The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has announced the publication of the Summer 2011 issue of the Information Standards Quarterly (ISQ) publication with a special issue theme of Organization and People Identifiers. ISQ Guest Content Editor, Helen Henderson, Managing Director at Information Power Ltd. has assembled an expert group of authors to discuss the major standards and initiatives.
Identifiers have always been essential standards in libraries and publishing. Content identifiers, such as the ISBN, are well established, but institutional and personal identifiers are much newer, the need having emerged as more and more content is available electronically.
In the issue's main feature article, Janifer Gatenby (OCLC, B.V.) and Andrew MacEwan (The British Library) discuss the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI), the new and much anticipated ISO standard for name identification. Martin Fenner (ORCID Outreach Working Group) follows with a description of the Open Researcher & Contributor ID (ORCID) initiative to create an open and global registry for unique author identifiers.
The JISC Names Project for establishing name authority for researchers is explained by Alan Danskin (The British Library), Amanda Hill (Mimas, University of Manchester), and Daniel Needham (Mimas), with particular emphasis on how the database is built and validated. Jody DeRidder describes a collaboration between the NISO Institutional Identifiers (I2) and ISNI projects to leverage the ISNI infrastructure for the assignment of identifiers to institutions, which was beyond the scope of the ISNI standard.
Geoff Bilder (CrossRef) provides an opinion piece on Identifiers and Trust, a particularly important issue when an identifier is for a person. And Louise Timko (R.R. Bowker) reminds us of a long-standing identifier for organisations, the Standard Address Number (SAN), and describes its use in the supply chain. The issue concludes with Noteworthy news items such as the new trial use NISO Recommended Practice on Test Modes for SUSHI Servers, the Mellon Foundation Grant that NISO received for E-Book Annotation Sharing Workshops, the Journal Usage Factors Project report, the ISO Focus+ Magazine now available for free, and the approval of the OpenURL Canonical Citation Profile.
ISQ is available in open access in electronic format on the NISO website. Both the entire issue and individual articles may be freely downloaded. Print copies are available by subscription and as print on demand.
Information Standards Quarterly (ISQ) is NISO's print and electronic magazine for communicating standards-based technology and best practices in library, publishing, and information technology, particularly where these three areas overlap. ISQ reports on the progress of active developments and also on implementations, case studies, and best practices that show potentially replicable efforts.
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