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A couple of weeks ago, EDItEUR fielded a query from an ONIX user installing a new product management system.

"In our old IT system, we arranged our products into “title groups”, where the hardback, paperback and two ebook versions of the same book are grouped together. Internally, we use the ISBN of the hardback as an identifier for the title group. Is this usual, or should we be doing it some other way in the new system we’re installing? And can we put this title group ID in ONIX?"

Well, a title group — I would call it a ‘work’*, essentially a group of products (or ‘manifestations’) that embody more or less exactly the same intellectual property — doesn’t have any kind of standardized identifier. There’s no ‘work’ equivalent of the ISBN that identifies ‘manifestations’. There used to be the ISTC, which no one used, so that standard was withdrawn. Now, EDItEUR recommends that publishers use a ‘proprietary identifier’ of some kind.

It’s not in any way unusual to do this with an ISBN, at least for internal purposes. At my former company, we called the title group ID the “head ISBN”, the first ISBN assigned to any of the products in that title group. And you need to rely on context to know when that ISBN is being used as a proper product identifier, and when it’s being used as a proxy identifier for a group of products.

In fact, this concept of head ISBN is so common that in ONIX, we have a special code for that type of proxy work ID. In the ONIX, it would look like this:

</WorkIdentifier>

</RelatedWork>

and this snippet of XML would be included unchanged in the ONIX record for every product in the group (or using other terms, every manifestation of the work).

Not all publishers use this head ISBN concept. An alternative would be to allocate something like a UUID to every title group or work.

<IDTypeName>MyPublisher Work ID</IDTypeName>

</WorkIdentifier>

Whichever way you identify the groups (or works), you need to be at least a little careful and consistent about how broad the range of products in a group is. Would a new edition be a new group? Would an abridged version be a new group? Would a translation be a different group? Yes in all those cases, because new product incorporates different or significantly modified intellectual property. Would the same content in a paperback, or in an ebook or an audio download be a new group? No, because that’s the same intellectual property.

Finally, don’t get these work IDs or title groups mixed up with ‘discount groups’. Those are groups of products to which the same reseller discount percentage applies, and those groups are specified in the <DiscountCoded> composite.

Graham Bell is Executive Director of EDItEUR, responsible for the overall development of EDItEUR’s standards and the management services it provides on behalf of other standards agencies (including the International ISNI agency and the International DOI Foundation).

He joined EDItEUR as its Chief Data Architect in 2010, focused on the continuing development and application of ONIX for Books, and on other EDItEUR standards for both the book and serials sectors. Graham will be back, teaching Canadian stakeholders about ONIX and its practical applications in multi-day educational workshops in March 2023. To receive news about upcoming events, sign up for the Tech Forum newsletter here.

*ONIX uses the term ‘work’ in a very specific sense, which may be different from the way that many librarians use the term ‘work’. In fact, ‘work’ in ONIX means something more like what a librarian might call an ‘expression’. In contrast, the term ‘manifestation’ means the same in ONIX as it does to librarians.