1995 saw the first feature-length film created entirely in computer-generated graphics and astronomers discovered the first distant star to have an orbiting planet. Microsoft launched Windows 95, revolutionising personal computing. And BDS was founded.
As events go, the startup of a small company based in Dumfries, south-west Scotland, may seem insignificant but over the next 30 years it was to change every public library in the UK and Ireland, the British Library, and academic and research libraries across the country. It also established a model methodology for the efficient and rapid production of library-quality metadata that outperforms competitors internationally. That has been key to the success of BDS.
In the Beginning
Lesley Whyte and Eric Green met while both working in library book supply, at T.C. Farries & Co Limited, in Dumfries, Scotland. Lesley had previously had a successful career in university libraries including Glasgow University, University of London, King’s College London and Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs in the United States. However, she was drawn to the business world, moving into library bookselling. Her skills in library automation and knowledge of cataloguing and cataloguing standards were important in providing information about new and published books to the customers of Farries, where she became a member of the senior management team.
Eric had recently qualified in IT and worked with Lesley to streamline the Farries operation. Both Lesley and Eric saw the revolution taking place in digitisation and communication via a relatively new linked system of connections called the internet. These could change the way libraries received and integrated metadata into their library systems.
Dawn of a Revolution
“Metadata is a broad word meaning data about data. It sounds specialised but it boils down, for BDS, to the description of books in machine readable formats created to agreed standards,” says Lesley. “It was the replacement for the old card system of cataloguing.
“Those cards, which some readers may remember, were metadata, a description of the book and its place in the library. Digitisation expanded the possibilities of the catalogue card. A digital record on a book can carry a lot more information. It can store on a hard drive, or, in the early days, a CD-Rom, and today in the Cloud. It aids resource discovery and access and, most importantly, it can be shared. One digital item of metadata is of use to libraries worldwide, and it can travel at the speed of light.
“In the old system, every library needed a card for every item on its shelves. This record needed created again and again for every library. What Eric and I saw was the future: create the record once and distribute it electronically. The age of deduplication had arrived. And so we founded BDS.”
A Success Story
This simple principle has changed the way libraries work and made BDS a success story.
Of course, any success story needs talent to make it happen. Alongside the insight into library operations and cataloguing from Lesley and the coding and delivery expertise of Eric, the new entrepreneurs called on the talents of other bookselling and library professionals, several of whom are still working with BDS 30 years later.
Jenny Wright, Chief Metadata Officer, is in the staff photo taken in the new BDS offices soon after the company was set up (above, front row, extreme right). A recognised expert in the application of standards in cataloguing, Jenny now sits on numerous international committees, chairs the Bibliographic Conceptual Models Review Group and frequently gives papers at international conferences such as the annual IFLA’s World Library and Information Congress.
“Standards support interoperability, and give libraries the foundation of consistency and principle-based bibliographic data. The accurate application of cataloguing standards is at the heart of everything BDS does,” says Jenny. “It often seems like a world full of acronyms and obscure topics of conversation but it serves the functions of access and discovery. All our cataloguers undergo lengthy training and senior colleagues contribute to the development of standards internationally. I think this is why BDS excels and why BDS metadata is so reliable and flexible when used.”
Seal of Approval
Soon after it began trading, BDS won the contract to supply metadata to the British Library as part of the Cataloguing in Publication (CIP) programme. BDS retains the contract to this day.
“This was a significant seal of approval,” says Lesley. “We were supplying metadata on every publication to appear in print in the UK to the British Library. This meant that we were responsible for what appeared in the British National Bibliography. BDS was identifying the published output of the UK.
“Alongside our Cataloguing team, we had a Publisher Liaison team working closely with all the publishers in the UK. It ensured the Brirish Library received metadata for all available publications.”
The Arrival of ONIX
In those early days, there were no standards in the publishing sector to transmit data electronically. The BDS team had to key every single character. But at the turn of the last century, the introduction of ONIX, a publishing standard for the exchange of metadata, meant BDS could become much more focused on aggregation, subject analysis and making the metadata suitable for its various client bases.
Today, the UK publishes around 250,000 books each year. BDS catalogues every book.
