EDItEUR’s Chris Saynor and Tim Devenport, the Executive Director of the International ISNI agency, give an introduction to the International Standard Name Identifier. Do you know how to distinguish between Victor Hugo the writer and Victor Hugo the salsa musician? How does Margaret Attwood the Human resources specialist and author distinguish herself from Margaret Atwood? They explain what the ISNI is, how it works, and look at some of its uses. techforum.booknetcanada.ca #TechForum

1. Introduction to ISNI
Chris Saynor
EDItEUR
Tim Devenport
ISNI-IA
BNC webinar 18th June 2020

2. “I am Spartacus!”

3. What is an identifier?
• simply, a ‘name’ for an entity or resource
• can be a physical object, digital object, abstract object or concept, person,
organisation, place…
• usually a simple alphanumeric string in a tightly-defined format
• unique within some namespace
• ideally, persistent and meaningless
• trusted (due to clear provenance, good governance, utility)
• each entity or resource is characterised by a minimum set of metadata
for disambiguation purposes

4. GLN
SAN
ISBN
ISNI
ISMN
ISRC
ISWC
ISAN
EIDR
PLUSid
URI
DUNS
GTIN-13
GTIN-14
GTIN-12
EAN
UPC
DOI
ISBN-10
UUID
ORCID
Ringgold
GLIMIR
VIAF
IPI
ISSN ISCC
GRID
ROR

5. ISNI public identity identifier

6. ISNI
• International Standard Name Identifier
• ISO Standard 27729 for identification of public identities of parties in
creative industries
• parties may be people, organisations or even fictitious people (for
pseudonyms, fictional characters)
• typical use case – identify an author, establish difference from another
author of the same name, or establish same persona as musician or actor
(possibly of different ‘name’)
• obvious application in rights and licensing, scholarship
• can act as a cross-domain ‘bridge identifier’, linking data across multiple
sources and media

7. Implementing ISNI
• strictly, does not identify a person or a name
• person (or party – can be an organisation)
• persona
• presentation (spelling, script etc)
• ISNIs identify personas, or public identities
• Фёдор Достоевский = Fyodor Dostoyevski
• Ruth Rendell ≠ Barbara Vine (but well-known pseudonyms can be linked)
• Sue Welfare ≠ **** ****** (allows for anonymity)

8. Implementing ISNI
• strictly, does not identify a person or a name
• person (or party – can be an organisation)
• persona
• presentation (spelling, script etc)
• ISNIs identify personas, or public identities
• Фёдор Достоевский = Fyodor Dostoyevski
• Ruth Rendell ≠ Barbara Vine (but well-known pseudonyms can be linked)
• Sue Welfare ≠ **** ****** (allows for anonymity)
– in ONIX, a contributor is a persona

9. Richard Holmes

10. Richard Holmes

11. Richard Holmes

12. Richard Holmes
0000 0001 2147 5396

13. Richard Holmes
0000 0001 1768 55420000 0001 2147 5396

14. • Margaret Atwood
– ISNI 0000 0001 2321 5491

15. • Margaret Atwood
– ISNI 0000 0001 2321 5491
• Margaret Attwood
– ISNI 0000 0001 1634 1828

16. • Margaret Atwood
– ISNI 0000 0001 2321 5491
• Margaret Attwood
– ISNI 0000 0001 1634 1828
• Margaret Atwood Society
– ISNI 0000 0001 0743 4926

17. • Margaret Atwood
– ISNI 0000 0001 2321 5491
• Margaret Attwood
– ISNI 0000 0001 1634 1828
• Margaret Atwood Society
– ISNI 0000 0001 0743 4926

18. • ISNI 0000 0004 7241 1001

19. • Tin Tin – ISNI 0000 0003 7258 2882

20. • Tin Tin – ISNI 0000 0003 7258 2882
• Stephen Duffy
– ISNI 0000 0001 1536 8631

21. • Tin Tin – ISNI 0000 0003 7258 2882
• Stephen Duffy
– ISNI 0000 0001 1536 8631
• Duran Duran
– ISNI 0000 0001 0945 500X

22. • Rhys Davies, ISNI 0000 0004 4647 560X (novelist)
• author of A Time to Laugh (University of Wales Press)
• Rees Davies, ISNI 0000 0004 4460 7816 (mediaeval historian)
• author of The Revolt of Owain Gln Dŵr (Oxford University Press)
• Rhys Davis, ISNI 0000 0004 0344 7828 (illustrator)
• originator of fantasy maps in Marie Brennan’s A Natural History of
Dragons (Titan Books)

23. What does it look like?
ISNI 0000 0004 4460 7816
Prof. Rees Davies

24. What does it look like?
ISNI 0000 0004 4460 7816
for display
purposes only
Prof. Rees Davies

25. What does it look like?
ISNI 0000 0004 4460 7816
for display
purposes only
15 decimal (base 10)
digits for persona
Prof. Rees Davies

