Metadata, also known as data about data, is a key element for effective functioning of the book market. It helps people find, identify and obtain a book. Quality metadata for books also facilitates communication between business partners and contributes to higher sales of a title. Different organizations abroad invest a lot of energy in researching and optimization of metadata, while in Slovenia this area is not very studied and clear. The goal of this master thesis is to research the situation of this field on Slovenian book market and compare it with foreign practices. For this purpose a survey has been made in July 2014, where two different research methods have been used. First an expert study on user interfaces of five organizations dealing with metadata for books was conducted. Using the guidelines provided by BISG in 2013, we checked a set and form of metadata that are available to users in our systems. To improve our understanding and to obtain information on the internal metadata, we also conducted interviews with people, who work with metadata for books at their workplace. The results show that Slovenian players in the book industry do not use single standard and schemas for creating and sharing metadata. Despite the opinion that unity would improve the condition in our book market, the interviewees are skeptical if such system would work. From the review of informational systems I also noted that organizations, when building their schemes, are inspired by the successful systems of foreign book markets. This results in a good metadata element set.
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