Beaverton, OR, USA
Ringgold Inc has acquired Book News Inc, a Portland based company serving academic and scholarly publishers by providing book summarization services for all scholarly titles, particularly in the sciences, including technology, engineering, and medicine.
Ringgold, also headquartered in Oregon, provides services to many of these same academic publishers by matching their customers to an internationally recognized standard identifier for all types of institutions, across all sectors of the market that consumes scholarly and online content. Ringgold’s database, called Identify, now contains more than 300,000 institutional names along with related metadata.
For more than thirty years publishers have relied upon Book News to create professional abstracts of newly published monographs. The summaries are then released to the supply chain, reaching library acquisitions departments and individual scholars through various online services, including Bowker, EBSCO, ProQuest, and Gale and book resellers, such as Baker & Taylor and YBP. Ringgold expects to continue to create abstracts of printed books but also to expand the Book News programs to incorporate e-books and other online content.
Fred Gullette founded Book News in 1977 as a part of the Academic Book Center, a major supplier of academic books to libraries in the 1970s and 1980s. It has served as a promotional service for publishers ever since. “After more than fifty-five years in the book business, it’s time to let go,” said Fred, “and what is pleasing to me is that my company has gone into the hands of Ringgold, which already has programs devoted to serving the needs of publishers. This will be a dynamic and synergistic fit.”
About Ringgold
Ringgold (www.ringgold.com) has created a process for the accurate identification of institutions and the relationships between them. Each institutional entity has been assigned its own unique Ringgold ID, which is mapped to the organizational hierarchy and a range of classification metadata, including consortium membership.
Ringgold provides two main services:
- Identify – a database of over 300,000 organizations with Ringgold IDs and associated metadata.
- CDO – a directory of over 390 library consortia world-wide which licence online content, fully profiled for analysis and information regarding licensing and contacts.
More than 60 publishers currently use Ringgold’s databases and its related services to organize their customer data, prepare quotations for licenses and deals, and for market penetration and gap analyses.