Beaverton, Oregon; Crystal River, Florida; London, UK.
Ringgold is pleased to announce that its Identify worldwide database of institutions, institutional entities and their related metadata now exceeds 200,000 records, compared to the benchmark set late in 2009 when the database contained fewer than 125,000 records. This expansion reflects a wider scope from the increasing take up by the information industry, as well as a more granular approach to identification within institutions.
Each record in the database contains a unique identifier and other essential information about the institution, including its consortia memberships, affiliated purchasing groups and its hierarchical relationships to subsidiaries and other organizations. Metrics include custom tiers describing the type and size of the organization, allowing comparisons to similar organizations worldwide.
Nearly all of the records in the database relate to organizations that purchase academic and research material, usually through subscription. Numerous small, medium-sized and large publishers currently use Ringgold’s database and its related services to organize their customer data, prepare quotations for licenses and deals, and also for market analysis. Ringgold’s web service, OpenIdentify, supports extensive searching, standard reporting, market penetration surveys and “gap” analysis for smaller publishers who use it to host their subscription data. For larger publishers Ringgold works with the software integration company, Data Salon, to use their MasterVision product to integrate multiple internal data sources with the Identify Database.
The National Standards Information Organization (NISO) is actively supporting the goal of creating a national standard for institutional identification. Helen Henderson, Ringgold’s VP of Marketing, Research and Development, acts as consultant to the NISO I2 Working Group on Institutional Identifiers, which is establishing standards for applications in e-resource publishing, e-learning, institutional repositories, and library management systems. The NISO midterm report can be downloaded from: http://groups.niso.org/workrooms/i2/midtermreport.
About Ringgold www.ringgold.com
Ringgold is based in Beaverton, Oregon, Crystal River, Florida, and London, England. Its mission is to help publishers and software vendors improve their marketing while reducing costs in supplying products and services. Ringgold supports two services: OpenIdentify – providing unique identification of organizations subscribing to electronic journals, and OpenRFP – providing an online eProcurement system where software vendors present functions to libraries that can use the information for creating RFPs or requests for tender.