stephanie has taken
the lead on is helping migrate our 2.1 custom projects to 3.0. Considering there
is no support for additions to the ONIX 2.1 code list, the landscape is still very
much a 2.1 landscape in North America. But as we move further and further
away from 2.1, everyone needs to deal with their technical debt, including us.
These maps involve all of the custom solutions for extracting data that we have
provided to clients over the years. No small feat. Shuvanjan has been working
with our Webform platform, while more specifically he has been testing and
documenting our upcoming Webform upgrade. In the near future, we will be
replacing our current Webform with ONIXEDIT Cloud. This will be a
significant upgrade for our Webform users, and we're all looking forward to it.
There are a lot of other areas that the two new product coordinators have been
working in and all I can say is we do feel the immediate impact of their efforts
at BookNet. We look forward to you working with them and them supporting
you in all the ways their specific set of skills can help. They are so much better
to work with than an AI.
Before we get into BiblioShare numbers for 2023, I will mention two other new
things in the works for BiblioShare. These new things we hope will also support
you in your quest to be more agile in your projects by providing access to the
information that you need. The information we are making available will be
provided through our new APIs. The first is our Author and Title Search API.

3. Our goal here was to provide a service that can be used with keywords from
titles or contributor. This is a new kind of API for us since currently most of our
web services are ISBN-based. We want users to be able to send the request with
either title or contributor as the type followed by a keyword from either of those
fields.
Here's a sample of the output from a query. I've hidden the token. I was using
my token, but it's a sample of the output from a query using "Minett" as the
author keyword and nothing in the title field. And here's the same query, only
this time I've added in "House" for the title keyword along with "Minett." The
results are nicely reduced to a handful of titles. I should also mention our Bibli-
O-Matic plugin comes in handy here as well since the results in the view portal
of the browser will add the Bibli-O-Matic icon next to the ISBN so you can
quickly click to get more details about the title in question like when was it last
updated in BiblioShare, March 21st, 2024. So very much still a dynamic record
that is coming into BiblioShare. This API could work nicely implemented into a
search function on a website or some other place where you want to pull back a
handful or hundreds of titles.
And our other API we have worked on is equally exciting to us. It's our
Accessibility API for BiblioShare. So, we're still working on this API, but it
should be available very soon as part of our suite of web services. The API will
return a list in JSON format, and this is just a sample. JSON format. You'll get
the EAN, the title, the publisher, the pub date, and accessibility code
descriptions for digital product, which accessibility metadata is available in
ONIX. We plan to allow users to filter results using a publisher's name or a
specific code that they are curious about. We're pretty excited about this API.
We've seen accessibility become more and more urgent, more and more needed
in the industry, and we hope, by adding this discoverability tool, that we help in
our small way. We'll also mention that this API represents the coming together
of our new product coordinator and our new product since Stephanie Small
worked on the functional specifications for this API, a rite of passage in
BiblioShare land. So, look for the release of this API in the next month.
That is really about it for the significant new things in BiblioShare. We hope
you share our excitement and being able to bring better support, more agile
development, and more useful ways of distributing all of this marvellous
metadata in BiblioShare. And that is a perfect way to segue into BiblioShare by
the Numbers, where we look at, well, numbers. First up, the ONIX 2.1 data set.
In 2023, the BiblioShare ONIX 2.1 data set grew by about 290,000 records.

