User:Cindycpaa/sandbox

ONIX, the ONline Information eXchange, a publisher metadata standard
ONIX began in New York City in July, 1999 when Carol Risher convened a group of nearly 60 people representing the publishing industry--including publishers, distributors, and others in the publishing supply chain--including representatives from Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com and Borders.com. Carol was then VP for Copyright and New Technology for the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and she knew from her publisher members that managing metadata for the various new, online retailers was proving to be a huge challenge for publishers who were used to using the minimum metadata required to enable shipping and internal title management. She also acknowledged she had heard from her stepson, David Risher, who was a vice president at Amazon.com, how difficult it was for an online retailer to use the publisher-provided metadata to create complete representations of books for sale. Data from publishers was inaccurate, truncated, and minimal, lacking the enriched information, like complete author names and names of multiple authors, full titles and subtitles, and other, important information like series name and original publication date.

On that hot, July day in the Broadway Street offices of the AAP, Carol let every attendee vent on the challenges of getting the data sent correctly to the various online retailers, when every company wanted the data in a different format. The group agreed that a new standard had to be created, and those in the room pledged to support it.

The original working committee shrunk from close to 60 to around 20 people as the length of the monthly meetings expanded, and the work became more granular and demanding. On January 20, 2000, the AAP unveiled the first version of the ONIX standard by holding a meeting in New York City to announce the standard and reiterate the pledge of the presenters and their organizations to use the new standard. The presenters on stage that day were Wendell Lotz, head of cataloging at Ingram; Michael Cairns, then CEO of Bowker; Sam Dempsey of Baker & Taylor, Cindy Aden (then Cunningham), head of Catalog at Amazon.com and Laura Dawson, then head of Catalog at BarnesandNoble.com. At that time Amazon and BarnesandNoble.com were competing fiercely, and both Aden and Dawson can attest that under no circumstances were the two companies allowed to talk to each other, let alone work together to solve a common problem. The cost of correcting and adding to book metadata, however, was significant in both organizations, and both women were able to convince the executives in their companies that cooperating on a data standard benefitted the publishers, saved operational costs and allowed both companies to focus their competition on the user experience and pricing and not on product details.