Grow and Prosper
Alongside technological innovation, new economic models helped the company grow and prosper.
The cost of the creation of one record had to be shared across all the institutions that use it. In the old system, every library service had cataloguers duplicating records time and time over, each for their respective institutions. The arrival of BDS allowed libraries to subscribe for a fraction of the costs associated with in-house metadata creation. They could also rely on the excellence of the product to produce a better catalogue than was possible internally and importantly, consistent standards meant interoperability between libraries.
The Public Library Licence and BDSLive
BDS created the Public Library Licence. It allowed library services to spread the cost of record creation among all licence subscribers. Licence fees are calculated according to the size of scale of operation of the library authority. BDS could then fund the creation of the hundreds of thousands of records needed each year.
“Soon after I joined BDS in 2006, every library service in the UK was using BDS services via the Public Library Licence,” recalls Sarah Armitage, Director of Library Sales. “I remember in my early days working for the company, I promoted a new product, BDSLive. This was our first web interface product. Users could access the whole of the BDS database.
“BDSLive made the huge metadata store built by BDS over the previous 11 years a visible, interactive reality. Libraries found it very useful. It enabled stock selection and resource discovery. This, in turn, led to the public facing online catalogue, BDSLite. Both products are still heavily used to this day.”
As Sarah travelled up and down the country, she worked with libraries, consortia and schools’ library suppliers as well as the major library systems suppliers and book suppliers to ensure the seamless delivery of BDS metadata into diverse systems.
“It has been an adventure and a pleasure,” says Sarah. “Knowing you are representing a quality service and helping libraries around the country, especially in times of cuts and austerity, to work for their communities, is very rewarding.”
Software By Design
Today BDS employs over 60 staff, split between Cataloguers, Publisher Liaison, Sales, Finance and IT Development and Support.
“Since the beginning, BDS has developed the software used to carry out our cataloguing in-house,” says Eric Green, Managing Director of the Digital Division. “This allows us to be much more responsive to customer needs and to address any issues that arise swiftly.
“One of the hallmarks of BDS is quick and friendly customer service. This can only be achieved if we are not reliant on third-party providers. At BDS we understand our systems. We wrote them. We manage them.
“This means we have our cutomers trust and the feedback we receive certainly supports this.”
Diversification
As BDS grew, it diversified. Starting as a purely library-focused books business, it quickly identified the opportunity to include metadata on film within its database.
“Libraries at that time often had large stocks of film on DVD. These, too, needed cataloguing,” says Eric.
A film database, Parafax, was identified and purchased and then integrated into the BDS offering. The rapidly improving speeds available over the internet also allowed for the transmission of media such as trailers and clips. Incorporated into a library’s public-facing software via the inclusion of widgets, these could stream directly to the customer.
“The important thing was to not burden the customers’ systems with huge amounts of digital content,” says Eric. “So we developed the means to transfer the often large video and graphics files directly from our servers. When the user in the library requested a trailer through the library’s management system software, BDS streamed it seamlessly.”
A similar model was developed for music metadata and for video games metadata both of which were integrated into the BDS database as the company grew.
Extended Content is Vital
Extended content became more important as the layperson had freer access to library catalogues and those catalogues went online.
“Once the preserve of library professionals, the public were now undertaking their own research and searching in order to access material,” says Lesley. “They would often identify an item by its book cover, or check that they were borrowing the film they wanted by viewing the trailer. Students might look through a table of contents in order to check that the information they wanted was in the book that they were about to borrow. They could do all this from the library computer terminal or even from their own home.”
BDS included more and more extended content to its core bibliographic record. As the internet gets ever faster and data becomes linked across the globe, the availability of extended content grows too. Once a user has a BDS record, a journey through related and linked content is at their fingertips. Trailers, previews, author biographies, wikis, scans, cover art, YouTube videos, GoodReads reviews, live gaming vids – the metadata becomes the key to open doors onto discovery.
Accuracy and Reliability
“Of course, at the heart of this, is an accurate and reliable record, created by trained professionals who adhere to standards,” reiterates Lesley. “If you get it wrong at the outset, if the name authority is wrong, if a classification is misapplied, the domino effect tumbles into a blind alley.
