BIC's operational board met on Monday and afterwards its chair, Jonathan Nowell, generously hosted a small reception for the board and other trade luminaries. Quite coincidentally I remembered that it was twenty years almost to the day since BIC had been established; so it became a birthday party too.
I chose that as the theme of a short speech I gave: that BIC had achieved much in its history but that the book world was changing so much and so fast that in many ways we faced the same potential challenges now to standards-driven stability that we did twenty years ago.
Anyway this is what (more or less) I said:
'Since 1991, BIC has achieved a quite extraordinary profile both in the UK and internationally, thanks largely to the vision and perseverance in its early days of my predecessor Brian Green.
'As a result, we have for our core product – the book - a sophisticated supply chain, almost all of it underpinned by a swathe of BIC standards for EDI, barcoding, identifiers, product information, returns processing and so on, and which simply wouldn't function without them.
'Now, however, although BIC will continue to maintain those standards as long as there is a need to do so, we are confronted by an industry in a dramatic transition to new models, which currently operate largely without standards - certainly book trade ones.
'There may never be local or specific book trade standards again. But does that mean there is no role for BIC? Absolutely not: industry collaboration and standards are essential in the long run if the industry is going to prosper – even survive - in the new world. It is vital that the industry works to re-establish its grounding in standards – just as happened in the 90s – to cope with the bewildering complexity of the supply chains of the future.
'We all know that global standards are the inevitable necessity in the digital arena. But local needs and local implementations create the momentum for standards, and BIC’s status as a community of interested individuals and organisations gives us a huge advantage in the quest for greater supply chain stability.
'I want to mention just a few things that BIC is doing or plans to do.
'I am tremendously proud of the recent achievements of the BIC/CILIP RFID in Libraries Group, which has had an influence far beyond its original remit in fostering standardisation in the area of library RFID; and now is rewriting the way RFID systems and library management systems interoperate. This is hugely important work for that sector and has given the group international clout and respect. We are very grateful to its chair, Martin Palmer, and the consultants who work alongside the group for their part in this success story.
'We want to see standardised sales reporting of digital content adopted universally in the UK trade. At present this crucial bit of the digital jigsaw is a mess. The tools to clean it up exist already and this is exactly the kind of supply chain nightmare which we believe we can resolve by promoting those standards and the best practice that goes along with them.
'There is a huge task to be done on metadata. The cosy world of metadata, based on simple processes and identifiers, is irretrievably gone. We need to move fast to prevent complete anarchy moving in to take its place.
'We want to start the process of establishing a global multilingual subject classification scheme, appropriate to digital search and discovery as well as more traditional purposes. The parallel existence of two influential schemes in North America and in Europe is no longer a sustainable model; and we and our colleagues in the US must address it fast.
'We need to engage with the rights community in the communication of rights, contracts, licences and royalties. As rights are the pillars which support the digital publishing edifice, efficient communication of them is going to be as important as the transmission of metadata was ten years ago.
'To conclude, then, we absolutely need to promote standards in the future as we did in the past, and we need the support of the whole industry to do so. Our standards are open and free, but ‘free’ doesn’t mean they come without cost. We therefore beg those organisations which are not in membership but who use our standards to show in a tangible way their commitment to the overwhelming importance of stabilising the supply chain once again as we move through these disruptive times.
'So many thanks to Jonathan Nowell for hosting this reception and to Nielsen for sponsoring it; and to our sponsoring associations and institutions (PA, BA, British Library and CILIP); our committee chairs, consultants and members. The toast is to BIC.'
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