Coming Changes in ONIX (2024/2025)

Changelog

Introduction

To meet the customers demands for more metadata, we are releasing some changes at the end of 2024 / start of 2025. Note: Some of those are also breaking changes. Check the time-schedule.

We need your feedback by 20 October 2024 on when changes marked "critical change" can be handled.
If we do not receive feedback, this is interpreted as the changes being handled by you, and we follow the set schedule.

General note about compatibility

All changes are compatible with Onix 3.0 (covered by existing schema), and should therefore not break anything. We expect that customers will always handle that more and more fields are populated (as long as they are in the schema.

Schedule / Status

Features / changes

Contributor Unnamed Persons Breaking change

Unnamed Persons allows positive indication of content generated by AI or where synthesised voices are used for audio content.

Unnamed Persons is part of the Contributor composite.

Unnamed Persons will be supported both for metadata to and from Bokbasen.

Subject

The Subject element contains classification from several different schemes.

Bokbasen will deprecate two proprietary vocabularies for literary form and genres, and replace them with terms from the official Norwegian thesaurus on genre and form (NTSF). The thesaurus is provided by the National Library of Norway.

All records will be updated with terms and URIs from NTSF.

Terms from NTSF will be supported in records from Bokbasen only.

Terms from proprietary vocabularies and NTSF will be included in records from Bokbasen in parallell to facilitate this transitio

EUDR, FSC, PEFC, carbon emission

ProductFormFeature and ProductFormFeatureType is used to indicate if a product is in compliance with EU deforestation regulations (EUDR), is FSC or PEFC certified, or information about a carbon emission scheme.

According to EUDR, provenance of raw material source plot must be stated using GPS coordinates. Publishers are expected to add both an identifier for a Due Diligence Record in the EU registry (DDS) and details of provenance of raw material for cover and body of the product.

Contributor Role Code

Contributor role code is used to indicate the role played by a person or a corporate body in the creation of the product.

Support will be added for new codes from List 17 for both records to and from Bokbasen.

Chapters in audio and ebooks

To facilitate navigation in apps for audio books, we will add metadata describing chapters in Onix records. We will also supply chapters for ebooks. We will start to support manual chapters, and then work with automatic chapters that publishers then need to approve.

Device support Breaking change

We will move away from using ProductFormDescription.

It will now be present as ProductFormFeatureDescription (code 07 from list 79). to allow the indication of multiple devices supported.

Price condition

Price condition is used to indicate when the subscription of a product is automatically renewed. Typically used for digital learning resources.

The duration of the license period is specified in PriceConditionQuantity/EpubConstraint?.

Collection (Norw. forlagsserie)

CollectionType is used to indicate what type of collection is described in the metadata.

Support for code 11 for identifying publisher’s collections will be added.

Publisher’s collections are bibliographic collections defined and identified by a publisher, often used for marketing purposes, and often with a distinct design style. The books in the collection does not necessarily have a specific order, shared subject or authorship.

Collections where the books in the collection have a shared subject, narrative or authorship, are identified by collection type 10. This collection type is independent of the publisher, and will be added as metadata to all editions of a book.

Text and data mining

In all Bokbasen’s customer contracts, use of the product for extraction or automated computer analaysis is regulated and forbidden.

This constraint will be added to the Onix-records in Epub Usage Constraint.

Onix 3.1

In February 2023 the Onix Steering Committee agreed that in addition to adding new features to Onix, various data elements that were deprecated, plus the <Gender> tag were to be removed. This necessitated the labelling of the revision as release 3.1.

Aside from the removal of the deprecated elements and <Gender>, these updates are all
optional and fully backwards-compatible.

Bokbasen will do a revision of Onix both to and from Bokbasen, to make sure that the records are compatible with version 3.1

The deprecated elements has originally not been supported by Bokbasen, and the upgrade to Onix 3.1 should not cause problems for customers of Bokbasen.