Can we give up completely on ONIX 2.1?

Here at BookNet Canada, we have been advocating for the use of version 3 of the ONIX standard for book metadata ever since EDItEUR went live with it in 2009. So it may seem strange to many of our stakeholders that we still require 2.1 as well as 3.0 data to be delivered to our bibliographic database, BiblioShare.

This year, some major industry players have announced their intent to end their support of the ONIX 2.1 version and so the main question we have been fielding these days is:

"Do we still have to send data in the 2.1 format?"

We understand the question and sympathize with the desire to stop dealing with a standard that has been deprecated for about as long as 3.0 has been available. There are real costs with keeping a 2.1 feed active in the supply chain. Someone has to make sure correct code lists and values are being used. Often a 2.1 file will be created by down-converting a 3.0 file and that doesn't always work out so great. ONIX 3.0 values have a way of sneaking into the 2.1 records which means added costs when the recipient of this invalid 2.1 data has to troubleshoot to fix the file.

So, back to that burning question, can we stop sending the 2.1 data? Here's the problem, stated as poetically as one can get in this context:

"no bibliographic database is an island entire of itself.

every piece of data a piece of the supply chain,

a part of the outbound."

All poetry aside, the BookNet Canada 2.1 BiblioShare dataset includes data for close to five million titles, while our 3.0 dataset is just under half that size. Why such a big discrepancy after so many years? One of the various reasons is that when it comes to adoption of the 3.0 standard, organizations have been dragging their feet. And why not when your data is being processed by your trading partners without any problem? Why spend money, time, and resources to support something no one is really asking for?

Again, this has been the thinking. However, the shortcomings of ONIX 2.1 are becoming more glaring as more and more development goes into ONIX 3, leaving the 2.1 version frozen in the past. And this is exactly why certain major players in the marketplace are now making decisions to end support of 2.1.

So, can you stop sending your 2.1 version data? Not yet! One of the major reasons for BookNet's requirement that data providers send both 2.1 and 3.0 versioned ONIX is that, over the almost 20 years of aggregating data and building solutions both for our own in-house projects as well as for initiatives out in the wild, there are many downstream dependencies on the data. While we have provided our own solutions for migrating to 3.0 usage, we still have some big solution providers in the Canadian supply chain that pull data from our 2.1 ONIX data service. We need your 2.1 data because they need it!

However, this is all coming to an end. CataList, the BookNet digital catalogue solution for the trade, has been doing a lot of heavy lifting to migrate businesses to using 3.0 data. Though this takes time since the CataList team goes through a quality assurance check on the 3.0 data in CataList and provides feedback to stakeholders hoping to transition their feed to 3.0. All of this can end up becoming a little time-consuming.

Another change is coming to BiblioShare as well. BiblioShare is going through a huge overhaul and part of the intent is to make 3.0 data front and centre. But for now, the answer still remains no — please don't stop sending that 2.1 data because we still need it, at least for a little while longer.

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