Abstract
In this session two veterans of the international information standards community discussed the National Information Standards Organization's (NISO's) soon to be released Institutional Identifiers, or “I2” standard. When adopted and implemented the I2 standard will create a standard unique identifier for each institution, one that can be used by publishers, agents, and online hosts. Once adopted, use of the standard bodes well for improving processes in managing electronic resources, particularly access and activation issues, throughout the information supply chain.
Tina Feick, Director of Sales and Marketing at Harrassowitz, began the session by providing background information on the Institutional Identifiers (I2) standard. Feick noted many identifiers are already in place in libraries, but with the transition from a print-based information society to an electronic information society, identifiers have expanded dramatically. There are a variety of international and national identifiers in place including Universal Identification Number (UID), machine-readable cataloging (MARC) organizational codes, Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) symbols, the International Standard Identifier for Libraries and Related Organizations (ISIL), and the International Organization for Standardization's International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI). Some states, consortia, and organizations also have identifiers.
Feick pointed out that co-presenter Helen Henderson, from Ringgold, Inc., began exploring identifiers about fifteen years ago and realized that with all the different identifiers in place, as well as those that were being developed for each electronic system, “this was going to be a mess in a while.” In 2008 the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) got involved and formed a working group to begin working on the concept of an institutional identifier.
I2 MISSION AND OBJECTIVES
The I2 Working Group recognized that the institution is the critical entity in determining and identifying organizations that operate within and around the information supply chain. As such, identifying information must follow an institutional model where the institution serves as the basis for an identifier. According to Feick, if one is sending an order, “getting it to the right place makes a difference.” If the place is not defined correctly and the wrong number is added, the order may be sent to the wrong place. Since digital information is global, the I2 Working Group wanted the provenance authority for information on institutional affiliations to also be worldwide. Feick emphasized that the identifiers cannot be just used in the United States, the United Kingdom, or Canada; they must be global.
The I2 standard must be interoperable, where data can be easily exchanged from system to system. The standard must be unambiguous and unique, integrate with existing workflows, and support smooth and seamless access to information. Feick declared, “It still boggles my mind that after being in the business for so long that we can't place an order and get everything activated and get access in seconds. It should happen.” When the I2 Working Group looked at the information chain, they saw there was a breakdown with all the players in the supply chain trying to figure out “what is the institution?” Therefore information must be authentic and authoritative.
The I2 Working Group looked at use cases and developed a list of objectives. These include the following: to develop scenarios from compelling use cases and to develop strategies for creating an interoperable and unique identifier with lightweight maintenance and scalability. Additional objectives are to identify existing standards and model against scenarios, to resolve issues of granularity, and to identify core metadata structure. Lastly, the I2 Working Group wants to identify an implementation and sustainability model. Feick stated that the implementation and sustainability were the essential part, particularly since I2 is intended for global use.
IDENTIFIER CONCEPT
At the basic level I2 is a standard identifier for each institution. It will be available for use across all publishers, agents, and platforms. Hierarchies and combinations with consortia will be created for institutions that have branch libraries, medical libraries, regional libraries, and so on. Publishers, agents, and online platform hosts will also need to be defined and on board. For example, when a publisher who has implemented the I2 standard sells a group of titles to another publisher who has also implemented the I2 standard, the institutional identifier would travel with the subscription order. Records at the new publisher would have the right subscriptions associated with the right institution, which would result in less disruption in service. Feick stressed that although the idea behind an institutional identifier is a very simple concept, there are many details necessary to make it work.
I2 WORKING GROUP: PHASE I
The group's work to date has been divided into two different phases. The first phase identified stakeholders from libraries, archives, consortia, subscription agents, distributors, publishers, hosting services, bibliographic utilities, and institutional repositories to identify scenarios for the information chain. Pain points in the information chain workflow were identified in the course of their work. Feick identified some of these pain points: missing issues because subscriptions were not started; lost access to e-journals; confusion over renewals; problems with titles that moved to a new publisher; resolving issues with identifiers; accurate (and quick) entry of order; updates in IP ranges; and changes to agents, publishers, and online hosts. To illustrate one of the pain points, Feick observed that when she gave a talk on this topic at last year's United Kingdom Serials Group (UKSG) conference, an attendee from Finland stood up and said, “I needed this. I changed agents and all the publishers got everything mixed up. If I had an identifier it would have worked.”
