Emerging Standards: Data and Data Exchange in Scholarly Publishing - Jay Henry at CSE 2016

Editor's Notes

• #3: Let’s take a moment to orient ourselves on the big picture…
• #4: Our trees are interesting! Publications, vendors, authors… all the people places and things can be described using standard taxonomies and identifiers.
• #5: This aerial view of our forest home provides a bit more perspective – but we’re really headed to a place where we can use standardized descriptions to develop new information
• #6: Here, we’ve virtualized our understanding of the world by using data ---from this perspective, not only can we look at things far beyond our immediate sight, but are able to view our surroundings in different contexts and with much deeper analysis than by simply looking around– this is where we are headed when looking at the universe of people, the world of places, or all the stuff in it. We used to look at long lists of people we though might be customer, those that were already customers… and now we have ways to better understand who is really using our content, who is funding the most highly accessed research, and who’s are the individuals and institutions involved?
• #7: You’ll note that I’ve used the term “Standard Identifiers” as opposed to just “Standards”… I’ll be focusing on using standard identifiers as the main data hooks that will allow us to aggregate information for the purpose of synthesizing knowledge. Interoperability implies communication; how we communicate something is very different than how we describe things. I should take a moment to clarify that the Ringgold ID is not a standard – not an ISO Certified standard, in any case, but in many cases, our data has become a defacto standard through application; some of you might be wondering what then constitutes a big “S” Standards – if any system uses a predefined taxonomy as an authority file to validate data (thereby achieving identify data entries for each and every instance it is needed) then a standard has been achieved. How data is exchanged is quite different than the data itself, and of course, standards may be applied to both. For my part, I’m going to talk about the data itself, not how it is exchanged– So, in terms of the data itself, what are we trying to standardize? Descriptions – the wrapper around highly unique content. More importantly, as an industry—as a species, really—we are creating data elements that can be interpreted by machines – I should say, easily interpreted by machines – I’ll come back to this topic near the end of my presentation.
• #9: INTERNAL – Let’s look at your own ecosystem. Linking of data: Enable staff to use your data more efficiently, and keep the same view of an institution regardless of what system they are using. See overlaps and outliers when comparing two or more datasets. Example 1: Compare your fulfillment – active subscriber list – w your doc storage system, and see which subscribers have never submitted their license agreement.) Example 2: We’ve got a client that uses 3 systems to take and fulfill institutional subscriptions: CRM, authentication, and an accounting platform. Before linking these systems up with identifiers, there were disconnects that affected their clients: sometimes it was impossible to tell why the auth system was granting journal access to a particular institution – the access seemed unconnected to the payment.
• #11: Loads of benefits: IF STANDARDS ARE INTEROPERABLE
• #12: Bridge Identifier – this is an extremely important concept– there are identifiers, and there’s data… and while identifiers are data, not all identifiers operate or are maintained in the same way, and this is the important difference between and ISNI and a Ringgold ID.
• #13: Mention that we are now board members (Laura).
• #16: (ISNI straddles persons and institutions, so this will make a nice segue.) INTERNATIONAL STANDARD NAME IDENTIFIER, Iso standard. SCOPE: ISNI is meant to identify all things considered to be public parties, mostly which are creators of content, or otherwise appear in library & union catalogs (including fictional characters?). Typical records hold name variants, as you can see here. It is not limited to the scholarly or research sector, but covers all manner of popular authors, musicians, and contributors. (Original ISNI dataset was populated with VIAF records & other bibliographic sources like the Library of Congress and other international sources.) Our relationship: RIN is an ISNI registration agency, which means we will be working as a conduit for new record creation within our scope, which is primarily institutions in the scholarly supply chain. It is our plan to hold ISNIs for all institutions in our Identify database, and we are now we are working to ensure that all ISNI records which map to RINs are correct, and that we can achieve clean one to one matches. We are also working with them to create new ISNI IDs for insts in RIN, but that are not yet in ISNI. By mapping our database completely to theirs, we hope to put our clients at the starting line, so that our clients may maximize their supply chain linking.
• #17: To look at a few specific records: Here’s an ISNI, but an institutional record rather than the personal record we saw earlier. Again, note all the name variants as they appear in library holdings records. I should mention that this record illustrates one of the biggest problems everyone is confronted with--- the Many-to-One (One “Golden Record” as one major publisher refers to their internal authorative record). Here we have many names for the same institution… all attributed to the 1 ISNI – this is not ulinke what Ringgold does– we have ‘alternate names’ for each Ringgold ID stored within the Identify database, and by the end of June, the ISNI names will also be linked to the Ringgold ID (mostly… there’s not a 100% 1|1 match between ISNI and Ringgold… that’s another story.