BITS for Government Information?

Abstract

Scholars Portal, a service of the Ontario Council of University Libraries, provides multiple levels of access and preservation to scholarly packages of Ebooks. We have created an in-house custom modification of the Book Interchange Tag Suite (BITS, a sister vocabulary to the Journal Article Tag Suite, JATS) to describe EBooks. A recent strategic decision to host government information has posed several challenges with our BITS modification and required a new in-house schema to accommodate specific metadata requirements posed by the somehow different nature of govinfo content. We’ll look at some of these challenges, then examine ways BITS can accommodate metadata that isn’t necessarily standard Ebook metadata.