Feick and Henderson worked on the group's scenarios, which were a continuation of a project Henderson had started a few years ago to explore whether an institutional identifier was a viable concept before it was brought to NISO. The two identified metadata they thought were important in the electronic resources information chain from the library placing the order to its obtaining usage statistics. Metadata identified included the institutional identifier; any variant identifiers, such as a library's OCLC institutional symbol; the institution's name; and any variant names. Variant names include the institution's various “known by” names and foreign language versions. Metadata identified also included location (country, region, and city), Uniform Resource Locator (URL), domain, and any related institution along with the related institution's relationship type.
Some of the I2 Working Group members focused on institutional repositories and their use and need for identifiers. This I2 subgroup conducted a survey to look at trends and the survey's results indicated that standardized institutional identifiers were important and needed. A majority of repositories already use identifiers, including subordinate units such as various academic departments or colleges within a university. One of the concepts that came out of the survey, according to Feick, was that people wanted participation to be voluntary and cost-free. Metadata elements identified as important in the survey of institutional repositories included institution name, parent institution name, and the URL. Feick added that one of the rationales for conducting surveys was not only to promote the concept of an institutional identifier, but also “to get people to start to think and to see what's viable” in order to have buy-in on the I2 standard.
Another subgroup of the I2 Working Group looked at library workflows and metadata. This group also conducted a survey, which was posted to a variety of e-mail lists. Metadata important to library workflows were name (formal or legal name of the institution), country (where the institution is located), state or region, city, variant identifier, website URL, variant name, relationship type, and former name of institution. Feick provided an example of why former name is an important metadata element when she mentioned Glassboro State University's name change to Rowan University. Feick added that these name changes need to be tracked and linked. Included in the survey for libraries was a section on a registry, which was not included in the institutional repository survey. Results pertaining to the registry indicated that libraries wanted the registry to provide the initial metadata, make changes whenever needed, and review metadata annually to ensure continued accuracy.
I2 WORKING GROUP: PHASE II
Helen Henderson, Vice President of Marketing Research and Development at Ringgold, Inc., took over the discussion regarding the group's phase two work, which addresses how the I2 standard would be implemented and sustained. Phase one dealt with surveying the information chain community and asking, “Do you really want this? Do you really need this? And if you have it, are you going to use it?” Henderson articulated that use has been their focus from day one because there is “no point in creating a standard that's never used.”
For phase two, the group developed a purpose statement, an environment, and a structure, and they identified potential existing standards. Henderson explained that “if there's something out there that's already gotten through the standard process that we can take and adapt, let's use it because it will be quicker to adopt and implement.” Business models will need to be developed to ensure continuous funding. Additional goals include developing a consensus on metadata and circulating the group's consultation document.
Objectives for 2010 include finalizing a draft of metadata elements, developing a schema, completing the stakeholder feedback document, and finalizing the group's report and metadata from feedback. The group's plans for summer 2010 are aggressive. They will begin the implementation and metadata draft report, circulate the request for comments to stakeholders to get feedback and in early fall submit their final recommendation and report to NISO.
The first task in developing the environment and structure for the I2 standard and registry was to develop business process scenarios and then determine how they might work and if people could see the value in them. According to Henderson, the key idea that came out of this was the need for a central registry, not just for institutional identifiers, but also for any name that exists. The plan is to create a central registry that would work in relationship with a decentralized series of business-specific registries. Henderson pointed out that the I2 standard is not focused on specific metadata elements such as street addresses, in part because a business-specific registry could take the I2 metadata and then add street addresses and other information to meet their own needs. This central registry will involve a database of “many, many millions of institutions.” To illustrate this, Henderson commented that Ringgold, which only deals with institutions that subscribe to academic content, has a database with over two hundred thousand institutions and they are adding on average five thousand institutions per month.
