Generating Proprietary IDs

If your organization does not have an internal content management system (CMS) or does not use an accounting application to manage product data, then you will most likely not have proprietary IDs for your data. If this is the case, then you will need to generate proprietary IDs on your own.

Product Data

I recommend the following method for the proprietary ID of the product data:

Set the proprietary_id column to the default/primary ISBN

For example, if your organization publishes primarily (or only) reinforced library binding books, use the reinforced library ISBN as the proprietary ID for each product row in the “products” ingestion template.

Product Format Data

I recommend the following method for the proprietary ID of the product format data (NB: if your organization assigns unique ISBNs to all formats then you do not need to populate the proprietary_id column of the “product_formats” ingestion template):

Set the proprietary_id column to the default/primary ISBN plus a unique identifier for the format

For example, if your organization publishes primarily reinforced library binding books:

• Use the reinforced library ISBN plus “PBK” as the proprietary ID for each paperback product format row in the “product_formats” ingestion template;

• Use the reinforced library ISBN plus “PDF” as the proprietary ID for each PDF product format row in the “product_formats” ingestion template;

• Use the reinforced library ISBN plus “EPB” as the proprietary ID for each ePub product format row in the “product_formats” ingestion template;

• Etc…

There is nothing special about the suffixes that I am adding to the original ISBN. I recommend letters that abbreviate the format because on seeing the proprietary ID you can decipher certain information about the record it’s assigned to.

You could use numbers instead of letters and skip the repeating the original ISBN entirely but then you lose these insights.