As of the summer of 2020, Catalist remains primarily powered by ONIX 2.1 data due to the limited amount of ONIX 3.0 data available in the Canadian supply chain. However we are now starting to see a significant shift of more publishers transitioning to ONIX 3.0, and that opens up new opportunities for CataList to pull data points that were not supported in the previous ONIX 2.1 version.

The information below details the ONIX 3.0 fields that CataList has started to pull in where available.

Contributor Locations

CataList is beginning to pull in new data points that are available in the publisher ONIX 3.0 data files, as adoption of ONIX 3.0 increases.

One of the most interesting new data points available is the data contained in the <ContributorPlace> composite, which allow publishers to indicate not just the contributor's nationality, but also the region (meaning the province in Canada) as well as city or town.

When CataList has access to this data from publishers, we now display it to signed-in users of CataList, in the Author Bio section of the title detail page!

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When searching in CataList, you can also drill down to the province level to locate authors more local to your store or library. When the Contributor Location refine box displays as an option in the left sidebar of the Search Results page, that means CataList has location data available for at least some of the titles in your search result set. As ONIX 3.0 adoption ramps up, this data will be populated more consistently. If you find it to be useful data, let your reps and publisher contacts know that this data point is important to you!

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How to supply Contributor Locations in ONIX 3.0

After support for ONIX 2.1 ended back in December 2014, adoption of the updated ONIX 3.0 standard underwent a very slow ramp up in North America. But as business needs for new fields to better support digital books and other key content, it's beginning to be adopted at a quicker pace. The <ContributorPlace> elements are only supported in ONIX 3.0. If you need more general information on the ONIX 3.0 standard, or have questions about how to upgrade, check out BookNet Canada's Collected resources on the transition from ONIX 2.1 to ONIX 3.0.

For the <ContributorPlace> composite, it is an optional and repeatable composite inside the <Contributor> composite.

In the image above, you can see a simplified <Contributor> composite where we can see the first contributor's role and names, followed by two instances of the <ContributorPlace>. <ContributorPlace> is an optional and repeatable composite, used for expressing different information about locations and how your book's contributor(s) relate to each place. These relationships are indicated using the place relator codes from code list 151.

In this example, the first data point provided is a country code 'CA' using place relator '08' - meaning "citizen of". This structure indicates that this author is a Canadian citizen, and this is the accepted method of indicating Canadian authors in ONIX 3.0.  

If you know more about the author's relationship to specific provinces, towns or cities, you can add additional repeats of the <ContributorPlace> to express those relationships. For CataList's purposes, we are specifically pulling the data point that indicates a contributor's current residence (place relator code '04') or where they flourished (code '07') in the case of a deceased person.

If you know more place relationships for your contributors, add composite repeats as needed to detail all of the connections.