Transcript: New from BookNet Canada for 2026: BNC SalesData and LibraryData
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Lily Dwyer: Hello and welcome to Tech Forum Online. My name is Lily Dwyer. I’m the Product Manager for SalesData and LibraryData here at BookNet Canada. And today I’m going to be talking about what’s new in SalesData and LibraryData.
But before we get started, BookNet Canada acknowledges that its operations are remote and our colleagues contribute their work from the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, the Wyandot, the Mi’kmaq, the Ojibwe of Fort Williams 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, the Squamish, or Tsleil-Waututh people, 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.
So, SalesData and LibraryData are reporting tools that allow retailers, publishers, libraries, and other members of the book industry to access sales, inventory, and circulation data from retailers and libraries across Canada. If you’re interested in learning more information about this, you can find us at booknetcanada.ca. And for those of you who are already familiar with SalesData and LibraryData and are heavy users of our products, welcome back. We’ll be going through an update on what the past year has held for SalesData and LibraryData and what we’re planning for the future as well.
So, on the day that I’m recording this, we’re not quite at the end of the 2026 fiscal year, but so far our users have run 280,397 reports on the SalesData and LibraryData platform. So, that’s over 1,100 reports per business day so far this year. And on a weekly basis, users also received 1,387 scheduled reports by using the platform’s report automation feature. And that saves users collectively about 46 hours each week. And that adds up to about 2,404 hours each year of full-time work saved for the industry through automated reporting. Or if you’re looking to measure that time in a more fun unit of measure, that’s enough time to read all of the books in the “Heated Rivalry” series 50 times. So, depending on your reading pace, of course, there are different ways you can use that time that you’ve gained back for yourself. And of course, if you’re not partaking in the latest hockey romance craze, we at least hope you’ll have the time back to keep engaging in the business of selling, publishing, circulating, or connecting readers to books.
So, where is all the data powering these reports coming from? As you may know, the SalesData team is constantly working behind the scenes to make sure that the data is as up-to-date and reflective of the Canadian book market as possible. So, this includes onboarding new retailers and libraries, working with them and our developers to accommodate their specific reporting needs and changes, and also ensuring that the data is accurately and routinely provided for users on a weekly basis.
So, with that in mind, this year we picked up 19 new reporting retailers from coast to coast. And that brings our total up to 308 retailers that are currently reporting into SalesData. And to support reporting from our retailer partners, we have integrations built for 10 different point-of-sale systems and our data processing supports many others that aren’t listed here. So, we currently support BookManager, Givex, Lightspeed, Nebraska, Ratex, Shopify, Square, Vigie 3000, Wordstock, and WooCommerce. So, if your store is supporting any of these POS systems that you see listed here and you’re not currently reporting into SalesData, please reach out to us and we will work with you to begin reporting. And if your store is not showing these POS systems, don’t worry. We would still be happy to discuss reporting options with you. You could always drop us a line at [email protected] to get started.
Now, in regards to LibraryData, this year we are happy to announce that we’ve added four new library systems. So, that means that we currently have 86 library systems reporting into LibraryData and that covers more than 800 branches across the country.
And on this slide, you can really see many of the logos of those library systems and we’re working hard to add more libraries as time goes on. We’re really excited to have so many amazing libraries working with us. And we have integrations built for seven ILS systems. We currently accept library reports from libraries with Evergreen, Horizon, Infor VSmart, Koha, Polaris, Symphony, and our newest addition, Sierra. So, if your library is not using one of these ILSs, you can reach out to us anyway. We really look forward to working with you and your ILS to get your data on board.
And libraries contributing to LibraryData also have their stats counted towards our Loan Stars programme, which relies on data provided by libraries across Canada to inform a data-driven list of the top books ordered by Canadian libraries. So, for more information, please check out my colleague Kalpna’s presentation on Loan Stars. The Loan Stars lists are a great place to find out what library staff from coast to coast are ordering for their library collections.
