Beaverton, Oregon.

Ringgold is delighted to announce that the Identify Database now contains over 300,000 institutional records. The Identify Database provides the unique identification of institutional entities that are acquiring scholarly and professional content. Each organisation or part thereof is assigned a unique identification number, known as the Ringgold Number, which will be joined by an ISNI later this year. Publishers and intermediaries use the Identify Database to disambiguate their customer data and to compare it to the rest of the applicable universe of institutions which acquire content.

Identify also contains the details of each organisation’s hierarchy and a range of additional metadata, including classifications. Ringgold is currently working on building on this metadata by consulting with customers on a “types” project, adding granularity to the classification system to improve the ability to run very specific analyses of the data and development of precise target lists. This project will also add several new metadata elements including a concept of the level of an institution, where it sits within a set structure, to enable publishers to apply their own business rules to customer data and non-customer data alike.

Laura Cox, VP of Sales and Marketing at Ringgold, said: “Ringgold will continue to expand and enhance the Identify Database, and will develop new tools that benefit publishers who need to understand and utilise their data, now more than ever, because of the added pressure created by the economic climate”.

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. www.ringgold.com