Information and publishing services provider Ingenta, UK, a division of Publishing Technology plc, has announced a new agreement with Ringgold, UK. Ringgold creates and maintains a hierarchic database of identifiers for institutions to support publishers and other parties in the delivery of e-content within the information supply chain. The company now licenses institutional IP data from Ingenta's global access control system, enhancing the 100,000 records in its Identify database of institutional identifiers.
This collaboration is claimed to represent the scholarly information industry's first centralisation of authentication data relating to academic, professional and business libraries worldwide. The Ringgold-Ingenta partnership seeks to create a functioning system in which administrative updates to one registration database (Ingenta) may be securely syndicated (via Ringgold) to other participating publishers' systems. Ringgold's forty publisher customers - including Oxford University Press, Taylor & Francis and SAGE - stand to benefit from the enhanced data, which will support more effective gap analysis and better targeted marketing activities. Ingenta's 270 publisher clients will be offered favourable terms to adopt the Ringgold solution.
This latest development extends the collaboration between Ringgold and Publishing Technology, parent company of Ingenta, VISTA and PCG. Other cooperative advances include VISTA's adoption of the Ringgold identifier as a core field in its fulfilment software, and PCG's partnership with Ringgold to provide marketing services that minimise inappropriate targeting of publishers' sales communications.
