[PatNY]

Kovid, all my secondary libraries have the same exact structure/custom columns as the main library. A few months ago, I made sure of that by recreating all secondary libraries using the "copy structure from the current library" option checked. (Previous to that I didn't know that option existed and had been manually re-creating the custom columns in each separate library).

To double check, from within the main library, I just now created a brand new empty test library with that option checked. Then I imported a book into the test library that had previously been "saved to disk" from within the main library. Again, the long text field imported fine; but all the short text fields did not.

Also, if I simply copy that same exact book from within the main library to the test library (or all secondary libraries), all the custom metadata shows up fine -- both the long text and short text. If the library structures weren't exact, then that wouldn't happen.