How to Build a Publishers' Catalogue · Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

"Our previous blogpost about computational publishing outlined the technical model that we are using to create computational books that combine text with Python code to pull in datasets and digital media objects. This blogpost discusses a particular use case for this computational publishing model and how we have designed a working prototype of a publishers’ catalogue for ScholarLed. ScholarLed is a publishing consortium of scholar-led open access book presses and has been a key partner in the COPIM project. During COPIM’s computational publishing pilot project, we have worked closely with ScholarLed (and Open Book Publishers in particular) to get the perspective of a publishing press and to ensure that our outputs can be fit into a traditional publishing workflow. As a consortium of six open access presses, ScholarLed had a use case for a publishers’ catalogue that would present all their recent book publications in one catalogue. This would involve collecting bibliographic metadata from all of the presses, collating and arranging it, and then publishing the list of published books in a single publication. Fortunately all the presses have included the metadata for their monograph publications in Thoth, the open metadata management and dissemination platform that has been produced as another COPIM output. This made it possible to easily conceive of a catalogue published as both a website and a PDF that pulls in and arranges the bibliographic metadata automatically and that can be updated on a regular basis without manual intervention...."