26. What does it look like?
ISNI 0000 0004 4460 7816
for display
purposes only
check digit
may be X
15 decimal (base 10)
digits for persona
Prof. Rees Davies

34. 0000 0000 8388 8172

35. 0000 0000 8388 8172 0000 0004 2756 6194

36. <Contributor>
<SequenceNumber>1</SequenceNumber>
<ContributorRole>A01</ContributorRole>
<NameIdentifier>
<NameIDType>16</NameIDType>
<IDValue>0000000444607816</IDValue>
</NameIdentifier>
<PersonName>Sir Rees Davies</PersonName>
<ProfessionalAffiliation>
<ProfessionalPosition>Chichele Professor of Mediaeval
History</ProfessionalPosition>
<Affliation>All Souls College, University of Oxford</Affiliation>
</ProfessionalAffiliation>
</Contributor>
3.0

37. ISNI origins and status
• ISNI-IA established as Registration Authority for ISNI, incorporated
as a UK not-for-profit 2010
• an international standard – ISO 27729, published 2012
• founding members include CISAC, OCLC, IFRRO, CENL
• funded by membership fees – currently 27 Registration Agencies and
26 member organizations
• global involvement – 25+ countries
• cross-domain interest – libraries & archives, music, rights &
collecting societies, service providers, publishing

38. Who’s Who, and some metrics
• ISNI-IA – responsible for general coordination via its governing
Board and Executive Director
• Assignment Agency – central database, systems, matching
algorithms, operated by OCLC in the Netherlands
• Quality Team – run and supported by specialists from BL and BNF,
carry out data sampling, provide advice on matching techniques, fix
reported data issues…
• 11 million ISNIs assigned and available to date, of which
approximately 10 million relate to personas and 1 million to
organizations

39. ISNI in the publishing supply chain – 1
• United Kingdom
• British Library acting as focus for ‘triangulation’
• comparing publisher title files with ISNI and other sources like NACO
• demonstrated that many book authors already have ISNIs assigned
• useful way of ‘priming the pump’, current match rates of 65–70%
• active participation from ten or more large publishers based in UK
including:
• Bloomsbury, Cambridge University Press, Hachette UK, Harper Collins UK, Pan
Macmillan, Penguin Random House UK, smaller presses now becoming involved
• co-ordination by EDItEUR, with Bibliographic Data Services also participating

40. ISNI in the publishing supply chain – 2
• France
• smart integration into legal deposit workflows
• early provision to BNF of title/author metadata in ONIX
• BNF searches for existing ISNIs and allocates new ISNIs as appropriate
• enriched metadata, systematically including ISNIs, fed back to publishers
• Hachette Livres, Interforum, L’Harmattan and many other publishers
represented or distributed by these three major players

41. ISNI in the publishing supply chain – 3
• Canada
• BookNet Canada
• unswerving industry support and coined the phrase 'ISNI, the dream identifier’
• Rakuten Kobo
• Toronto end of multinational, focus particularly on e-books
• Kobo investigating a similar programme to that in UK, matching in-house title
and author records with ISNI database, exploring potential and limits of matching
on ISBNs

42. ISNI in Canada
• BAnQ
• ISNI assignment services for people and organizations associated with Québec
(visual and audio-visual materials as well as books)
• BTLF
• central point of ISNI management in Québec (collaborating with BAnQ, ANEL,
UNEQ and Copibec), provision of ISNIs to all existing Québécois & French
Canadian contributors – supplying new authors with ISNIs and retrospectively
adding ISNIs to known authors
• MacOdrum Library, Carleton University
• academic focus, ISNIs for authors represented in their own library holdings

43. ISNI initiatives underway
• rebuilding the ISNI website
• offering ISNIs and their metadata in the form of Linked Open Data
• will make available under a CC-Zero licence
• expansion into the music sector
• YouTube, Sound Exchange and others
• representation & governance improvements
• special consultation groups for music, libraries, organisations

44. Benefits of ISNI
• provides cross-publisher and cross-sector party identification
• current focus is on personas of individuals, in future could also be used for
publishers and imprints
• links to other public identifiers can be recorded and/or use ISNIs as a
bridge
• potential for improved merchandising, royalties processing, rights
trading, library cataloguing, Wikipedia links
• as well as the hard work needed under the hood
• disambiguation, deduplication
• better, cleaner data to drive visibility and sales

45. Chris Saynor, EDItEUR (chris@editeur.org)
Tim Devenport, EDItEUR (tim@editeur.org)
and Exec Director, ISNI-IA

46. • International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI)
• https://isni.org
• https://isni.org/page/search-database/
• ISNI general enquiries info@isni.org
• ISNI Twitter @ISNI_ID
• ISNI for the publishing supply chain https://isni.org/page/article-detail/isni-for-the-
publishing-supply-chain/