I don't know why it took me so long to notice that Dorothea Salo works (and thinks and opines) in electronic publishing. Her blog is not so much about cataloging, although clearly I would be happy with metadata as she thinks it should be done. It is much about the formats books go through, and where to put what markup when. Many points that match my memory of my startlingly long-ago efforts putting vast programming manuals into a format from which we could publish simultaneously to paper and CD - yeah, right - and in less than six months in Japanese. We learned to stay with the most abstract format as long as possible. (We used to talk about a problem being 'up' in SGML or 'down' in the wordprocessing or CDROM formats, and open our hands gently while looking up in imagination towards SGML, very like Hope on a Beaux-Arts monument. SGML! That was a long time ago!)
On the other hand, there's the Internet Book List, which I admire for existing, but which causes me pain because the identifying data for a book is so... so... so newbie. No field for publisher, for instance, although that's a necessary part of the older ways of identifying books. "Series" and "Series Part" considered very important, though; also "Genre" soi-disant. Now, it may become a useful reference for slightly geeky light reading, apt to be mined for If-You-Liked-This recommendations; and that wouldn't be a bad thing. But it would need munging to be integrated into a similar design made by people with slightly different interests, and more munging to be clean data in a system designed to identify nearly all books.
Wow. I'm very flattered.
Actually, metadata is totally not my thing -- that's part of the reason I'm going to library school. Text I can do. Text about text I've got a ways to go yet.
Like they say, knowledge is what you're supposed to have coming *out* of school.
Anyhow, knowing about the data seems a vital first step in choosing metadata; warning flags for Has Had/Will Need Human Finoogling, for instance.