Happy Holidays from Ringgold!

As we approach the close of another extraordinary year, we would like to wish all of our customers and partners a peaceful season and a hopeful new year. We missed seeing many of our customers in person in 2021, and we hope that we will have the opportunity to do this in 2022. We have, however, met with many customers virtually and we continue to work closely with all clients to ensure that Ringgold’s services meet their needs. We have been very busy throughout the year with the curation and development of the Identify Database and are pleased to continue to welcome new customers.

We wish everyone very happy and safe holidays.

Ringgold Data Services is delighted to welcome to following new clients

• Higher Council for Science and Technology Jordan
• nkoda

Identify Database API 2.9

Ringgold has released a new API call by change date, which returns Ringgold IDs that have changed within a defined date range (up to one month).

• Release notes for 2.9: https://support.ringgold.com/identify-database-api-rest-version-2-9/
• Documentation for 2.9: https://app.swaggerhub.com/apis-docs/RINGGOLD-INC/RinggoldIdentifyRestApi/2.9

CDO & OA Deals

Ringgold’s Consortium Directory Online (CDO) is a valuable resource about library consortia worldwide. CDO provides entries for nearly 400 consortia, with an overview for each describing its history, structure, acquisition policies, licensing requirements, and contact information (excluding countries under GDPR) as well as member lists and vendor relationships. Effective 2021, CDO now notes the Open Access agreements announced by vendors and consortia. This information helps CDO users as they consider implementing their own OA agreements by highlighting which consortia are actively making deals, and which vendors they have announced OA deals with.

Open ISNI for Organizations service

As an ISNI Registration Authority, Ringgold is able to create ISNIs (International Standard Name Identifier) which is an ISO standard.

In response to feedback from our users we have updated our free Open ISNI service. Open ISNI for Organizations is a free Ringgold service that provides ISNIs for organizations. To optimize usability and interoperability, we have re-engineered the free and open service we provide to limit the results to top-level organizations only.

The service provides:

• An API to obtain and resolve existing ISNIs for organizations > Click here
• An online look-up service to search for organizations and obtain ISNIs > Click here
• An online look-up service to search by ISNI > Click here

The services are free to use and do not require registration. The ISNI data that Ringgold is providing is open, and may be utilised and shared freely.

ISNIs and the new CrossRef DIO schema

The new CrossRef DOI schema release has been updated to support the inclusion of open institutional identifiers related to authors affiliated organizations. With this change, ISNI IDs can be included in DOI metadata deposited to CrossRef via the element.

ISNI is making data sets for people and organizations available CC0

ISNI Data sets are being made available in two formats – RDF/XML and JSON-LD. The data is available in the form of downloadable data dumps, refreshed every six months, for ISNI person and organization records, and is freely available (under a CC0 waiver). For further information, see here: https://isni.org/page/linked-data/  

We’re constantly working in the background to enhance our services for you

We were delighted this year to have reached another milestone, by creating the 600,000th Ringgold ID! (Ringgold ID 600000 Florida Gulf Coast University U A Whitaker College of Engineering).

So far in 2021, our expert researchers have added 23,528 new records and updated 56,839 records in the Identify Database.

We review and update FTE data from official sources on an ongoing basis, and this has recently included:

• USA: all NCES listed colleges and universities (those with an IPEDS number)
• GB: All higher education institutions listed by HESA
• Australia & New Zealand: all CAUL consortium members
• Canada: 95 member universities of Universities Canada
• France: around 80 public universities
• Germany: All A4 universities have been updated, majority of A3 universities.
• Italy: all A4 universities
• Norway: all public A3 and A4 universities
• Sweden: all A4 universities
• Switzerland: all public A3 and A4 universities

In addition to this work we recently reviewed and updated the university and colleges records of:

• Ringgold ID 1085 SUNY The State University of New York System
• Ringgold ID 3777 Montana University System
• Ringgold ID 7938 University of Toronto
• Ringgold ID 7180 Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico
• Ringgold ID 27210 Universitat Bern
• Ringgold ID 9296 Universita degli Studi di Bologna
• Ringgold ID 2112 Cardiff University

In cooperation with a client earlier in the year, we increased the granularity of and completed the hierarchies for many universities in eastern Asia and Pacific region by adding departments, research groups and programmes. These included Queensland University of Technology, The University of Hong Kong, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Vietnam National Universities Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City and the National Taiwan University. Ringgold will review organization hierarchies on demand for a small fee. If you feel your organization’s hierarchy is incomplete, or otherwise in need of an update, please contact info@ringgold.com for more information about how to get the process started. 

Consortium Directory Online update

Since September, we have fully updated over 100 profiles, including JISC (Ringold ID 128554), IReL (Ringgold ID 53008), KESLI (Ringgold ID 119747), VIVA (Ringgold ID 27708), and NERL (Ringgold ID 42263). They now contain the most up to date members, contact information, general information, publisher deals, and deal types such as Open Access, and Read and Publish. Additional profiles have been updated to reflect the most recent Open Access and Read and Publish deals.

Customer Support over the holidays

The entire Ringgold staff team would like to wish all of our customers and colleagues a very happy holiday season and say THANK YOU for your support over the past year.

During the festive period we will be closed December 24 and January 3. Otherwise, our holiday support availability is Monday through Friday (US East Coast office hours) and we will aim to get back to you during this time within one working day. Email any questions to support@ringgold.com

Identify Database exports for Local Loading will continue as usual over the period. Our Validate Service will be available as normal, though we are not able to guarantee a 24-hour turnaround on new records submitted between December 23 and January 3. Please visit our dedicated Support Site to find answers to the most commonly asked questions about Ringgold’s services: https://support.ringgold.com/