Vision
Because standards are critical to efficient data exchange between suppliers and consumers of information, Ringgold is an active corporate member of NISO. Helen Henderson serves on the Business Information Topic Committee.
Within the OpenRFP process, applicable standards are available for libraries to use in developing their procurement specifications.
Ringgold believes its own business will benefit by establishment of an international standard for institutional identifiers and the Company is actively supporting an initiative to bring this about.
Identify market analysis and sales opportunities
Ringgold has developed a database of institutions which subscribe to journals. The organizations include companies, governmental departments, academic institutions, hospitals and other medical institutions, not-for-profits, charities, and many more. This database includes metadata such as legal name, alternative names, location, demographics, URL, and other metrics such as size, tier and type of organization.
Attached to the metadata are a series of identifiers which can be mapped to each other to allow different parts of the journal supply chain to communicate seamlessly. The database currently covers over 125,000 organizations in all the major subscribing countries in the world and is expanding rapidly.
The ultimate aim is to have an authoritative database of the institutions and their identifiers which can be used by any participant in the publishing supply and value chain.
Ringgold is working with all the participants in the journal supply chain to make the transfer of information more efficient and to make sure that content is made available quickly and seamlessly to the consumer market.
Links
OpenRFP system procurement made easy
Procurement of complex software for publishers and libraries is not easy. The requirements and specifications are changing daily with the advent of more automation and vendor specifications and capabilities are increasing all the time.
Ringgold has development a series of procurement templates which allows purchasing libraries or other organizations to select their requirements from prepared lists, then to weight these requirements in several ways, and finally to allow online responses from all potential vendors.
The vendors have already matched their responses to OpenRFP's specifications in such a way they can edit them for a particular RFP while responding more quickly overall.
OpenRFP can be used currently for the procurement of integrated library systems, RFID, Electronic Resource Management systems, Interlibrary loan software; publishing fulfilment and hosting systems procurment are in development.