The British Library as potential host for an ORG ID registry

Andrew MacEwan,Head of Content and Metadata Processing

Tim Devenport, ISNI

Dr Torsten Reimer,Head of Research Services

ORG ID meeting, Girona, 22nd January

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The British Library

• The British Library is bidding to host ORG ID registry, and is supported by ISNI.

• The British Library:– The UK’s National Library, set up by an

Act of Parliament.– A public, permanent, non-commercial

body that is recognised globally.– Expertise in metadata curation and PIDs.– Our mission is directly relevant to PIDs:

The BL Act tasks us to contribute “to the efficient management of other libraries and information services”.

– Working internationally is a core purpose.

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The BL vision• Living Knowledge articulates the vision of the British Library as “the

most open, creative and innovative institution of its kind in the world”.

• We are committed to contributing to a sustainableand open global knowledge environment. A new service strategy positions BL as provider of services in this space.

• Open Science requires open access to content and metadata. Core services should be open to all, with strong community governance.

• Build on existing components and services in this space. Aligning with the ISNI-IA’s recognition that the ORG ID registry needs a separate model, including governance, business model etc for the sector

• Working collaboratively to provide creation and curation services for the Org ID, with community governance.

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Alignment with ORG ID principlesPrinciple Response

The registry will support reliable, open, permanent, and unambiguous identification of organizations with whom researchers are affiliated.

The British Library will act in its role as a Registration Agency for the ISNI. ISNI is an ISO Standard. NISO published NISO RP-17-2013 Institutional Identification: Identifying Organizations in the Information Supply Chain,recommending adoption of ISNI as an institutional identifier

The registry will not be limited by institutional, stakeholder, corporate entity type, business, geographic, or national boundaries.

This is an absolute necessity in a global knowledge environment. ‘International’ is one of the six core purposes of the BL, we serve everyone, regardless of location, nationality or background. We are committing to full transparency for the proposed registry.

Participation in the registry and access to its services will be based on transparent and non-discriminatory terms of use.The identifier and metadata supporting the disambiguation of organizations will be available as Open Data using a CC-0 license.

Fully committed to this, the Library is already making metadata available as CC-0, e.g. the British National Bibliography. Other organisations are reusing this content (also available as linked data). ISNI-IA has published its intention to make Organisation ID subset of its database open.

The registry will have a sustainable business model based on revenue generation consistent with its mission to ensure its long-term openness, persistence, and reliability.

The British Library believes that by building on existing identifier collections, reusing suitable existing components and working through a through a network of agencies sharing the burden of effort internationally a sustainable business model can be built..

All software developed for the registry will be publicly released under an Open Source Software license approved by the Open Source Initiative.

The BL is committed to open source principles and to releasing code under an open licence. For example, we are developing software for an ISNI Portal function which will allow end user edit and request access to the ISNI database. The Portal code will be made open source.

For the software it adopts, the initiative will prefer Open Source. Amongst other issues this will help with the sustainability.The registry will be governed by representatives from a broad cross-section of stakeholders drawn from the community it serves, the majority of whom represent not-for-profit organizations, and will strive for maximal transparency by publicly posting summaries of all meetings and provide financial reports. The registry will have an explicit living will and, if acquired, it will continue to operate under these principles.

The British Library is committed to developing its services in collaboration with the wider community and as part of this bid has consulted with representatives from the CASRAI and EuroCRIS communities. The ISNI network of agencies and members already contains within it other national and research libraries and OCLC organisation

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The ISNI vision

• Leverage the existing and mature ISNI registry

• Work with existing and new specialist registration agencies for data curation and sector-specific knowledge

• Build on steps underway for an ISNI Organizations Registry within the ISNI system:

– Advisory Board to capture and represent stakeholder needs– Segmentation of Org_IDs from the ISNI database with a

searchable user interface– Core metadata available under CC0 & in Linked Data formats– APIs for organizations to self-manage their records

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ISNI contributions to the open registry

• Established infrastructure

• Significantly lower entry costs

• Dedicated quality control team in place

• Established partnerships with large tech provider (OCLC) and a range of specialist registration agencies

• Proven basis for sustainable, non-profit operation

• Recommendations from JISC/CASRAI group, OCLC Research Task Group on Organizations

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Relevant BL expertise

• Staff expertise and resources already in place committed to ISNI operational development

– Specific experience with pilot study assigning to RCUK database

• Experience of supporting persistent identifier infrastructure development (e.g. DataCite)

• Strong track record of managing centres for international standards

• Provision of data quality curation for the ISNI database

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Plan for resourcing

• The Resourcing Model is based on a federated network of participating Agencies and Members.

• Central Assignment Agency (OCLC) maintains the central Assignment Database for the ISNI-IA.

• Registration Agencies and Members provide source data requiring provision of Organisation IDs.

• Database is built by matching data from multiple sources to ensure that disambiguation is shared/aligned across communities.

• National Libraries (and others) provide Registration Services building on identity management of research organisations in their authority files

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Business model approach

• The data remains free, additional services could be charged

• There should be no cost for updating ORG data as to not discourage organisations from keeping records up-to-date

• Different business models need considering; BL happy to facilitate the community process to determine the most suitable one. Examples/elements could be:

– Commercial entities pay for API access– Research funders cover (at least the initial) the cost– Consortium HEI membership that allows granular

updates of units in each org (if this is deemed suitable)

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Community access

• Metadata under CC-0 license, community access to database.

• Any Organisation can also become a Registration Agency and provide services.

• Any Organisation can become a Member and directly manage data in its own database.

• Any Organisation can directly search the database, edit their own records and request new IDs (the British Library ISNI Registration Service already provides such a service).

• Metadata policy and frameworks are supported by advisory bodies, eg. CASRAI, EuroCRIS, PCC (US research libraries),etc

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Community engagement

• ORG IDs are not a technical problem; lasting success will only come through uptake and buy-in from community.

• Commitment to community engagement and governance from the start. This includes full transparency about the registry.

• CASRAI have offered to facilitate community engagement to improve quality and interoperability (e.g. identifying required information about organisations and maintaining definitions in an open dictionary to facilitate exchange of information).

• We will work closely with partners in the FREYA project and use the global BL network, including contacts to other (national) libraries, publishers and vendors, government organisations etc.

• Other organisations have offered to help, including EuroCRIS.

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To sum up: what we bring to this

• A public body with a promise of longevity

• Non-commercial and unbiased

• Committed to the principles of openness

• Internationally recognised and trusted

• A broad international network highly relevant to PIDs

• Experts in long-term curation of (not just) metadata

• Expertise in setting up and running PID services

• Elements of a solution already in place

• Committed to working in partnership with the community

• Support from organisations like euroCRIS, CASRAI and ISNI