‘Book Metadata’ & Visual-Meta

Let’s first look at how metadata is ‘imprinted’ in a paper book:

Traditional Book Approach, the Colophon

A traditional book features a page inside the book, before the main text, with ‘meta’ data ‘about’ the book, including the name of the author, title of the book and imprint information and so on. This page is known as the printer’s imprint in the UK, where it is mandated by law, and the impressum in Germany, where it is also included by law. Other terms for this page are edition notice or copyright page. Before printing it was at the end of the document as a ‘colophon’, a term which is sometimes also used. 

Copyright © 2010 Alberto Manguel.
All rights reserved.
Designed by Sonia Shannon Set in Fournier type by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-Manguel, Alberto. A reader on reading / Alberto Manguel. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-15982-0 (alk. paper) 1. Books and reading. 2. Manguel, Alberto— Books and reading. I. Title. z1003.M2925 2010 028’.9—dc22 2009043719 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.  

The Visual-Meta Approach

Visual-Meta puts this metadata into an Appendix at the back of the document instead of at the front (to make it less obtrusive), written out as visible plain text. It contains citation metadata and can also contain addressing, interaction and formatting information. The PDF viewer can then use this to make the normal PDF text in the document interactive:

@{visual-meta-start}
author = {Hegland, Frode},
title = {Visual-Meta: An Approach to Surfacing Metadata},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2Nd International Workshop on Human Factors in Hypertext}, series = {HUMAN ’19},
year = {2019},
isbn = {978-1-4503-6899-5},
location = {Hof, Germany},
pages = {31–33},
numpages = {3},
url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3345509.3349281},
doi = {10.1145/3345509.3349281},
acmid = {3349281},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
keywords = {archiving, bibtex citing, citations, engelbart, future, glossary, hypertext, meta,
metadata, ohs, pdf, rfc, text}, }
@{visual-meta-end}