Now let’s take a look at what’s been added as new features into SalesData and LibraryData over the past year. And first up is the changes we made to our internal bibliographic corrections approval tool. As you may know, the bibliographic data that is seen on SalesData is provided to us by Bowker Books in Print. So, if a user ever wishes to patch a record or to correct any of the fields in the bibliographic record, they can do so by clicking the “Report bibliographic error” button on the single ISBN report or at the bottom of the “More bibliographic data” pop-up. Once a correction is submitted to BookNet Canada, it enters a review process with the SalesData team. And if we approve a correction on our end, we have the ability to lock the record up until a certain date so that new incorrect data feeds do not alter that correction. This of course is not meant as a long-term solution, but it does allow the user more time to correct the metadata issues at the actual source of the problem.
So, the SalesData team uses our internal product admin tool when viewing and improving these bibliographic corrections. And this year we added some new features to that tool that give us much better visibility into an ISBN’s bibliographic data in SalesData, including insight into whether the data displayed in SalesData came from the regular biblio feed or if it came from a manual correction that was reported by a user. It also includes better insight into whether or not a biblio record is currently unlocked or locked. And if it is locked, when it will become unlocked and as well it gives us a complete history of past instances in which a record was locked. So, while these improvements are not user-facing, they were all made with our subscribers and users in mind. Having better visibility into corrections and patterns into those corrections allow us to provide better metadata support for our users and to make sure that data corrections are always made at the source of the problem.
Another exciting development for our team this year was wrapping up the initial integrations and testing with Sierra. So, I’m happy to say that LibraryData now can receive library reports from libraries using Sierra. So, if you are a library that’s using Sierra as your ILS and you are interested in reporting to and using LibraryData, please reach out to us. We’d be very excited to have you on board. Just note that you do need to be on Sierra version 6.3 or higher in order to participate.
We also had time this year to make some changes to our media bestseller list tool, which is our platform that allows users to merge ISBNs for the generated media bestseller list each week, as long as they share the same title, author, format, price, language, publisher, sales date, and pub date. And it also allows them to suppress ISBNs, meaning they will not appear on a bestseller list until after their publication day. So, some tweaks we made this year to this tool include increasing the table row count so that users can see all of their past merge requests and not just the most recent. And we also added some column sorting options to the merge request and suppression request tables, which can be really useful if you’re a user who has submitted many requests in the past and you want an easy way of finding those past requests.
Finally, let’s take a brief sneak peek into what’s next on the roadmap for SalesData and LibraryData. So, as I’m recording this, the SalesData team is in the middle of our next release, which will revolve around improvements to our quick search feature, which is the search tool found at the top of all of the SalesData pages. Currently, users can use quick search to quickly find titles by ISBN, title, contributor, series, and more. And depending on the search terms, this will either bring the user to a single ISBN report, or it will return a simple list of the top 1,500 titles that are related to those search terms. We are working on adding some new features to that results page, and those will include additional columns and column customisation, as you can find in some of our other reports. We also want to add some filters as well as some export functionality. And the intention of this project is to enable users to narrow down and sort their quick search results so that they can more easily identify the ISBNs that are most relevant to their queries. So, once identified, users should then be able to select those ISBNs to use them for their own purposes, so either for their own internal reporting, or to then use to build other SalesData reports. And we are aiming for a release date at some point in early April, so this new feature may already be available to you depending on when this recording is made available.
Of course, we always have lots of interesting ideas in the can, and most of those ideas for how we can improve SalesData and LibraryData come from you, our users. So, please do let us know what would make your life easier, and what sort of data you really wish you had your hands on, and we will do our best to help you. Like all BookNet products, our feature development is really driven by stakeholder feedback, so please don’t hesitate to get in touch. We’d love to hear from you and how we can make your work in 2026 and beyond easier and more data-driven. And if you have feedback or questions, please email us at [email protected]. Again, you can find us online as well at booknetcanada.ca. We really would love to hear from you and hear your ideas for how we can improve these tools for the future. And thank you so much for watching. Hope you have a great day.