August 4, 2015 – Beaverton, OR – Ringgold is delighted to announce that over 400,000 ISNI numbers for organizations are now available in the Identify Database, representing 99% coverage.
Ringgold became the first ISNI Registration Agency for institutions in May 2012 and has participated in the standardization of institutional identifiers since 2005. We have been working with ISNI over the last three years to improve and standardize the assignment of ISNI numbers for organizations, which have different characteristics than individuals. Ringgold is now pleased to be able to release ISNIs to all Identify customers and to the general public.
The International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) is an ISO standard (ISO 27729) that identifies public identities of individuals and organizations. The ISNI number is not intended to provide direct access to comprehensive information about a “Public Identity” – instead, it is designed to act as a ‘bridge identifier’ to link systems where comprehensive information is held, such as Ringgold’s Identify Database.
The ISNI number is an open identifier in that it may be freely shared with any other person or party without restriction. In this way, ISNI provides a “bridge” between any public or proprietary dataset where the ISNI number has been incorporated.
ISNI number syntax
An ISNI number consists of 16 numerical digits. Example: ISNI 1234 1234 1234 1234
How to obtain an ISNI number
For Ringgold customers:
ISNI numbers have been included in Ringgold’s Identify Database at no additional charge to customers. As new records are added to Identify, we will obtain new ISNI numbers from the ISNI Assignment Agency automatically.
For organizations wishing to obtain the ISNI number for their own institution:
Ringgold provides a free lookup service for ISNI numbers at: ido.ringgold.com. To search for your Organization and its assigned ISNI number, simply login (registration is free) and use the simple search tool. If your organization is not listed, we will supply a new ISNI upon request for a small fee. For more information, please visit www.ringgold.com/isni
For organizations wishing to obtain ISNI numbers for multiple institutions:
There are two options, you can become a Ringgold customer and enjoy the benefits of all of the associated metadata about institutions that are not available with an ISNI number alone, or you can obtain the ISNI numbers only. For more information, please visit www.ringgold.com/isni
About Ringgold – Ringgold supports a scholarly supply chain where information and data about subscribers, authors, readers, and content is able to flow easily and without confusion. With the Identify Database and affiliated services, Ringgold provides unique and persistent identifiers and authoritative quantitative and qualitative metadata on institutions from every market sector involved in scholarly and academic communications globally. Ringgold’s ProtoView service enhances the discovery of scholarly works by creating and disseminating standard metadata via an extensive distribution network. Our clients utilize Ringgold’s services to improve internal data governance, increase discoverability of published works, and maximize the potential of their data. For additional information, visit www.ringgold.com.
About ISNI – ISNI is the ISO certified global standard number for identifying the millions of contributors to creative works and those active in their distribution, including researchers, inventors, writers, artists, visual creators, performers, producers, publishers, aggregators, and more.
The mission of the ISNI International Authority (ISNI-IA) is to assign to the public name(s) of a researcher, inventor, writer, artist, performer, publisher, etc. a persistent unique identifying number in order to resolve the problem of name ambiguity in search and discovery; and diffuse each assigned ISNI across all repertoires in the global supply chain so that every published work can be unambiguously attributed to its creator wherever that work is described. For additional information, visit www.isni.org.
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