10/04/2026
The number of titles identifying local authors on TitlePage has almost doubled since May 2025, as publishers increasingly add contributor nationalities to their metadata. Australian and NZ contributors now make up 50% of the titles that include contributor nationality information.
Amidst a 78% increase in titles featuring contributor nationality information, there was a 93.1% increase in titles with Australian contributors and a 35.9% increase in titles with NZ contributors. This comes as part of overall improvements to Australian metadata quality over the last year.
Despite this progress, the majority of titles still lack contributor nationality data, which is a relatively new data point in the supply chain. Only 2.23% of all 1.7 million TitlePage titles – just under 38,000 – include this data, while the total number of titles has grown by 8.8% over this period.
Including contributor nationality in ONIX helps readers, booksellers, librarians, and educators, find locally relevant titles – or works by authors of another nationality, given 30% of Australian residents were born overseas. Discussions with major online retailers indicate this information is becoming increasingly important to their categorisation and merchandising, as they use this metadata in consumer-facing promotions, search filters, and curated collections.
This is also why the upgraded TitlePage is making contributor nationality a key element in the new search interface, allowing users to easily search by contributor nationality – with quick filters for Australian or New Zealander contributors.
In late 2025 the identification of First Nations titles was significantly enhanced with a new contributor-place relationship providing a respectful, structured way for Indigenous contributors to be identified in metadata. This metadata will also be available as a search field within the upgraded TitlePage.
Improve your metadata
We’ve produced guides to support publishers in promoting Australian titles through their metadata using ONIX, ensuring that they’re able to respond to increasing supply chain demand for this information.
Local content can also be highlighted through Thema with place qualifiers (1MB*), along with national literature qualifiers (5T*) – you can learn more about their application for Australian literature, complete with worked examples.