PURPOSE OF THE INSTITUTIONAL IDENTIFIER AND THE CENTRAL REGISTRY
The I2 standard must be able to identify all types of institutions be they academic, government, hospital, corporate, or non-profit research institutions. Each identifier will be globally unique and will represent sufficient metadata to differentiate institutions unambiguously. The I2 standard is not just for libraries and academic institutions. It will identify any institutions engaged in the selection, purchase, licensing, storage, description, management, and delivery of information—in other words, all the players in the information supply chain. The issue of trust, Henderson pointed out, is important in the I2 environment. For an identifier to be trusted, its source must be trusted.
Henderson discussed a scenario to demonstrate how the I2 standard would assist libraries. For example, Library A wants to become part of Consortium Z and to obtain access to that consortium's resources. Library A must first apply to the I2 registry to obtain an institutional identifier. If the library already has an institutional identifier it is added to Consortium Z's registry once the consortium completes its I2 registry verification. If Library A does not yet have an institutional identifier, it needs to complete an I2registry request. Once the I2 registry request is completed and an institutional identifier has been assigned, Library A can then re-apply to Consortium Z.
Henderson noted how use of the I2 standard can expedite library workflows by describing a scenario whereby Library A subscribes to a particular e-journal. Library A (which belongs to Consortium Z) licenses a journal via Consortium Z, who submits an order to the subscription agent on behalf of subscribing members, each of whom is identified by an institutional identifier. The subscription agent maintains a customer registry with the additional information needed to manage subscriptions (for example, street addresses and IP addresses). The subscription agent then invoices Library A and upon receipt of payment, sends the relevant information about Library A to the journal publisher, who can then quickly provide Library A with access to the e-journal. Henderson's example illustrates how the use of the institutional identifier should speed up the access and activation process. She also stated that several other scenarios were developed; these have subsequently been made available in the I2 midterm report.Footnote 1
The working group supports the creation of a central registry to help encourage industry-wide adoption of the institutional identifier. The central registry would be used to assign identifiers to new institution records, store core metadata about those institutions, provide look-up services (which would allow participating registry members to see if an institution has already been identified), and provide one or more Web-based application programming interfaces (APIs) to automate look-up capabilities. The central registry would identify all organizations in the information supply chain. The registry should use identifiers that are opaque strings of characters that do not contain semantics about the institution. The I2 group envisions a registry which would support registration of institutions in a decentralized manner, address community-specific registry needs, and permit Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) from trusted third-party registries to be submitted and stored. The central registry would allow one to redirect to other registries such as a U.S. registry of physicians or a registry of institutional repositories in the United Kingdom.
EXAMINATION AND MAPPING OF EXISTING IDENTIFIERS
As part of phase two, the group looked at existing identifiers. In the next segment of her talk, Henderson highlighted some of the group's findings in their examination of existing identifiers. The International Standard for Identification of Libraries and Related Organizations (ISIL), a standard accepted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), was the first examined. It was problematic because national agencies maintain the registry information and there is no standardization among them, resulting in widely varying metadata. The standard is also limited to libraries.
The I2 Working Group also looked at several OCLC-initiated standards. Henderson acknowledged that the OCLC symbol is widely used in the library community, but it is OCLC specific. It also excludes a large portion of the information supply chain community. The I2 Working Group discussed OCLC's WorldCat Registry ID at length and concluded that, since registry is voluntary, the information is very patchy and many non-academic libraries have not bothered with the registry. The MARC organization code, the most widely used identifier in the United States and by some major libraries outside the United States, is also problematic due to maintenance issues.
ISO's International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) standard, which is currently in final committee draft, is promising. OCLC and some national libraries are supporting this standard, which will standardize author information. Henderson declared that there is a lot of interest in this standard. For example, rights organizations are interested because they want to know to whom they should be paying royalties. To date, ISNI has been focused on individuals' names and non-corporate authors, and has ignored institution names.
