Karen Smith-Yoshimura
Program Officer
OCLC Research
Institutions wish to enhance and promote their reputation to attract funders and faculty and to increase their ranking. Since universities change their official names as part of branding activities, academic departments change their names to reflect new curricular emphasis, and schools merge with or separate from parent institutions, institutional identifiers are crucial to accurately represent scholars’ affiliations both on their output and on grant applications. Institutions may not realize they already have such an institutional identifier, ISNI, and that this identifier has already been disseminated, used by ORCID and included in VIAF and Wikidata. This project briefing summarizes the current work of an OCLC Research task force on use cases and challenges of representing organizations in the ISNI database.
http://www.isni.org/content/oclc-research-partners-task-force-representing-organizations-isni
