Transcript: New from BookNet Canada for 2026: BNC CataList
Go back to the main session page.
Vivian Luu: Hello, welcome to the 2026 Tech Forum session on What’s New in CataList. To get us started, I’d like to first acknowledge that BookNet Canada’s operations are remote, and that my colleagues and I contribute our work from the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, the Wyandot, the Mi’kmaq, the Ojibwa of Fort William First Nation, the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations, which includes the Ojibwa, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi, the Métis, as well as the unceded and ancestral territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. These are the original nations and peoples of the lands we now call Beaton, Guelph, Halifax, Thunder Bay, Toronto, Vancouver, Vaughan, and Windsor.
We endorse the calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and support an ongoing shift from gatekeeping to space-making in the book industry. If you’d like to learn more about the peoples whose lands you’re joining from today, please take some time to visit native-land.ca to learn more.
Thank you for joining me for this session. Today we’ll talk about some of the changes that we’ve made to CataList in the past year. All of the features I’m going to talk about today are currently available when you’re logged into CataList. If you’re part of the book industry but you don’t have a CataList account yet, you could head over to our CataList website, that is bnccatalist.ca, and request an account.
First up, let’s talk about the changes that you’ll see when creating a new catalogue. On the right-hand side of this slide, we have a screenshot of the form that you’ll use when you’re creating a custom catalogue. The design changes that we’ve made to CataList apply to seasonal and custom catalogues, and I will point out a few areas where we’ve made updates to features that are specific to the custom catalogues. So, you can add ISBNs to your new catalogue using a few different methods, and we’ve updated the design so that it’s easier for you to see which options are available for you, and you could very easily choose the option that you want to use to create your new catalogue. For example, you could choose an option to upload an ISBN file, and if you’re creating a custom catalogue, that ISBN file could include the suggested quantities for those ISBNs. You just have to remember when you’re filling in this form to also select the checkbox in the form that lets us know your file includes those suggested quantities.
We also check the ISBNs that you’re adding to make sure that they can in fact be added to your catalogue. So, we have two new tables to help you review your ISBNs. The first table is the Warnings and Errors table, which shows the ISBNs that cannot be added to your catalogue for one reason or another. We will include in this table the error message that gives a bit more detail about what is wrong with the ISBN, why it cannot be added. For example, your list might include duplicated ISBNs. They might be duplicates of another ISBN in your list, so those duplicated ones cannot be added, and we’ll let you know. If your list includes invalid ISBNs, we will also let you know here so that we do not accidentally include those invalid ISBNs in your catalogue. And specifically for custom catalogues, we will also let you know if the publisher has not listed those titles on CataList. This one’s important because ISBNs cannot be added to custom catalogues until the publisher has added those titles to their seasonal catalogues. The second table that we’ve added to CataList will let you know which ISBNs we’ve confirmed are valid and can be added to your catalogue. So, this is the Confirmed ISBNs table, and if you’ve uploaded a file with ISBNs and suggested quantities, the table will also show you the suggested quantities that we’ve found for your associated ISBN. And so together, these two tables work as an initial review for your ISBNs when you are creating a catalogue.
Next, let’s talk about some of the changes that we’ve made to My Page. My Page is where you can manage the catalogues that you and your colleagues have made in CataList. So, we’ve added new actions as well as updated existing actions that you can perform for your catalogues. You can now delete or archive seasonal catalogues of any status. This is a new update. It used to be a bit more limited in the type of seasonal catalogue that you could delete or archive. For example, previously you could only archive a seasonal catalogue if it was published, but now you could archive a seasonal catalogue if it’s in draft status, published status, or even trade-only status. So, we’ve made these changes to make it a bit more convenient for you when you’re managing the catalogues in your account. For custom catalogues, we’ve added a brand new action, and that is the archive action. So, this new action will let you identify the catalogues that are perhaps old and no longer actively used by you or your colleagues, so you could archive those catalogues. And I’ll talk a bit more about how you can filter those out of your table in a moment.
Next, we also made an update to the received catalogues table. And as a very brief reminder, the received catalogues are those that people receive from sales reps and other people who are on CataList. As a person who has received a catalogue, you could now mark those catalogues as complete to tell yourself that you’ve finished reviewing that catalogue and that you’ve done all you needed to do with that catalogue, or you could do the reverse and mark a completed received catalogue as in progress to let yourself know that you actually still have some work to do with the titles in that catalogue. So, all of these actions that I’ve mentioned could also be performed in bulk on catalogues that you select.
On this slide, I have an example of the seasonal catalogues table. And you can see here that I’ve selected a few seasonal catalogues, and you could then choose to perform certain actions on those selections. You could archive your selections, you could restore them, or you could even delete them. You could also add or remove tags that are associated with these catalogues.
