Ringgold becomes the first contracted ISNI Registration Agency for Institutions

Beaverton, OR,USA

Ringgold Inc. has contracted with the ISNI International Agency to be the first ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier) Registration Agency for institutional identification.

Ringgold will incorporate ISNIs into its Identify Database of institutional identifiers and distribute these ISNIs without charge to Ringgold’s Identify clients. For Ringgold’s clients, this will immediately affect over 300,000 institutions worldwide.

Building on several years of experience in providing institutional identification, Ringgold will be working with ISNI on the technical requirements for the addition of ISNI Numbers to Ringgold’s Identify Database. It is anticipated that all Ringgold institutional records will have an ISNI attached to them in the latter part of 2012. During the first year of operation, clients using Ringgold’s standard Identify services will receive ISNI Numbers without additional charge, to encourage them to incorporate ISNIs into their workflows and services. Organizations acquiring just ISNIs without Ringgold’s other services will be charged on a sliding scale based on the quantity of ISNIs required.

In addition, Ringgold’s free look-up service will display ISNI Numbers as well as Ringgold ID Numbers. The free look-up service is available at www.openidentify.com which, after registration, enables users to search for and obtain an institutional identification number as well as basic location information and the Ringgold Standard Name for an institution.

ISNI has been designed as a bridge identifier between identification methods across the media industry. It provides a unique identification number for any public party, such as authors, fictional characters, musicians, rights holders, publishers, and institutions. Since 2005, Ringgold has been providing institutional identification services to publishers and intermediaries through its Auditing services and Identify Database.

Laura Cox, VP of Sales and Marketing at Ringgold said: “We are delighted to have been recognised as an authority on institutional identification by ISNI and anticipate that the ability to assign ISNI numbers to institutions will open up a wide range of possibilities for everyone working in the content creation industry. The ability to map data from one source to the next gives tremendous power to the data that is generated on a day-to-day basis.”

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. (www.consortiumdirectory.com)

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.

For further information please contact info@ringgold.com.

About the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI)

The International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) is an ISO Standard (ISO 27729:2012) whose scope is the identification of public identities across multiple fields of creative activities. ISNI streamlines content distribution chains, disambiguating natural, legal and even fictional parties that might otherwise be confused. ISNI is a creation of the ISNI International Agency (ISNI-IA) founded by CISAC, the Conference of European National Librarians (represented by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the British Library), IFRRO, IPDA, OCLC and ProQuest. The founding members include consortia representing more than 26,000 major world libraries, 300 rights management societies and research information giants OCLC and ProQuest, along with its business unit Bowker.