Oxford, UK.
Ingenta, the technology provider that connects the publishing and information industries, is pleased to announce a new agreement with Ringgold, the company that creates and maintains a hierarchic database of identifiers for institutions to support publishers and other parties in the delivery of e-content within the information supply chain. Ringgold now licenses institutional IP data from Ingenta’s global access control system, enhancing the 100,000 records in its Identify Database of institutional identifiers. This collaboration represents the scholarly information industry’s first centralization of authentication data relating to academic, professional and business libraries worldwide.
The Ringgold-Ingenta partnership creates a functioning system in which administrative updates to one registration database (Ingenta) may be securely syndicated (via Ringgold) to other participating publishers’ systems. Ringgold’s forty publisher customers – including Oxford University Press, Taylor & Francis and SAGE – stand to benefit from the enhanced data, which will support more effective gap analysis and better targeted marketing activities, while Ingenta’s 270 publisher clients will be offered favourable terms to adopt the Ringgold solution.
“We’ve participated in many supply chain initiatives over the years”, comments Ringgold Managing Director, Helen Henderson, “but we believe this one improves upon them all in terms of the scale of data involved, and the potential scope for changing the way publishers and libraries interact. Ingenta’s team has been refreshingly creative and enthusiastic in their approach, and together we will prove that it is possible to streamline the process of accessing scholarly information for everyone”.
The partnership has arisen from both companies’ support for the principle of subsidiarity, whereby control is devolved to the lowest competent authority – in this case, institutional librarians. “Librarians are frustrated with the current piecemeal nature of registering for resources, and the multiple authentication profiles that need to be maintained as a result – particularly because a lot of those profiles do not support self-management. Our conversations with them suggest that in an ideal world, there’d be a single place to manage your institution’s details,” explains Kirsty Meddings, Product Development Manager at Ingenta. “In sharing the data we have compiled, which librarians can edit themselves, we’re taking the first step to making that ideal into a reality.”
This latest development extends the collaboration between Ringgold and Publishing Technology, parent company of Ingenta, VISTA and PCG. Other cooperative advances include VISTA’s adoption of the Ringgold identifier as a core field in its fulfillment software, and PCG’s partnership with Ringgold to provide marketing services that minimize inappropriate targeting of publishers’ sales communications.
For more information, please contact: Charlie Rapple Tel: +44 1865 397860 Email: charlie.rapple@ingenta.com
About Ingenta
Ingenta is the global market leader in online management and distribution of publications, allowing publishers to focus on their core business by outsourcing their online publishing requirements. Ingenta’s key competences include website design and development, data conversion and enhancement, secure online hosting, access & authentication and content discoverability management. Flagship web platform IngentaConnect provides 250 research publishers and societies with a ready-made audience (of over 25,000 libraries) for their publications. For libraries and information professionals, the site offers comprehensive collection management and document delivery options for over 30,000 publications.
In 2007, Ingenta merged with VISTA International to form Publishing Technology plc, the largest provider of publishing software solutions. The company is listed on the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange and has offices in Europe and North America. www.ingenta.com
About Ringgold
Ringgold is based in Beaverton, OR and Bristol, 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 RFIs or requests for tender. www.ringgold.com