Ringgold and Ingenta form pioneering partnership

Ingenta has made a pioneering agreement with Ringgold to centralise authentication data relating to academic, professional and business libraries worldwide.

The Ringgold-Ingenta partnership has created a functioning system in which administrative updates to one registration database (Ingenta) may be securely syndicated (via Ringgold) to other participating publishers’ systems. Ringgold now licenses institutional IP data from Ingenta’s global access control system, enhancing the 100,000 records in its Identify database of institutional identifiers.

Kirsty Meddings, product development manager at Ingenta explained. ‘Librarians are frustrated with the current piecemeal nature of registering for resources, and the multiple authentication profiles that need to be maintained as a result. Our conversations with them suggest that in an ideal world, there’d be a single place to manage your institution’s details. In sharing the data we have compiled, which librarians can edit themselves, we’re taking the first step to making that ideal into a reality.’

‘We’ve participated in many supply chain initiatives over the years,’ commented Ringgold managing director, Helen Henderson, ‘but we believe this one improves upon them all in terms of the scale of data involved, and the potential scope for changing the way publishers and libraries interact. Ingenta’s team has been refreshingly creative and enthusiastic in their approach, and together we will prove that it is possible to streamline the process of accessing scholarly information for everyone.’

Ringgold creates and maintains a hierarchic database of identifiers for institutions to support publishers and other parties in the delivery of e-content within the information supply chain.