Hello! I have some exciting news to announce. Last week, we released a new feature that’s been requested by a lot of folks: collections and metadata management.
Until now, Tags have been the only way to organize Pubs. However, this always felt a bit too lightweight and limited for communities producing things like books and journals. Additionally, although you could use Tags to group Pubs together, there was no way to add metadata to Tags or cite Pubs with Tags as part of the group.
The new Collections feature, which is an enhancement of Tags, is the first step towards more robust management of groups of Pubs. In addition to Tags, which can still be used as a lightweight way to group Pubs thematically, you can now create Books, Journal Issues, and Conferences.
When you create Collections, you can now order Pubs within them and set their role within the collection (forward, chapter, etc.), add Collection-level contributors (i.e. conference editors), and add metadata for citations and depositing. You can also deposit collection-level metadata to Crossref by clicking the “Get DOI” button in the metadata pane.
Pubs can still belong to multiple Collections. However, you can now set a Pub’s “Primary Collection,” which will be used in citations and metadata deposits.
Full reference documentation for the feature can be found on our help site.
In the coming months, we’ll be adding more Collection types, more metadata options for collections, and new ways of displaying Pages and Pubs that change depending on the type of collection.
In the meantime, we’d love your feedback on the new feature. In particular, if there are specific types of collections you’re interested in creating, metadata fields you’d like to see captured, or different ways you expect citations or deposits to appear, please let us know in this thread.
Tremendous thanks to @ian, who lead development of this feature and braved the minutiae of citation standards and the wilds of Crossref, and to our colleagues at MIT Press, who gave us feedback and helped us test and refine the feature.