onixref

About

The drive

onixref grew out of a simple urge: giving the ONIX codelists the lookup tool they deserve. There is a clear need on the metadata and book-chain developer side: a fast, multilingual search engine over the ONIX codelists, with citable URLs. That's what onixref offers, and the project will keep evolving to bring more useful features.

Status

Unofficial tool. EDItEUR remains the sole authority on the ONIX standard; in case of any divergence, EDItEUR prevails. All data comes from their public sources — Issue 74 available from EDItEUR, FR/ES translations from ns.editeur.org. No affiliation, no change to the standard. Only the presentation differs.

Why

EDItEUR's documentation is rigorous but heavy to navigate: you have to open a PDF or a per-codelist view just to check a single code. onixref offers another way in — instant search over the 166 codelists in EN/FR/ES, stable URLs (/codes/150/BB) for citing or sharing, ready-to-copy ONIX 3.0 snippets, batch CSV export, ONIX file validation. Go faster, or simply understand. In service of the wider ONIX community — publishers, ISBN agencies, systems integrators, developers, translators, students.

Artificial intelligence

onixref is generated with an expert AI (Claude, by Anthropic) in the hands of a metadata expert, who directs, reviews and validates. In the vocabulary of the FAIR AI Attribution (FAIA) framework, the site carries the AIG label (AI-Generated Content). The data itself remains strictly EDItEUR's, unaltered.

Contact

Feedback, ideas, fixes: [email protected]. The site is free to use, but hosting it isn't: anyone can help the project along by buying me a small coffee.