OCLC Research Report on Organizational Identifiers

I wanted to share the announcement of the recently-published OCLC Research Report on Organizational Identifiers. This is a very important — and very hard — problem that has been getting renewed attention recently in a variety of contexts. For those looking for additional information, I’d note the sessions at the last few CNI meetings, and also the recent workshop held at the Force 11 meeting in Portland in April 2016 as additional resources. CNI will continue to cover developments in this area.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

———————————————-

I’m pleased to announce that OCLC Research has published a new report: Addressing the Challenges with Organizational Identifiers and ISNI.

Identifying and tracking organizational affiliations of the creators of works can be challenging, as organizations may be known by a variety of names and may have schools or research centers well-known on their own. An organizational identifier- a unique, persistent and public URI associated with the organization that is resolvable globally over networks via specific protocols-provides the means to both find and identify an organization accurately and to define the relationships among its sub-units and with other organizations.

Highlights:

• Organizational identifiers provide the means for a variety of stakeholders to find and identify an organization accurately and define relationships among its sub-units and with other organizations.
• The modeling of organizations provided can be adapted by others for their own uses, including linked data implementations.
• Identifying and tracking organizations presents multiple challenges. 
• The International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) has the means to disambiguate organizations and to meet the needs identified by 12 use-case scenarios. 
• The ISNI database already includes over 500,000 institutional identifiers derived from the registries of agencies with business needs for identifying institutions.
• An outreach document targeted to academic administrators presents the reasons why organizational identifiers are important and the benefits of ISNI membership.   
• Organizations need to take responsibility for maintaining current and accurate information associated with their identifiers.

http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/2016/oclcresearch-organizational-identifiers-and-isni-2016.html

Please share with colleagues. We’d love to hear your comments. 

Patrick

—
Patrick A. Confer
OCLC · Web Projects Manager, OCLC Research
6565 Kilgour Place, Dublin, Ohio USA 43017
T +1-614-764-6280