Spring Quarter 2025
Theme: Black Digital Archives
29 May, Thursday — 10am PST [Zoom]
South Africa and ONIX Metadata:
Discoverability, accessibility and cross-border movement of books in Africa
ONIX metadata is the global standard for sharing rich, structured book information across the publishing supply chain, enabling books to be discovered, bought, and accessed more easily. Hear from speakers key to the South African publishing industry on how improving ONIX metadata adoption makes local titles, especially those in indigenous languages, more visible in digital catalogues, libraries, and bookstores worldwide.
Andrew Joseph is the Digital Publisher at Wits University Press based in Johannesburg. Andrew is closely involved with standards development and implementation especially for metadata, processes and workflows and in fostering collaborative projects around these. Andrew has served on several boards and committees including the OA Data Trust, Crossref, ORCiD, and the Association of University Presses. Andrew currently chairs the SA National Metadata User Group and is the Secretary on the Executive Committee of the Publishers Association of South Africa.
Melvin Kaabwe is the President of the South African Booksellers Association. He headed the Digital initiatives of Van Schaik Books Group for >15 years.
Melvin is active on the Publishers Association of South Africa Intellectual Property Anti-Piracy & Copyright Sub-committee. Melvin is currently the Project Lead for Puku's Metadata Project which aims to make more children's books in local languages discoverable to parents, librarians, teachers and ultimately children. (Read more about Puku below.)
Elitha van der Sandt is the head of a consultancy that has worked with the African Development Bank Group and UNESCO to provide expertise on the book industry in Africa. She was the CEO of the South African Book Development Council (SABDC) from 2002 to 2021.
The metadata initiative at the Puku Children’s Literature Foundation is vitally important for improving the discoverability of local indigenous language children's books. Research has shown that foundation phase learning in the mother tongue offers a pedagogical advantage over colonial languages in communicating first principles. In South Africa, there are nine official languages; however, shockingly, fewer than 2% of books are produced in the seven indigenous ones.
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The South African president recently announced support for Mother Tongue-Based Bilingual Education as a national priority in the State of the Nation Address. Yet, most books remain predominantly in colonial English, and to some extent, Afrikaans—a language evolved from Dutch settlers. The PIRLS benchmark reading study conducted by the University of Pretoria revealed a devastating decline in reading comprehension among Grade 4 learners across two consecutive iterations. As a result, South Africa is now widely regarded as being in the midst of a "reading crisis," with serious implications for both children and the nation’s future.
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It is clear that making "more books, better books" discoverable, accessible, and inclusive is a practical intervention to help reverse this alarming trend. The Pukupedia Portal addresses this by capturing book metadata from publishers directly in local languages and generating ONIX 3.0/3.1 metadata—an industry standard that plays a crucial role in the book value chain, enabling business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) communication.
PASA spearheads metadata initiatives to assist publishers and other partners in the supply chain. The South African National Metadata Group aims to provide information on updates to the ONIX and Thema standards, make relevant documentation and resources available, provide input to proposed international adjustments to the standards and policies, and represent PASA and other South African stakeholders’ interests at key metadata engagements.
