Here in the UK - but also in a surprising number of other countries around the world, including Australia and soon Spain - BIC's standard subject categories are an entrenched part of the book trade scene. They are one of our most successful endeavours, being used in all sorts of ways by retailers both terrestrial and online.
In North America, though, they have a parallel - but very different - scheme called BISAC. Academic publishers have for years known that they had to use both - or map from one to the other - in order to sell product internationally; but with the growth of online retailers and content aggregators the problem has become one for trade publishers too.
Both BIC and the Book Industry Study Group (our US opposite numbers who manage the BISAC scheme) agree that a single scheme should be our objective, that local schemes have no place in a global information environment; but equally we accept that this will be a long and substantial task - even once we have agreed what it should look like.
Our advice to publishers is therefore to assign both BIC and BISAC codes to all titles as a matter of routine and include both in the product information they put out. We know, however, that we can't persuade publishers to do this unless the tools are available for them to do so quickly and easily.
We are working with BISG to endorse official mappings between the two schemes and to enable the BIC assignment tool which appears on our web site (and is widely used by Nielsen's PubWeb users as well as other publishers) also to display BISAC subject categories. We hope this work will come to fruition within the next month or two. In the meantime Howard Willows of Nielsen, who is the chief begetter and editor of the BIC scheme has produced an overview of the history, scope, rationale and benefits of the BIC scheme; and you can see it here.
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