CSV & Metadata management

Requesting metadata

When a publisher transfers titles, they need to send both the document files, and the metadata for those titles. To do this, they will fill out the metadata spreadsheet that you sent them upon registration. This asks them to provide relevant information about their titles to enhance their discoverability, and help to sell these titles to end-users/customers.

It is most important that they do not leave the following fields blank:

1. Title
2. Author
3. ISBN
4. Date of Publication
5. License fee

For some publishers who have very large lists, this method might not be practical. In that case they might choose to send you a feed of metadata which they have exported from ONIX, or which filters through distributors like CoreSource. If this is the case, you might need to scrub the metadata to get it into the format we require.

Writing CSV

We use a CSV to upload titles enmasse. To create one:

Open a new spreadsheet and add the following heading to it in this order: COPYRIGHT_STATUS; IDENTIFIER; IDENTIFIER_TYPE; PUBLISHER; TITLE; SUBTITLE; ALTERNATIVE_TITLE; PRIMARY_CREATORS; SECONDARY_CREATORS; EDITION; PRIMARY_LANGUAGES; SECONDARY_LANGUAGES; SUBJECT_AREA; PUBLICATION_DATE; EMBARGO_DATE; STARTING_RIGHTS_FEE; SHORT_DESCRIPTION; LONG_DESCRIPTION; PARENT_ISBN; ALTERNATE_ISBN; AUDIENCE; ONE_UP_PDF_FILENAME; TWO_UP_PDF_FILENAME; A5_FILENAME; JACKET_IMAGE_NAME; TERRITORY; TAGS; URL; URL_CALL_TO_ACTION; SUPPORTS_ADS; SAMPLE_PAGE_RANGE; LICENCE_STATEMENT.

Create an entry for each book you are going to upload and fill in all of the relevant information from the received metadata spreadsheet.

Save the the spreadsheet as .csv and naming as product_date.

Content master

The content master is a shared Google spreadsheet which acts as a record of content on the Paperight website, and the production status and priority of that content. Importantly, it also includes metadata for each content item, as well as other important information such as licence fees and distribution territories. It is perhaps the most valuable document we work with.

Once an upload is complete, it is important that you put all of the relevant metadata about the titles in that upload on to the content master.