The ISNI and Its Role in Providing Scholarly Content

By Todd Carpenter, NISO Managing Director—Our world is increasingly interconnected, and information distribution—even in the scholarly landscape—can take a variety of forms, from print to audio and video. Unambiguously identifying the content creator and then linking the content object to its creator is a critical element in discovery and distribution chains.

To address this issue, the International Standards Organization has developed the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI), a new identifier for the public identity of parties. The goal of ISNI is to provide an efficient means to disambiguate public identities so that their role in creation, production, management, and content distributions chains can be recognized accurately, and the content they created can be effectively linked to the correct parties.

ISNI was developed to serve the confluence of needs of content-creating organizations and the library community. Libraries have long dealt with this issue through the creation of authority files, but these are name-based and are not generally used outside the library community. For the content creation industries, the assignment of unique identifiers to authors, composers, or other parties is critical to ensuring that the stream of royalties is paid correctly and processed efficiently.

Supported by a broad swath of large media industries, the ISNI system has the commitment and participation necessary to ensure its financial strength and is driven by a significantly challenging business need to ensure its success. Initial work, built upon data from the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) project, has resulted in the compilation of data on more than 4 million names, far larger than any other potential system in development. The ISNI standard has been approved by the ISO committee membership and is set for publication following the legal formation and appointment of the ISNI International Agency as Registration Authority. The system should be launched in early 2011.

The ISNI system is designed as a federated system aggregating and disambiguating information based only on a minimal core set of metadata. It will serve an important bridge between different media industries, each of which can continue to maintain its own industry-specific databases. Because of its limited core metadata set, the ISNI itself is not meant to serve all the name discovery needs of all industries. The key benefits of the ISNI system are the registry, the disambiguation service, and the links to the richer metadata stored in other industry-specific registries.

ISNI differs from the proposed Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) project, led by Nature Publishing Group and Thomson-Reuters, in that ORCID, as it has been described, focuses solely on the researcher community, and ORCID includes far richer metadata specific to the needs of scholarly publishing. The ORCID leadership has had discussions about participating in the ISNI system and using ISNI as its identifier, but as yet ORCID is not directly participating in ISNI.

NISO represents U.S. interests in the ISO technical committee that developed ISNI and serves as the conduit for ballot voting, nominating U.S. working group experts, and providing comments on drafts. NISO also serves as secretariat of the subcommittee that is responsible for identifiers, including the ISNI standard. More information about ISNI is available via the project’s Web site, http://www.isni.org or by contacting Todd Carpenter at tcarpenter@niso.org.

Todd Carpenter is Managing Director of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and a long-time member and supporter of SSP. Todd focuses his attention on collaboration among publishers, libraries, and systems vendors in pursuit of greater efficiency in the creation, discovery, distribution, and preservation of media.