4 April 2022
The ISNI International Agency (ISNI-IA) has announced that Bibliographic Data Services (BDS) has recently joined as a new ISNI Registration Agency (RAG).
Representing the library, book and entertainment sectors, BDS will contribute metadata to the ISNI database and begin assigning ISNIs to the public names of individuals and organizations (including authors, illustrators, contributors, researchers, scholars, publishers, and more) with a view to ensuring not only that each creative work can be unambiguously attributed to its creator wherever that work is described, but also that ISNIs are assigned to those individuals as standard, as well as all those involved in the creation and/or distribution of their works – thereby facilitating search and discovery online and bettering all associated supply chains.
Eric Green, Managing Director, Digital at BDS explains: “BDS is delighted to be in a position to champion the adoption of the ISNI standard within the UK book industry and beyond by becoming an ISNI Registration Agency. Having participated in the UK’s recent ISNI pilot, which explored options for including ISNIs in publishers’ standard product metadata, and having seen first-hand the appetite for ISNI adoption, we felt that becoming a RAG was the most logical conclusion to the pilot, to expand upon the hard work already undertaken by the pilot Group and begin to address the areas that are outstanding.”
Over 320,000 public names were put forward by publishers involved in the UK ISNI pilot, and 206k were matched to existing ISNIs (representing a success rate of 63.4%). BDS, in conjunction with the British Library and publishers involved in the UK pilot nationwide, will now begin to address the remaining 36.6% of the pilot’s identified creators, assigning them ISNIs; and will look to extend its remit to incorporate the data of other UK-based publishers in due course.
Tim Devenport, ISNI-IA’s Executive Director said: “This is a very exciting time for ISNI and we confidently anticipate a further step change in the adoption of the ISNI standard within the publishing sector, and possibly the entertainment sector too. With its cataloguing expertise and familiarity with a wide range of standards and standard identifiers, BDS is a perfect match for ISNI's objectives and we are delighted to partner with such an established, respected and forward-looking organization.
In the first quarter of 2022 alone, over 16.5k creators have been assigned ISNIs within the library and book sectors, and we cannot wait to see the impact that BDS’s involvement will certainly have on both this statistic and the sectors’ overall uptake of the ISNI standard.
BDS is already planning cross-walk services which will enable users familiar with other identification standards – such as NACO, DDEX, ORCID and more – to more easily discover ISNIs that have already been assigned to public names by using the ISNI standard as a bridging identifier."