A Practical Guide To Implementing ONIX
Introduction
Who would have thought that a four letter acronym like ONIX could cause so much confusion and consternation?
ONIX stands for ONline Information eXchange and it is "the international standard for representing and communicating book industry product information in electronic form" according to EDItEUR, who are the keepers of the standard (see www.editeur.org).
OK, so there is a standard for passing bibliographic information between interested parties and if you have started to look into this topic you will have found numerous sites that espouse the benefits of the standard and either stop there or launch into a swathe of technical details that would appear to challenge even the most gifted MENSA student. Either people take a top down view talking about benefits for supply chains and give vague cost benefits or they drop straight into technical details talking about required values for XML tag , etc. What is missing is a simple guide that talks a publisher through the details of the ONIX standard and gives them practical guidance on how to implement it. To this end we humbly give you the Practical Guide to Implementing The ONIX Standard .
This guide will, indeed has to, give a slightly technical (don't worry we'll be gentle) overview of the ONIX standard and the technologies it's based on. We will then talk you through five basic steps you will need to follow to get your title information out into the world in ONIX form. Once you have an understanding of what is involved you will hopefully be better prepared to look into the market for a software solution that suits your businesses requirements or for the braver, more technically minded, souls give a basis for creating your own in-house solutions.
Now we will be discussing some quite technical issues and using I.T. terminology that may not be familiar to you but we will try and keep the acronyms down to a minimum and describe some of the more technical stuff in lay mans terms. What that does mean though is that some of you more technically minded people out there may take issue with some of the definitions we use to describe some of the ideas and technologies involved. We make no apologies about this. The aim of this document is to help non-technical publishers get a handle on ONIX and we may occasionally over-simplify some of the concepts and use terminology that may not be totally accurate but we take the view that simple is best and academic rigor will not get us where we need to be.
So Where to Start?
ONIX is a technical standard and as such requires a technical solution but don’t be fooled, as you will see shortly, when you distill it down we are actually talking about just sending text files between interested parties. Fair enough, the text files do have to be formatted in a very specific way, and there are many ways to implement technologies to achieve the desired results, but they are just text files! The complexities arise because you have to split down and categorize your title information in very specific ways so that it can be bundled up into an ONIX message (which is just the text file) and submitted.
Unfortunately, it is this breaking down and linking of title information that may lead you to reviewing your whole business process and possibly even purchasing some title management software to pull your title information together! Don’t panic just yet but please bear in mind that ONIX compliance is not a trivial task.
So our first job is to look at the ONIX standard and show you how to interpret the technical standards documentation that is available. We will then describe an ONIX message in terms of how it is structured. Once you understand what ONIX is and how it works the next step is to actually implement an ONIX solution for your business. To this end we have put together a framework of five steps that we believe you should follow to allow your business to successfully start sending ONIX messages.
Throughout the document we’ve throw in hints, tips and ideas, based on our own experiences, and where appropriate pointed you to other web sites and documentation to help try and make the whole process as painless as possible.