BIC reminds UK book trade that BIC Standard Subject Categories scheme to be made obsolete

The Book Industry Communication (BIC) organisation has issued a reminder to the UK book trade that the BIC Standard Subject Categories Scheme (BSSC) is being made obsolete by the end of February 2024.

Originally conceived in the mid-1990s, the BSSC scheme has been used by publishers and retailers for around 25 years.

However, the current version (2.1) was last updated in November 2010 and has not been altered in any material way since, meaning that the concepts, detailed headings and notes are now 11 years out of date.

In February 2017, BIC purposefully froze the development of the BSSC scheme and has endorsed Thema as its replacement ever since.

Thema is the international multilingual subject category scheme for the global book trade being introduced to replace the BSSC.

In its initial announcement in 2022 concerning the phasing out of the scheme, BIC said it would eliminate costs in the UK industry associated with support for two parallel schemes; enable the industry to move away from using outdated BSSC scheme concepts and headings that social change has made inappropriate; remove the time and resource involved in mapping from/to BSSC codes to/from Thema and other national classification codes; eliminate classification approximations and the category drift that comes with use of such mappings and actively encourage a greater adoption of the Thema standard across the industry.

The February 2024 deadline – some seven years after BIC endorsed Thema as the preferred scheme for the UK trade – is intended to provide sufficient notice to the industry and allow stakeholders time to make the necessary changes to their systems and workflows. More information can be found on the BIC website.