The I2 Working Group looked at several identifiers from NISO: Standard Address Number (SAN), Global Location Number (GLN), International Standard for Describing Institutions with Archival Holdings Information (ISDIAH), and Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS). All were problematic or not financially viable for the I2 standard's use. The last group of standards examined was the Online Information Exchange Serials Online Holdings (ONIX-SOH) and ONIX for Publications Licenses (ONIX-PL). Henderson noted the ONIX standards were examined not for use of the identifier, but for interoperability capabilities. Once an institution has an institutional identifier, these two ONIX standards become much more powerful.
As part of the process of examining existing identifiers, the group mapped the I2 standard's desired attributes to all the identified standards. The mapping exercise clearly illustrated ISNI mapped well to them. EBSCO's Oliver Pesch, an I2 Working Group member, then mapped the I2 standard's scenario requirements to the ISNI, which clarified to the working group that this is the standard to pursue and piggyback on.
Another task in the process of developing the I2 standard was to draft the I2's metadata requirements. Although the group ended up with 360 different elements, they focused on eleven core data elements, which addressed not just identification but also discovery. Core elements include institution identifier, variable identifier, name, variant name, location, URL, domain, affiliated institution, contact information, note, and type of institution. Variant names are included because in addition to an institution's legal name in its native language, there are “also known as” names, translations, abbreviations, acronyms, and former names. Henderson commented that Ringgold's database has institutions with twenty-two names and one institution in Cambridge, England, has seventeen former names going back to 1802. In the United States, a number of two-year colleges have become four-year universities, which further illustrates the need for variant names. In terms of location, the group decided to limit data elements to country, state or region, city, and language, which would be enough to uniquely identify the institution.
Affiliate institution data elements are particularly important with licensing. These data help determine for both the library and the publisher whether an affiliated institution is closely enough related to have rights under a license. To further define myriad institutional relationships, the group is working to establish a standard set of descriptions of the relationships between institutions. When completed, this will help clarify which relationships allow access and which relationships do not allow access.
NEXT STEPS
The I2 Working Group's next steps include evaluation and selection of an identifier standard, including support for a metadata registry, applicability for each broad scenario, ease of adoption and use, and interoperability or ease of transition for legacy systems. Finalizing the I2 metadata and developing an implementation and maintenance strategy are steps yet to be completed. The group also plans to solicit another round of stakeholder feedback via consultation postings to several U.S. and U.K. distribution lists, instead of the 150 lists they used in the earlier stakeholder feedback rounds. The I2 Working Group desires this additional round to ensure that stakeholders understand the I2 standard and buy into it. Henderson ended with noting the group's goal is to complete this work by December 2010.
During the question and answer portion of the program, Henderson clarified that the I2 Working Group planned to pursue becoming a sub-registry for institutions of the ISNI as it is the best opportunity for a viable registry. One of the major concerns of the group is who is willing to pay for the creation and maintenance of the registry. Henderson also expects the I2 standard to be ready to roll out by the end of 2011. Library buy-in is critical and once libraries are on board and have identifiers, things are expected to happen quite quickly. According to Henderson, most of the major publishers are on board with the I2 standard. Electronic resource management system vendors need to be brought on board as an identifier field will need to be added to their systems. Several publishers have indicated that once there is a standard in place, they will come on board. To ensure global implementation, Henderson plans to target acceptance by European publishers and national consortia. To ensure adoption in the Far East, the group is working with subscription agents and secondary sources such as a group working with the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) standards, called the International Committee on EDI for Serials (ICEDIS), as well as consortia and publishers. The key to the I2 standard's adoption is to have the national libraries on board.
Notes
1. NISO Information Identifiers (I2) Working Group, NISO Institutional Identifier (I2) Midterm Work to Date: Request for Comments (n.p.: National Information Standards Organization, 2010), http://www.niso.org/workrooms/i2/midtermreport/I2midterm2010.pdf (accessed July 9, 2010).
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