As confirmed in an earlier blog post, the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) has published the 2024 update to its book publishing subject codes, often referred to as BISAC Subject Headings. Accordingly, all BookNet products and services have been updated with the 2024 list of codes, including the BISAC to Thema Translator, following the release of an updated map of BISAC to Thema. The new map reflects a gargantuan amount of work from a focused working group that included BookNet’s own Bibliographic Manager Tom Richardson. The update reflects not only the recently-released 2024 edition of the BISAC Subject Headings, but also the release of Thema 1.6 in November 2024.

As BISG Executive Director Brian O’Leary writes:

The update proved to be a significant effort, with over 1,600 changes made to the prior version, including identifying the right Thema codes for BISAC codes new to the 2024 edition, and identifying new Thema codes for existing BISAC subject codes.

Users of the BISAC to Thema mapping should be aware that this mapping incorporates a lot more changes than past updates and that you may want to consider re-running some past work. In part, that's because Thema has a two year cycle and this year is matching new BISAC to new Thema, but in this case both standards have had substantial changes. Thema supports improved search and has made changes to its synonym support allowing better matching as well.

BookNet Canada strongly recommends only using the translator as a starting point. The two standards are different and for any specific book its correct code in BISAC may not be the best Thema coding match available even if you assume that this is the "best match" in Thema to the BISAC code. The two standards have different strengths and focuses, with BISAC designed to serve a single market and Thema intended to support multiple international ones. The Translator gives you a leg up but results will vary.

This will likely bring some questions, please take a look at an essential primer on the BookNet Canada and BISG BISAC to Thema Translator in this blog post for more information about the translator. For further instructions on using the BISAC to Thema Translator, please consult our help documentation. For more information on how to use Thema subjects and qualifiers, have a look at our Thema documentation.

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