About

Origin

The original project, lasselehtinen/onix-codelist, hosted at onix-codelists.io, was shut down by its author. Yet there's still 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, in Python, with a few features the original didn't have.

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 73 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, public JSON API. Go faster, or simply understand. In service of the wider ONIX community — publishers, ISBN agencies, systems integrators, developers, translators, students.

Contact

Feedback, ideas, fixes: hello@onixref.com.