Ringgold and ISNIs

Ringgold has become the first contracted ISNI Registration Agency for Institutions. Ringgold will incorporate ISNIs into its Identify Database of institutional identifiers and distribute these ISNIs without charge to Ringgold’s Identify clients. For Ringgold’s clients, this will immediately affect over 300,000 institutions worldwide.

Building on several years of experience in providing institutional identification, Ringgold will be working with ISNI on the technical requirements for the addition of ISNI Numbers to Ringgold’s Identify Database. It is anticipated that all Ringgold institutional records will have an ISNI attached to them in the latter part of 2012. During the first year of operation, clients using Ringgold’s standard Identify services will receive ISNI Numbers without additional charge, to encourage them to incorporate ISNIs into their workflows and services. Organizations acquiring just ISNIs without Ringgold’s other services will be charged on a sliding scale based on the quantity of ISNIs required.

In addition, Ringgold’s free look-up service will display ISNI Numbers as well as Ringgold ID Numbers. The free look-up service is available at www.openidentify.com which, after registration, enables users to search for and obtain an institutional identification number as well as basic location information and the Ringgold Standard Name for an institution.

ISNI has been designed as a bridge identifier between identification methods across the media industry. It provides a unique identification number for any public party, such as authors, fictional characters, musicians, rights holders, publishers, and institutions. Since 2005, Ringgold has been providing institutional identification services to publishers and intermediaries through its Auditing services and Identify Database.

Identify Database Update

Identify has broken through the 300,000 barrier and now contains 301,600 records with over 7,000 records added in May 2012. Our coverage of academic bookstores in the USA has expanded with hundreds of new records added within the Follett Higher Education Corp, Nebraska Book Company and Barnes and Noble College Booksellers Inc, plus hundreds more owned/operated by individual colleges. We are also busy ensuring that our hierarchical coverage of academic institutions in the USA is complete and 100% comprehensive so we have been filling in the gaps for US faculties, schools and colleges.

Staff Changes

There has been a new permanent appointment as part of a staff reorganization at Ringgold. We welcome Kelley Hewson as Research Team Manager. Kelley was previously a contracted researcher for the Identify Database and has been with us since 2010. She now reports to Michelle Koster who takes over responsibility for the Production Department in her new role as Production Manager. Michelle will concentrate more on working with our customers on their requirements, and on more strategic issues. Gisele Rawlins has been promoted from the Production Team to Sales and is now Ringgold’s Customer Support Manager. Contact her for any training or user queries. She will also be regularly updating our social media presence and overhauling Ringgold’s corporate website. Gisele’s role was previously fulfilled by Rachel Taylor, who has moved to Production and is now Classifications Editor. Rachel ensures editorial policy for the Identify Database is achieved. Ankie Visschedijk has been promoted to Chief Editor within the Production team and maintains content quality of Identify and CDO.

Social Media

Ringgold now has a presence on Twitter and Facebook. Follow or ‘like us’ for the latest updates, news and inside gossip.

Consortium Directory Online (CDO) Updates

The following consortia have been added recently:

India
– DMER e-Library Consortium (DMER)
– NTRMEDNET Consortium and Digital Library (NTRMEDNET)
– National Library and Information Services Infrastructure for Scholarly Content (N-LIST)

Poland
– Interdyscyplinarne Centrum Modelowania Matematycznego i Komputerowego (ICM)

Russian Federation
– ICSTI Consortium for Joint Acquisition of Electronic Information Editions (ICSTI)

United States
– SAILS Library Network (SAILS)

If you have any suggestions for future developments to CDO, or wish to provide us with any feedback, please contact us at info@ringgold.com

SSP Preconference: Identifiers in Digital World

On June 29, representatives from ORCID, Altametric, SSRN, and Thomson Reuters stressed how unique researcher identifiers can both solve current problems and create new opportunities. Without a unique ID for researchers or authors, how can we know if Dr. Barbara Smith, B. Smith, and Dr. B. Smith-Jones are the same person; all of whom have authored papers on femtosecond laser pulses? Such ambiguity makes it impossible to reconcile researchers’ myriad contributions to the scholarly record, and participation in their field of research. On the upside, unique IDs applied to individuals, organizations, and articles enable powerful joined-up reporting: Altametric is now able to quantify and qualify how much attention specific articles receive via social media and web services. Thomson Reuters is integrating ORCID into Scholar One and their Researcher ID services, which will facilitate the manuscript submission and enable the assignment of the proper subject-specific editor.

