A Crosswalk from ONIX Version 3.0 for Books to MARC 21

An OCLC Research Report by:
Jean Godby,Ph.D., OCLC Research

Download the report (.pdf: 666K/37 pp.)
Download the crosswalk (.xls: 272K/18 sheets)

A Crosswalk from ONIX Version 3.0 for Books to MARC 21 describes the crosswalk developed at OCLC for mapping the bibliographic elements defined in Version 3.0 of ONIX for Books to MARC 21 with AACR2 encoding. It is an update to the previous report, Mapping ONIX to MARC, which was published in 2010 and focused on ONIX 2.1.

The new version of ONIX requires a major revision to the crosswalk because of various changes introduced in ONIX 3.0. Despite these changes, however, the MARC record that is produced from the new crosswalk is only slightly different from the output generated by the previous version. The reasons for this are examined in detail.

This report describes the layout of the crosswalk and a strategy for deriving ONIX 3.0 syntax from ONIX 2.1, including a note about how the translation logic is implemented at OCLC. It also builds a complex MARC record from ONIX 3.0 input, focusing on relationships that constitute an important source of shared value in the library and publisher communities, are newly introduced or extensively revised in ONIX 3.0, or illustrate unresolved conceptual problems with bibliographic description. In the process of creating this record, it becomes apparent that some of the concepts introduced in ONIX 3.0 are not easily expressed in a MARC record with AACR2 semantics. The report concludes by speculating about how the MARC output might be improved if the AACR2 semantics is replaced by RDA.

Related information:

Activity page:
Metadata Schema Transformation Services

Author's Video (2:26):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkMkd7Rm_1A

Report publication announcement:
New Report: A Crosswalk from ONIX Version 3.0 for Books to MARC 21

Suggested citation:
Godby, Carol Jean. 2012. A Crosswalk from ONIX Version 3.0 for Books to MARC 21. Dublin, Ohio: OCLC Research. http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2012/2012-04.pdf (report) and http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2012/2012-04a.xls (crosswalk).