This document discusses the need for an institutional registry to store contact and relationship information for libraries, publishers, vendors, and other entities involved in scholarly communications. Currently, each entity stores this information individually, resulting in millions of duplicate records. An institutional registry could provide a single place to store and update basic contact and identification information. While not solving all problems, a registry would eliminate the need to duplicate institutional details and updates across different systems. The document asks for any questions or comments about the proposal.

1. The Need for an Institutional Registry
Nathan D.M. Robertson
University of Maryland School of Law
Society for Scholarly Publishing
Arlington, Virginia
9 June 2006

2. The current situation.
n Libraries create a unique code, vendor record,
and enter contact information for every vendor.
n Each library does this…
n For each vendor…
n And keeps the information up to date…
Let’s see . . .117,664 libraries1 x 3075 booksellers2 = 360 million records 3
n And each vendor does the same for each library
they deal with! make that 720 million records!
1. ALA estimate of number of US libraries.
2. Booksellers attending 2004 London Book Fair.
3. Obviously an utterly untrustworthy number, but you get my point.

4. Complex?
University System of Maryland and Affiliated Institutions
Licensing: Betty Day
NELLCO
Link Resolver: Laura Wrubel University of Baltimore
UMCP
Coppin State
U of Maryland, Baltimore County
Bowie State
St. Mary’s College of Maryland
University of Maryland, Baltimore
IPs: 134.192.*.*
Procurement Services
University of Maryland Sharon Quinn
School of Law
IPs: 134.192.40-48.*
Thurgood Marshall Law Library
PALINET Health Sciences and Human
Services Library
E-Resources: Nathan Robertson E-Resources: Robin Klein
Collection Development: Bill Sleeman Collection Development: ?
Billing: Flora Lilliston Billing: ?
NELLCO
Ordering: Marie Laguerre Ordering: ?

5. Who’s talking? To whom? About whom?
Parent Company
Publisher Publisher
Business Affiliate Supplier Supplier
Agent
Consortium
Parent Institution
Library Library
Branch Branch

6. Don’t we have institution identifiers?
n SAN, GLN, ISIL, MARC21 org codes…
n … but these don’t carry information.
n Registry will be one place each group in
communication chain will need to go to get
(or update) contact information and IP
addresses.

7. Will this solve all our problems?
n Of course not.
n Internal systems
will still need to
map relationships
specific to each
transaction.
n But internal systems will no longer need to
duplicate institutional details and updates
across every system in the chain.

8. Questions and Comments
Nathan D.M. Robertson
nrobertson@law.umaryland.edu