Two primary initiatives are now taking root to rectify these issues, as they relate specifically to individuals: ORCID, the Open Researcher & Contributor ID, which seeks to provide a registry of persistent unique IDs for researchers & scholars, as well as automated linkages to research objects such as publications, grants, and patents. The other is ISNI, the International Standard Name Identifier. ISNI is an ISO Standard (ISO 27729) which identifies parties who create or manage content, thereby covering both authors, publishers, and other institutions. Ringgold has recently been contracted as the first ISNI registration agency for institutions (see above). As unique IDs increase in importance, they will become an integral part of a researcher’s “digital handshake” ensuring we know who is applying for research funding, employment, academic promotion, and enable those active in scholarly communication to build a secure personal brand around their publicati ons, grants, and citations. Look for more on this rapidly evolving topic.

Types Project

Thank you to all customers and contacts who have so far participated in the Types project. The feedback has been very valuable and we are currently making revisions to the schema to ready it for internal testing. The testing process will involve our researchers in applying the multiple faceted strings to each institution and applying all of the additional metadata that we have developed. This may take a few weeks, but we anticipate testing in all sectors and looking for any institutions which are likely to cause problems, if you have any suggestions for institutions that you would particularly like to see tested please let Laura Cox know at info@ringgold.com. Also, if you have any further feedback on types and metadata that you would like to see appear in the database it would be a good time to send that information through.

Events

Ringgold will be attending the following events in the next few weeks:

ALA Annual Conference
21-26 June 2012, Anaheim, CA

ALPSP Annual Conference
11-13 September 2012, The Belfry, nr Birmingham, UK

STM Annual Conference
9 October 2012, Frankfurt, Germany

Frankfurt Book Fair
10-14 October 2012, Frankfurt, Germany

If you would like to arrange an appointment, please contact us at info@ringgold.com

Spotlight on … Russia

Officially known as the Russian Federation, Russia is a federal semi-presidential republic comprising of 83 federal subjects or constituent entities. It is the largest country in the world and eighth most populous nation, containing the planet’s largest reserves of mineral and energy resources.

Russia is economically grouped along with Brazil, India and China as a ‘BRIC’ country; deemed to be at a stage of newly advanced economic development. It is one of the world’s fastest-growing major economies, undergoing significant economic changes since the collapse of the Soviet Union, moving from a globally-isolated, centrally-planned economy to a more market-based and globally-integrated economy.

  • GDP figure for Russia is $1,479,819,314,058 (World Bank, 2010).
  • Exports of goods and services is 30% (World Bank, 2010).
  • Unemployment rate in Russia is est. 6.5% (International Labour Organisations, 2011).
  • Literacy rate of adults in the region is 100% (UNESCO, 2007).
  • The population in Russia was estimated at 142,958,000 (WHO, 2010) and is likely to be stagnant for the next 4-5 years (Forbes, 2012).

You might find these of interest…

  • The 24th Moscow International Book Fair is the largest in Russia and is organised by the state General Directorate of International Book Exhibitions and Fairs (founded by Ministry of Communications). The dates for 2012 are 5-10 September.
  • What Creates the Market for Paid Academic Journals in Russia? Find out here.
  • ‘Russian Academics and Paid Publication Practices’, article from Scholarly Kitchen.
  • Vladimir Putin’s promise to increase research spending is welcome, news from Nature.
  • Russia Struggles to maintain Research Output, a Thomson Reuters study.
  • Read an Analysis of Scientific Output of BRIC countries here.
Meet Our Researcher

Galya Umansky, who has been working with Ringgold for over 4 years, says:

“I am a librarian with a Master’s degree in Library and Information Studies. My native languages are Russian and Hebrew, and I read Serbian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Belarus and Slovenian. My work for Ringgold is interesting and challenging, it allows me to use my multilingual skills and precision and keen attention to detail of a librarian. I audit mainly Former Soviet Union, Eastern European and Israeli records. To compile a profile of a Russian institution, I Google a name of the organization in Russian, then look for the relevant information on its website. A Cyrillic converter translit.cc helps to transliterate Russian (as well as Ukrainian and Bulgarian) to the Latin alphabet, according to ISO 9 standard. Some Russian audit records can be tricky as the names are sometimes already (mis)translated into English in the publishers’ data. Hence, I have to translate them back to Russian and then search for the original name online. Many Russian subscribers are scient ific research institutes which are often affiliated to the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The academic sector in Russia is similar to most other Eastern European countries. Most universities are research-heavy and PHD-granting. All education (schools, colleges and universities) used to be free. Today it is both free and fee-paying”.

We find that data from these web sites provides a good starting point for some of our research on institutions in Russia:

Ringgold’s data in Russia

Ringgold holds almost 1,800 records for Russia in the Identify Database, these are growing steadily in number. The majority of those are academic and non-profit research institutions.
Although there is a lack of authoritative websites on the internet that we use for research purposes, there is added value to Russian records because we have to look harder for data.

We have excellent coverage of the Russian Academy of Sciences, whose hierarchy contains 581 research institutions of a wide-variety of types.

Consortia data is held on CDO for ICSTI Consortium for Joint Acquisition of Electronic Information Editions, Neicon Russia (249 members) and Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR, 205 members).