“I can say with some assurance that today good metadata is more important than it has ever been. It opens avenues to wonderful discovery if correct. It threatens cliff edges that fall away into chaotic darkness if it is poor.”
A Worldwide Catalogue
As the barriers between the library and High Street blurred and as the world of knowledge and access to it democratised because of the explosion of the internet, so custom came to BDS from outside the library sector.
BDS already supplied every library book supplier in the UK, now bookshops became interested. Retailers and e-tailers were selling home entertainment products. In the music sector, there was a surprising development in the revival of vinyl, as Director of Sales, Barry Smith, recounts.
“Just when everything was moving over to streaming, I received an enquiry from a vinyl record sales outlet in London. Vinyl was having a boom revival and BDS had the catalogue records that shops needed to order and manage stock.”
It was proof that a record well created and accurate had flexibility built into it.
“The same was true of DVD,” continues Barry. “People wanted physical as well as digital and BDS had the catalogue records to help them manage their stock and, through our extended content, to help them promote it as well.”
Offering Websites
BDS identitifed a new angle on the use of metadata via the integration of metadata into customer facing websites. This meant that publishers could present their output and list it online to achieve direct sales. The offering of website design and build with BDS metadata give publishers a one-stop shop in the market place.
“The expansion into the provision of websites for the book trade made sense,” says Eric. “We have our web team branded under BDSDigital, skilled in coding and the delivery of metadata into systems, and we have the metadata and extended content, including such things as price and availability.
“For the publisher, all they have to do is discuss look and feel, what elements they want to include, such as currency conversion, links to distributers, author video, all of which we can incorporate.
“We have some big customers but our website service is also ideally suited to indie publishers and even self-published authors. This is certainly a growth sector.”
Metadata for Universities
For many years, a discussion was ongoing within government bodies, academic institutions and the book trade about the provision of metadata for content procured in universities.
Metadata come to universities from multiple sources. It was often of a poor standard. When created by institutions it had different aims and objectives to those institutions that were now ingesting it. This cost time and it cost a great deal of money. And with the increased reliance on digital content and Open Access material, it meant that some items were, effectively, lost.
“At BDS we knew we had a solution,” says Lesley. “We had the metadata for the content, and identifiers distinguished between physical and digital products. If records were supplied from a single, deduplicated source such as BDS, then the records would meet all standards. This, in turn, means that the records are suitable for sharing within institutions.
“As it stood, university libraries not only suffered duplication of effort, they also had duplication of duplication. This is why we introduced what was initially called the Academic Library Licence and has since evolved into UniCat.”
UniCat
UniCat aims to simplify the mire of metadata provision to university libraries by offering a single source for all universities for all their core bibliographic material.
Irrespective of source of content, BDS can provide a record that meets the requirements of the library. It is a library-quality, consistently catalogued record that flows seamlessly into the library system requiring no intervention by the university. The item can go straight to the campus that wants it, reducing the need for multiple handling and inspections.
“It’s a beautifully simple system,” says Heather Sherman, Director of Academic Library Operations at BDS. “It improves and simplifies the whole book supply chain to university libraries and fits in with existing workflows. It is automated and saves time and money.”
As universities recover from the pandemic, more and more are adopting UniCat for their metadata supply. It is now in use from Falmouth to Northumbria and includes institutions such as Imperial College London, Liverpool University and University of the Arts among its users. Specialist libraries such as the House of Lords have also embraced the concept.
“In the coming years, as universities across the country need to make economies and streamline operations as well as offer a first-class service to students, I am sure UniCat will become the service of choice for the majority of academic institutions in the UK and Ireland,” concludes Heather.
A Bright Future
BDS is still growing. It has a bright future built upon the firm foundations of providing an excellent product and first-class customer service. The first 30 years have seen steady growth and the future holds more.
“Metadata is the oil in the engine that runs the internet,” says Lesley. “As the internet grows, the metadata it uses needs to get better and better. BDS is ideally positioned to carry on the task of keeping the internet running in relation to libraries and the book trade.”
When BDS started, bibliographic metadata was the distant planet orbiting the physical book; today metadata is our guiding star and we rely on it to find our way around the globe.