Beaverton, Oregon; Crystal River, Florida; Tokyo, Japan.
Ringgold is pleased to announce an agreement with the Kinokuniya Company Ltd to work together to enhance the accuracy of the entries of the Japanese institutions within Ringgold’s OpenIdentify database, and to implement the Ringgold Institutional Identifier within Kinokuniya systems and supply the Identifier to publishers in the future.
The Ringgold database uniquely identifies 154,000 institutional entities that subscribe to academic journals and over 7,000 of these are in Japan. The associated metadata includes Japanese and English names, locations, URLs, sizes and subject categories, and Kinokuniya will be using their local knowledge to keep this metadata up to date in the rapidly changing Japanese markets, including corporations, government departments and academia.
More than 40 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 partners with other publisher services companies and consultants, including software and service providers such as DataSalon, Ingenta and Thomson Reuters
The Ringgold Identifier is important in all areas of data exchange in the e-resources supply chain and the National Standards Information Organization (NISO) supports a working group tasked with the goal of creating a national standard for institutional identification. Helen Henderson, Ringgold’s VP of Marketing, Research and Development, acts as consultant to this 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. Henderson said, “In the absence of a formal standard Ringgold has been encouraging subscription agents to adopt the Ringgold Identifier to ease the pain caused by miscommunications in the supply chain. Ringgold is committed to adopting the NISO standard as soon as it is available. I am pleased that the Kinokuniya Company has shown its excellent and continuing support for libraries and publishers by partnering with Ringgold”.
Kinokuniya, also as a member of ICEDIS, is committed to supporting standards in the supply chain and Mr. Toshiyuki Kawamura, Marketing Manager of Journal Department, commented that, “It is an honor that we will work together with Ringgold on this exciting initiative. As there are wide variances in Japanese institution names and due to the fact that rapid organization changes and mergers are making this situation more complicated, Ringgold’s identifier project is quite valuable for all the parties in the information chain. We start this new relationship by helping to increase the accuracy of Japanese institutions’ entries, but our goal is to implement this identifier to improve electronic communication between libraries, agents and publishers”.
For more information, please contact:
– Helen Henderson – helen@ringgold.com +1 (352) 436 4131
– Toshiyuki Kawamura – journal@kinokuniya.co.jp +81 3 6910 0532
ABOUT Kinokuniya
Kinokuniya Company Ltd. is based in Tokyo with over 4,000 employees. It is a leading bookstore chain in Japan, and its store network extends to the United States, Southeast Asian countries, Sydney and Dubai. Kinokuniya is also renowned as an importer of academic information products for universities, corporations and government institutions in Japan.
About Ringgold
Ringgold is based in Beaverton, Oregon, Crystal River, Florida, and Billericay England. Its mission is to help publishers and software vendors improve their marketing and reduce their costs in supplying products and services within the information industry. Ringgold’s two branded services are 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 use the information for creating RFPs or requests for tender. www.ringgold.com