4. This is 62,000 more than what we received in 2022, but that was actually in
2022, we had 70,000 lower than what we received in 2021. So there's still some
back and forth going on in the 2.1 data set. Our 3.0 data set did not see the same
rate of growth as we saw in 2022. In 2022, we saw more than double the
number of records year over year get added. But in 2023, there was about a
90% drop in the number of 3.0 records that were processed. I suppose this is a
good place to remind you that BiblioShare treats 2.1 data and 3.0 data as
completely discrete data sets. We don't do anything crazy like trying to fit the
2.1 data into the 3.0 framework nor do we downgrade 3.0 data to the 2.1
framework. Although this means we are receiving what is basically duplicated
data, 3.0 is not backwards compatible. At some point, 2.1 data will be a thing of
the past, but until then, keep sending both your 2.1 and your 3.0 data. We really
appreciate it.
Now in this slide, we're looking at the daily average intake of data for both new
records as well as updated records in BiblioShare. So, everybody has to update
their bibliographic data and we record that. Bibliographic data is not static, at
least not until the thing it is describing is no longer available. So, here we can
see that the year 2023 kept pace with previous years. That's for 2.1 data.
Looking at 3.0 data set, we see we're down a bit over 2022, and the average
number of updated records has declined. So that's where we've seen the most
decline. But on the whole, this data set continues to grow. Hopefully next year
at this time, these numbers will be exponentially higher as there is less and less
technical debt out there around the 2.1 data set.
In 2023, all told, we created 65 new or newish accounts in BiblioShare. The
breakdown of publisher and supplier ONIX accounts show us we are still
adding more 2.1 accounts in 3.0, but in the year-over-year view, we added 40%
fewer 2.1 accounts this year while the number of 3.0 accounts added was on par
with last year. The story we are seeing here is the slowly ending of the life of
2.1 ONIX and the continuing growth of 3.0. This certainly should be sending
signals to all of our data end users out there. If you haven't worked out your 3.0
migration yet, better get on it.
What continues to amaze us on the BiblioShare side of things at BookNet is the
volume of consumption of our web services and use of Shopify plugin. We had
21 new accounts established for either using our web services or in order to
support their Shopify stores. And we continue to build the holdings in
BiblioShare of supporting materials. Here we see that we now have close to 3.8
million covers on hand and that was 9% growth in our cover images. Interior

5. images, which are clearly one of the most obvious supports for everything from
art books to children's books when consumers are making buying decisions,
grew by 15% in 2023 to reach almost 580,000 interior images. Author images
continue to trickle along, and our author images grew by 4% in 2023. And
here's a look at how the rest of the supporting materials database is growing.
The explosive growth of the first couple of years for the samples and excerpts
holdings has tapered off, but hopefully this is because we are just in a regular
workflow. A regular workflow now to deliver those as part of your book
records and so there's no great backlog to be uploaded. At least that is my
takeaway from looking at the numbers.
And so always interesting to see what kind of data and how much of it we are
continuously processing, but equally interesting is this question. Is the data
being used and who is using all of this data? Well, once again, our web services
were very, very busy. This 199 million number, 199 million plus, excludes any
of our in-house use of the API. So, any BookNet staff member who has a token
or any of our products that use our APIs, which is pretty, well, all of them, we
do use the exact same APIs as we make available to the public for Bibli-O-
Matic, CataList, coverage of SalesData, etc. So, we really see the value of the
data, but this nearly 200 million number is all outside of BookNet.
And here is a list of the active web services and what is being pulled. So,
obviously, ONIX is still very big. It's the biggie, but I like seeing the ImageInfo
Service growth there. That is, I think, a very meaningful, successful metric.
That means people are leveraging really the timestamp that we provide in this
service. I think it's mostly probably a timestamp. So, in the DateProcessed tag,
you can see whether there's a newer image available than the one that you
currently have. So, you don't have to go out and pull down the image and then
check it. Here you have the timestamp. You can see, is it newer than what you
have. So, people really seem to be leveraging this service now before they go
and do the work of downloading images.
And here we have our top 25 plus 1 users of BiblioShare web services. The cool
thing about this list is that it shows the flexibility of the services. These users in
this list are made up of solution providers like ReaderBound, in-house solutions
like Whitehots, Shopify users, publisher sites, distributor sites, retail sites, and
author sites. And of course, you may have noticed I left in the BookNet usage
in this list, so BookNet products are in this list. And this is why I pushed it out
to I pushed it out to the top 25 plus 1 since the 26th position, you can see
SalesData. And if you don't know, SalesData is using the cover image service

6. from BiblioShare. So, any coverage you see in there are coming from the
BiblioShare site.
And that was a quick tour through 2023 for BiblioShare. Our focus remains on
ONIX 3.0, data and migrating solutions and support to that data set, but we also
have a couple of other projects keeping us up at night. Keep your eye on this
space for a recap of your favourite supply chain series, "The Supply Chain."
What are they thinking up in that writer's room? Stay safe and thank you.