Cataloging Style Guide

Language and Translation of Metadata

The Fatcat data model does not include multiple titles or names for the same entity, or even a "native"/"international" representation as seems common in other bibliographic systems. This most notably applies to release titles, but also to container and publisher names, and likely other fields.

For now, editors must use their own judgment over whether to use the title of the release listed in the work itself

This is not to be confused with translations of entire works, which should be treated as an entirely separate release.

External Identifiers

"Fake identifiers", which are actually registered and used in examples and documentation (such as DOI 10.5555/12345678) are allowed (and the entity should be tagged as a fake or example). Non-registered "identifier-like strings", which are semantically valid but not registered, should not exist in Fatcat metadata in an identifier column. Invalid identifier strings can be stored in "extra" metadata. Crossref has blogged about this distinction.

Editgroups and Meta-Meta-Data

Editors are expected to group their edits in semantically meaningful editgroups of a reasonable size for review and acceptance. For example, merging two creators and updating related releases could all go in a single editgroup. Large refactors, conversions, and imports, which may touch thousands of entities, should be grouped into reasonable size editgroups; extremely large editgroups may cause technical issues, and make review unmanageable. 50 edits is a decent batch size, and 100 is a good upper limit (and may be enforced by the server).