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ONIX Books Code Lists, Issue 8

From Release 2.1 of ONIX for Books, the ONIX Code Lists are being maintained separately from any of the individual ONIX message formats.  

A single set of Code Lists underpins all ONIX message formats. Some lists may be used in several, or all, of the formats (eg language and country codes). Some may be used in only one format. They are all maintained as part of a single set of lists, in which each list has a unique number. (The code list number carries no significance: it is simply a “dumb” reference number.) However, for practical reasons, code list files extracted from this master set are published separately for ONIX for Books and ONIX for Serials

Issues of the ONIX Books Code Lists are independent of the publication of new releases of the ONIX Books Product Information message formats. Code List Issues are numbered sequentially 1, 2, 3 etc. The set of Code Lists released in April 2003 was designated Issue 1.  The current set of Code Lists, dated April 2008, is Issue 8. 

Six-monthly issues
The ONIX International Steering Committee has determined that in principle there should be a regular issue of the Code Lists at approximately six-monthly intervals, with the possibility of issues at other times in response to specific needs.

Changes in Issue 8
You can download here a PDF file listing the changes made in Issue 8.

Links between format specifications and Code Lists
Code values are not now included as part of the format specifications. Instead, each specification of a coded data element includes a hyperlink to the relevant code list, and a set of HTML files carrying the latest issue of the code lists is part of the specification package. This approach can be seen in the download package for ONIX for Books Release 2.1, revision 02 which includes the HTML files for the latest issue of the code lists. In the linked HTML files, code lists and individual codes which are new (or whose status has been changed from active to “deprecated”) in the latest issue are highlighted in red.

PDF file for viewing or printing  
The complete ONIX Books Code Lists Issue 8 is available as a PDF file for viewing or downloading. In this file, newly added codes, and any existing entries where the wording has been clarified, are highlighted in blue.

ONIX Listes de Codes 7: ONIX Code Lists Issue 7 in French, translated by the French ONIX Group French flag

ONIX Codelisten Ausgabe 2: ONIX Code Lists Issue 2 in German, translated by the German-language ONIX Group

Code list files for loading into local systems
Comma-delimited file
You can download the comma-delimited file here. The file is encoded using ISO 8859 Part 1, also known as the ‘Latin 1’ or ‘Western European’ character set, which is compatible with most North American and Western European systems using versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system, and is compatible with all web browsers. Alternative versions using Unicode or character sets used by specific computer platforms or operating systems may be available on request – please email us.

The code lists are presented in numerical order. Each line in the file represents a code list entry. Each line has five fields, in the sequence as given below: 

  1. Code list
  2. Code value
  3. Description– a short text statement of the meaning of the code
  4. Notes– a longer definition where required
  5. Issue number – the code list in which the code was added, or in which the status of the code was changed. The issue number is "0" for all codes issued prior to the present release, and "1" for all codes new in this release.
Note that in previous issues of the code lists the CSV file has had a line sequence number against each line in the list, as the second element of the line. For reasons related to the way in which the lists are now being maintained, this numbering has been deleted from Isuue 6 and subsequent issues.  If this causes a problem for your established processes please email us.

XML code list file  
You can download the XML file here. The file is encoded using single-octet Unicode (UTF-8 – the default encoding for XML documents). Alternative versions may be available on request – please email us. 

The format is as follows. The top-level tag is <ONIXCodeTable>. The document contains a sequence of composite elements <CodeList>, each of which contains the data elements <CodeListNumber>, <CodeListDescription> and <IssueNumber>, and a sequence of composite elements <Code>. Each composite element <Code> contains the data elements <CodeNumber>, <CodeValue>, <CodeDescription>, <CodeNotes> and <IssueNumber>. Here is a sample:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><
<ONIXCodeTable>
<<CodeList>
            <CodeListNumber>1</CodeListNumber>
            <CodeListDescription>Notification or update type code</CodeListDescription>
            <IssueNumber>0</IssueNumber>
            <Code>
                  <CodeNumber>1</CodeNumber>
                  <CodeValue>01</CodeValue>
                  <CodeDescription>Early notification</CodeDescription>
                  <CodeNotes>Use for a complete record issued earlier than approximately six months before publication.</CodeNotes>
                  <IssueNumber>0</IssueNumber>
            </Code>
            ... 

The content of a list in the XML format differs in some respects from that of the CSV format. In the XML format, each list opens with the list number, a description of the list, and an issue number for the list as a whole, which specifies the issue when the list was added or last changed (in addition to the issue number against each individual code value).