On 2:59 PM, Henri-Damien LAURENT wrote:
> But I have some questions about CIP block.
> http://www.loc.gov/publish/cip/ <http://www.loc.gov/publish/cip/faqs/>
> In my opinion, this block is useful for printed books in order to shelve
> it correctly, and get a LCCN.

Right.  More precisely, it provides the information that a library needs 
to create a catalog record for the item, including assigning a LCCN.  It 
could be useful for e-books as well since libraries often add catalog 
records for e-books to their catalog; these catalog records are just 
like records for print books except that they don't usually have a LCCN, 
Dewey number, or other classification code.

> But who is deciding the LCC or Dewey Classification code ? Should it be
> the publisher's initiative ? Is there a way to get those information
> automatically ?

For books published in the US except for those categories listed at 
http://www.loc.gov/publish/cip/about/ineligible.html , the Library of 
Congress creates all of the CIP data based on information provided 
before publication by the publisher.  It's not up to the publisher to 
suggest these.  If you want to find classification data for existing 
titles (as above, mostly only those published in print), you could query 
the Library of Congress catalog or WorldCat.

The British Library provides similar data similar to CIP for titles 
published in the UK, and I imagine other national libraries do similar 
things for titles published in that country.

> And since it appears to me that CIP block could be processed from
> marcxml information, should that block be stored as such, or pieces of
> information collected as one is editing the e-book. Should we leave it
> up to the publisher to create the CIP block just like printed book, when
> it can't get through the process of having a partnership with Library of
> Congress or is there some regular and quick way to get those information ?
>
> Any hint librarians ?

I'm a bit confused since when you first wrote to this list you said you 
wanted to extract metadata from an EPUB in order to create a MARC21 
record for an ILS.  Now it sounds like you want to create an EPUB file 
from a MARC record.

Anyway, in print editions, CIP data is typically printed on the title 
page verso.  Publishers of e-books sometimes include front matter in the 
content (not just metadata) of the e-book file.  Others may decide to 
omit it so that users don't have to flip through it when opening a new 
e-book file.

You are right that you could in theory take a catalog record and 
reconstruct CIP data for the title based on it.  If you wanted to this 
and want the CIP data to match exactly what was published, the most 
reliable thing to do is to use the Library of Congress catalog record as 
the source.  There are a few reasons why:

1) Other libraries sometimes change the call number and/or subject 
headings for a title rather than using what the Library of Congress 
recommends.

2) The published version might have errors in the CIP data which other 
institutions noticed and fixed when creating their own catalog record. 
Similarly, there might have been a last-minute change to the title, 
author, etc. which is not represented in the CIP data but which would be 
represented once the item was cataloged elsewhere.

Admittedly, these are rare cases, but you might be interested in knowing 
them.

--Kevin