TitlePage upgrade project

The upgrade brings a fundamental change in how you search, explore and discover titles on TitlePage, offering a greatly enhanced interface with faster and more accurate search results.

We’re rebuilding not just the interface, but the underlying search engine itself. This more flexible and powerful platform lays the foundation for ongoing improvement, continuing to evolve as metadata improves and new capabilities are introduced.

The search interface, results display, and most importantly the underlying search engine have been completely overhauled with Thema as the primary subject classification scheme, plus advanced keyword search functionality to better reflect how users actually search.

Rather than relying on simple keyword matching, the search engine evaluates how well each record matches your search across multiple metadata fields – including title, contributor, subject, and descriptive text. This provides more relevant results, even when searches are broad, partial, or less precise. This approach is designed to reflect how users naturally search, helping them quickly find the most relevant titles across a large and diverse set of metadata from 1.7 million titles.

Equally important is that the new search is designed for exploration as well as known item lookup. Rich metadata helps surface related and relevant titles you may not have thought to search for directly, supporting discovery and helping answer customer queries outside your immediate area of expertise.

Keywords, audience ranges, and Thema classifications all play a central role in this. As more rich metadata is supplied, search results will continue to improve.

Your metadata should use Thema

As Thema will be prioritised in TitlePage searches, this means:

• TitlePage will transition to Thema as the primary subject classification scheme for search and segmentation, with native Thema highly encouraged. BIC will no longer be mandatory for records with Thema from mid-2026. Contact us if you will not be able to provide Thema for all records by mid-2026.
• Ensure your Thema meets best practice to ensure search visibility. Take advantage of your data quality reports and dashboards to prioritise and track areas of improvement. More on the key areas of metadata to focus on can be found below.

Key search metadata for publishers to focus on

Metadata like keywords, age ranges, and Thema subject classification will play a central role in title discoverability, allowing users to make more exploratory searches on TitlePage. Beyond the basics of keywords, pricing and availability information, publishers should focus on strengthening metadata in the following areas:

• Thema subject categories and qualifiers: ensure codes are accurate, specific, and supported by relevant qualifiers where appropriate to distinguish your title from countless others in the same top level category.
• Age ranges: support audience targeting and improve filtering for schools, libraries and retailers.
• Contributor information: inclusion of contributor nationality (more on that below) supports users in finding local creators, while the identification of First Nations Creators (where consent has been given) will help surface their work.
• Curriculum alignment: use Thema education qualifiers to link titles to relevant national and state based learning frameworks.
• Prize information: include award wins and shortlist data to support discovery and promotion.

Find metadata support and advice for improving your Thema on the APA website, with specific articles covering some of the above areas, including:

• Educational publishing and the Australian curriculum
• Identifying Australian authorship in metadata
• Place and time qualifiers in Thema
• Showcasing social topics in stories for children & teens
• First Nations metadata

Your login details will change

With the change in user management system, when the upgrades are released in 2026 you will move from a single organisation login to individual staff logins.

With the upgrade, all your staff can benefit from TitlePage access – searching and viewing all books on TitlePage, and viewing stock levels for your own products. High privilege access comes with the Data Editor role, available to multiple users in your organisation. The Data Editor can edit products for your organisation, plus generate and access sFTP keys and API tokens.

We’ll be in touch with users in late 2025 to request data to support these security changes, with more information on users and roles available in our upgrade FAQs.

We're transitioning to secure sFTP transfers

The enhanced security extends to how you deliver ONIX files to TItlePage, as we move to using sFTP using SSH key authentication. Using sFTP ensures your metadata files are encrypted when transferred to TitlePage, while the new user roles and permissions will give you greater control over who can manage your TitlePage data. 

Further details on sFTP and user permissions can be found here. Share the sFTP information with anyone who needs to know about managing your data feeds to TitlePage, and get in touch with the APA by Monday 1 December 2025 if you expect to have issues with the transition to sFTP.

Changes to single title editing and metadata/title management

The Single Title Edit form, used by some publishers to add or edit their titles manually on TitlePage, will be replaced in the forthcoming TitlePage upgrade.  The replacement functionality offers greater flexibility for publishers, allowing them to add or edit multiple titles at once using a simple CSV template.  This streamlined system will allow publishers to continue providing essential metadata to TitlePage by uploading a CSV file through a simple interface. The CSV template prioritises the mandatory fields required for a basic title listing on TitlePage, but also supports optional fields needed to deliver high-quality metadata to retailers. We’ll be in touch with affected publishers over coming months with further details of this new functionality. 

Future title management options

The functionality replacing the Single Title Edit form is the first of new options we'll be offering publishers to help manage their metadata. Future functionality will support more complex online metadata management, and publishers looking to learn more can discuss their requirements with the APA. 

Your login details will change

With the change in user management system, when the upgrades are released in 2026 you will move from a single bookshop or library login to individual staff logins.

For some bookshops and libraries, this will be a significant change. We’ll be in touch with users in late 2025 to request data to support these security changes, with more information available in our upgrade FAQs.