On the next slide here, we have the custom catalogues table. Custom catalogues have similar bulk actions to the seasonal catalogues. There is a unique action that you can perform in bulk for custom catalogues, and that is the action to set the editorial permissions so that you could set all of your selected custom catalogues as collaborative custom catalogues, which would mean everyone in your account has access to edit that custom catalogue, or you could do the reverse and set your selections to private so that only you and your company’s account managers could edit those selections. And on this slide, we have the received catalogues table and the actions that you could perform in bulk. So, you could select received catalogues and mark them as complete or mark them as in progress.
Now that we’ve spoken quite a bit about the actions, let’s talk about a few other changes that we’ve also made this year to My Page. So, we’ve moved the filters that are available on My Page for your catalogue tables into drop-down lists, and we’ve also added new filters to accompany the new actions that we now have. You can, for example, hide archived custom catalogues from your table so that you can focus on the catalogues that you’re actively working on for this season. All accounts could also export the catalogue table directly from My Page. The export, which could be exported using the Excel or CSV format, includes all of the columns that are available in the catalogue table on My Page. The export will also include a link for the catalogue so that you could easily load that catalogue on CataList when you’re reviewing the export in another application.
Let’s switch gears and talk about some other changes that we’ve made to other areas of CataList, starting with the Catalogues list. This slide shows a screenshot of the title detail page, and on the left-hand side, you can see the Catalogues list, which shows all of the catalogues that include the title you’re currently viewing. So, let’s move over to the next slide for a closer look at this list and the changes that we’ve made to it. The Catalogues list, as you can see in this example here on the left-hand side, could get quite long if you’re looking at a title that was included in several different catalogues. Sometimes you might not need to see all of these catalogues. For example, perhaps you want to hide the archived catalogues, or maybe you’re just interested in the catalogues that your account created. And so it could get a little difficult to identify those specific catalogues. And so what we’ve done on CataList is provide a new feature within this list. On the bottom of the list, you could now click the “Apply Filter” link to open up settings that will let you choose the type of catalogues that display in this list. You can also choose how you want those catalogues sorted, whether you want to sort them by the create date, the last modified date, or even in alphabetical order.
So, let’s go over to the next slide, and I’ll show you an example of how this updated filter works. So, if I want to see the catalogues that my company created, I would choose the associated catalogue options from the list and save my changes. And this will automatically update the Catalogues list that you can see on the title detail page. So, on the right-hand side of this slide, we have the updated list of the catalogues box. You can see that it’s much shorter now and only includes certain catalogues. This Catalogues list and the settings that you apply to it, these filters that you’ve applied, are also available in your search results. So, if I move over to this next section on the right-hand side, we now see the scrolling view of your search results. And within the scrolling view, you can also see the list of catalogues that your search result item is included in, and this list is synced with the settings that you had set up in the filters options.
And finally, we have a new tool that we introduced in CataList in support of the Booksellers List. The Booksellers List is a fairly new collective marketing program that is coordinated by the Canadian Independent Booksellers Association, also called CIBA. These lists are compiled seasonally based on the votes for titles from bookseller members across the country. And CIBA members who are also on CataList can recommend titles for the Booksellers List directly on the site. CIBA members simply have to log into their CataList account and look for the “Recommend” button that is next to any title that is eligible for the list. Publishers who are on CataList can also use the eligible icon to identify their own titles that are eligible for the Booksellers List.
And so those are some of the changes, some of the new features, some of the improvements that we are most excited to share with you about CataList. Now, what’s next for CataList? What are we going to be working on in the coming year? There are a few items that I wanted to call out specifically for this session. We are planning to make a few improvements to our notes feature. We’re going to create preset groups that you could choose as note recipients when you’re sharing a note. These groups are automatically updated by us here at BookNet when we create new CataList accounts, so that, for example, if you want to share a note with everyone in your company, you could choose that specific group, and that group will always be up to date with who you have in your CataList account. We’re also going to be researching ways in which we can integrate EDI into CataList. This is to help retailers who use CataList when they need to communicate information about orders with their suppliers. More information will be coming soon as we continue our planning for this type of integration. We’re also continuing to transition publishers on CataList to ONIX 3. As many of you are aware, version 3 is the new ONIX for Books standard, and we’re doing what we can to support our publishers when they are transitioning to using their ONIX 3 data. If your company is ready for ONIX 3, let us know and we’ll work with you to determine your next steps for CataList.
Thank you again for attending this Tech Forum session. If you have any questions or comments for the CataList team, you can contact us at [email protected]. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter so that you could stay on top of all of the new features that we’re adding to CataList. Thank you.