23.01.2012
09.01.2012
23.11.2011
Photo: EDItEUR website
ARROW messages released as an official ONIX standard
The first official release of
ONIX for Rights Information Services (ONIX-RS) – the development of which has drawn heavily upon the work of the EC-funded
ARROW Project and the inputs of ARROW partner organizations – has been published on the EDItEUR website as an official standard of the ONIX family.
ONIX-RS consists of a suite of XML messages to communicate information about rights, primarily for books. It supports comprehensive, due diligence searches by libraries engaged in digitizing their print collections or seeking to make the associated content more widely available.
From ARROW to a more generic format
From its first formal v1.0 release, ONIX-RS has deliberately been generalized and made more generic in its terminology, so that it can in principle support any rights information services or partnerships that may in future emerge. It is thus, by design, useful for but not limited to the ARROW initiative.
ONIX-RS joins ONIX-PL and ONIX for RROs as EDItEUR extends the standard formats it offers in the related areas of license terms and rights information.
ONIX-RS message formats
The ONIX-RS messages support various aspects of the rights discovery process:
• Processes of searching, matching and clustering against a number of reference sources: these may be national or international library databases, books in print agencies, authority files such as VIAF, etc.
• Declarations of license terms or usage permissions sought by the requesting library.
• Advice from books in print agencies on the publishing status and availability of related book products, insofar as these may impact upon the likely grant of licenses.
• Responses from reproduction rights organizations (RROs) advising upon the grant/refusal of licenses or passing on other information to enable the requesting library to bring the process to an orderly conclusion.
• Administrative communication to and from a central service that manages the rights discovery process.
ONIX-RS documentation
Documentation for ONIX-RS is available in two formats, PDF and HTML, both downloadable from the EDItEUR website.
The set of PDF documentation consists of an Overview and a series of Tabular Descriptions, one per message. The Overview explains the business context for each of the messages: there are a total of 14 messages in all, in seven “request/response” pairs. The individual Tabular Descriptions explain the message structures and each of the data items that they contain.
Alternatively, Version 1.0 of ONIX-RS is also described as a set of HTML Documentation, created directly from the XML schemas using the
XML Schema and codelists
In common with other ONIX standards, ONIX-RS is expressed in XML and controlled via an XML schema. The schema and associated codelists are available as a zipped package from the EDItEUR website.
Further information or suggestions
For further information on any aspect of ONIX-RS, please contact EDItEUR via info@editeur.org. The same address can be used to send suggestions or other feedback regarding the standard and its future development.
For more information on EDItEUR, please check their website: www.editeur.org or email info@editeur.org.
For more information about the ARROW Plus project and use of ONIX–RS message formats within the ARROW system, please check the ARROW website: www.arrow-net.eu or e-mail arrow@aie.it
