citem

Citem is a hypothetical open data standard for representing individual items in digital catalogs and citation workflows. The name is an acronym for Common Item Metadata. It is designed to be minimal yet extensible, enabling consistent item descriptions across libraries, archives, publishers, museums, and marketplaces. A Citem record typically includes an item identifier, title, creators, date of production or publication, item type, language, and a description, as well as a set of identifiers such as DOI, ISBN, and ISSN. It also supports provenance, rights information, and relationships to related items, such as parts, series, translations, or alternate formats.

Records are intended to be serialized in multiple formats, including JSON, JSON-LD, and XML, and can be validated against a public Citem schema. The JSON-LD representation allows linking to external vocabularies and participation in linked-data ecosystems, potentially aligning with schema.org, Dublin Core, and BIBFRAME where appropriate. The standard emphasizes interoperability, provenance tracking, and ease of integration with catalog APIs and citation tools.

Governance and adoption: Citem is maintained by a community-driven governance body and a public registry of schemas and validators. Early pilots have been reported in library networks and academic repositories, focusing on consolidating item metadata and improving citation generation and retrieval.

History: The concept emerged in the mid-2020s as part of broader efforts to unify item-level metadata. It remains in development, with ongoing proposals and pilot implementations.