PCC ISNI Pilot Home

Goals and Objectives

In initiating an ISNI Registration Agency Membership agreement, the Program for Cooperative Cataloging is undertaking a year-long ISNI pilot to develop an understanding of ISNI tools and systems, to create PCC documentation and training for its members, and to put in place member supports for cost-effective scaling of broader PCC involvement in ISNI.

With the November 2016 PCC Policy Committee 'agreement in principle' to seek a PCC umbrella membership in ISNI (original proposal that was endorsed), a PCC ISNI pilot has been proposed as the best way forward to explore the needs and issues that would arise for all parties (libraries, ISNI-IA and OCLC) when PCC metadata practitioners seek to incorporate ISNIs into their metadata workflows and pursue a wide range of ISNI use cases.  The experience of having PCC metadata librarians working in ISNI would generate information for all parties to understand the characteristics (tools, services, workflows, training & documentation) necessary for a sustainable, affordable and effective long-range PCC membership agreement beyond the pilot.

Participation in the PCC ISNI pilot is being drawn from three segments of the PCC:  library participants, Standing Committee representatives and the PCC Identity Management in NACO Task Group.

Background on the PCC

The Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) has a long history of commitment to creating, maintaining and sharing high quality metadata, as well as creating the professional context to train and support its members in working efficiently together in a coordinated manner as a unified community.  While members work within their local institutional contexts, they adhere to a common set of best practices and policies when undertaking work under the PCC umbrella.  They are highly trained and dedicated metadata professionals that work together to arrive at workflow best practices that result in minimizing duplicated effort and maximizing our ability to  share metadata outputs and expertise in support of information discovery.

Commitments

The PCC pilot participants commit to working together such that our engagement presents the lowest possible overhead to our ISNI colleagues and their technical partner, OCLC.  For example, the pilot group would designate a single point of contact for each functional area (practitioner training questions, tool-based technical questions, etc.) so that we ask questions in a coordinated and non-duplicative manner;  the pilot participants would first ask questions to each other, in a train the trainer model, and then present only outstanding questions to ISNI, OCLC, or ISNI Quality Team members as appropriate.  Answers would be documented so that the PCC would develop internal documentation and would share that documentation as would be helpful to others if desirable.

Workflow Activities

Pilot participants will experiment with workflows to:

• search for existing/ modify existing/ and create new ISNIs for persons and organizations using ISNI member tools, both as single practitioner-initiated transactions as well as batch work;
• work as a group to establish a PCC common batch template and batch workflow processes, agreeable to and coordinated with OCLC, so that best practices from the pilot could be adopted as the common template within the future PCC umbrella membership and not require ongoing scripting overhead on ISNI technical partners for PCC batch activities;
• understand and utilize the ISNI member APIs so that transactions requiring OCLC staff-mediated batch processing would be kept to a minimum and the API used to its fullest capacity as a “self service” model.

Sample Use Cases and Workflows

While a range of use cases utilizing identifiers are emerging within libraries, the most common uses for ISNIs initially articulated by pilot participants are the following:

• incorporating ISNIs within library MARC authority work;  examples include:
• seeing how the creation and assignment of ISNIs could support the authority control of personal and department names found in theses & dissertations collections
• searching for existing and/or create new ISNIs in conjunction with new NACO authority records
• developing a distinct and complementary “identity management” track within NACO
• utilizing ISNIs within non-MARC contexts, such as institutional repositories, which would require batch searching and creation of ISNIs for institutional affiliates
• exploring how ISNIs can complement and enhance faculty research platforms, such as VIVO
• creating ISNI URIs for use in linked data

Other use cases are also likely to be pursued during the PCC ISNI pilot;  this list is not exhaustive.