What’s the recommended way to denote a collection?

[jenstroeger]

Suppose I have a book “The Eye of the World” which belongs to the collection “The Wheel of Time”. How would I express the collection/series in a single book’s metadata, perhaps similar to the ONIX codelist 148?

The <dc:type> doesn’t provide a “collection” or some such in its type registry. If it did, I’d probably refine it like so:

<dc:title>The Eye of the World</dc:title>
<dc:type id="dc-type">Collection</dc:type>
<meta refines="#dc-type" property="collection-type" scheme="onix:codelist148">10</meta>
<meta refines="#dc-type" property="???">The Wheel of Time</meta>

It looks like #326 is a relevant discussion and two years old, though it doesn’t seem to come to a definite conclusion other than @jcsalomon’s recommendation?

[llemeurfr]

Here is in practice what Readium developers decided to map (from EPUB 2 and EPUB 3 to the internal Readium WP Manifest).

https://readium.org/architecture/streamer/parser/metadata.html#collections-and-series

This is implemented in the Readium Desktop (-> Thorium Reader) and Readium Mobile toolkits

[jenstroeger]

Thank you, @llemeurfr! So, based on the information you linked to the example would have to be:

<dc:title>The Eye of the World</dc:title>
<dc:type id="dc-type">Collection</dc:type>
<meta refines="#dc-type" property="collection-type">series</meta>  <!-- Or: "collection" -->
<meta refines="#dc-type" property="belongs-to-collection">The Wheel of Time</meta>
<meta refines="#dc-type" property="file-as">Wheel of Time, The</meta>
<meta refines="#dc-type" property="dcterms:identifier">urn:isbn:1234567890</meta>  <!-- Duplicate of the <dc:identifier> element? -->
<meta refines="#dc-type" property="group-position">Book 1</meta>  <!-- Is this a free text value? -->

Is this correct?

[JayPanoz]

@jenstroeger The doc was written following the examples in the EPUB Packages 3.2 spec.

So as an example:

<metadata>
    …
    <meta property="belongs-to-collection" id="c01">
        The Lord of the Rings
    </meta>
    <meta refines="#c01" property="collection-type">set</meta>
    <meta refines="#c01" property="group-position">2</meta>
    …
</metadata>

I’m not sure why you have a dc:type but that will make the parsing fail because refines don’t apply to the meta itself.

Notes:

• collection-type can be series or set (and not collection, which is internal mapping to RWPM);
• group-position is a number which can be decimal-separated.

[jenstroeger]

Thank you @llemeurfr and @JayPanoz, figured it out and it’s all working now 👍