EDItEUR’s International Supply Chain Seminar opened the Frankfurt Messe on 5 October, the first time the event has been held there in a decade. The mini‑conference, held the day before the Frankfurt Book Fair, focused on standards, case studies and real‑world practices, with a particular emphasis on the practical application of AI to metadata tasks.
That same month, EDItEUR released Thema version 1.7, a globally relevant, multi‑lingual subject‑category scheme. The update, ratified by the Thema international steering committee in Frankfurt, is fully backwards compatible with earlier versions but introduces more than 40 new subject categories and 200 new qualifiers. New options include FBAF – Dark academia fiction, FKK – Folk horror, JBFP – Social innovation, YFCG – Children’s/Teenage fiction: Young mystery solvers, 5THM‑MZ‑A – Literature of Mozambique, and 5YW – content with sexual activity off the page.
Volunteers from multiple countries contributed to the working group that produced the update, and the new categories are designed to provide finer detail for certain types and genres of books. The scheme remains freely available, with documentation and data files at https://www.editeur.org/151/Thema and an interactive, multi‑lingual browser at https://ns.editeur.org/thema.
Adoption of Thema 1.7 is straightforward: publishers can add the new codes to their title‑management systems and include them in ONIX messages. The ONIX international steering committee also released issue 75 of the ONIX codelists during the Frankfurt meeting, with new and modified vocabulary entries available via the ONIX online browser.