ISNIs and ORCIDS - the impact of identifiers

A recent post in The Scholarly Kitchen, Why persistent identifiers deserve their own festival got me thinking about the use of identifiers and how these might transform traditional technical services tasks. A post by Karen Smith-Yoshimura in Hangingtogether.org, Impact of identifiers on authority workflows, describes explicitly how the use of identifiers could simplify and enhance the process of associating works and creators. In fact, we are told that use of identifiers is essential to shifting bibliographic description out of MARC into a linked data environment. The implementation of personal identifiers is strongest in the sciences, but their use is expanding into the social sciences and humanities.

According to their website, ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier) is an

ISO certified global standard number for identifying the millions of contributors to creative works and those active in their distribution, including researchers, inventors, writers, artists, visual creators, performers, producers, publishers, aggregators, and more. It is part of a family of international standard identifiers that includes identifiers of works, recordings, products and right holders in all repertoires.

NACO and OCLC plan to incorporate ISNIs in the 024  field of LC/NACO authority records as part of the long delayed RDA authority file conversion phase 3B.

ORCID  is a subset of ISNI - a block of identifiers reserved for authors and researchers. ORCID's mission is to provide

an identifier for individuals to use with their name as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities. We provide open tools that enable transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions, and affiliations. We provide this service to help people find information and to simplify reporting and analysis.

Author's and researchers can register with ORCID, then share their ORCID ID with their institution. My institution, Cornell University, is actively encouraging faculty in all fields to establish ORCID IDs. Use of identifiers makes it possible to precisely identify authors without the squishy ambiguity of parsing out character strings.

Curious about the persistent identifier festival? PIDapalooza is scheduled for November 9-10, 2016 in Reykjavík.