DLF/CrossRef Institution Registry

On October 7, 2005, the Digital Library Federation and CrossRef hosted a stakeholders' meeting to convene individuals from libraries, standards groups, and publishing companies to examine the feasibility of an Institution Registry. The problem: at present libraries deliver information about our institutions' contact names, telephone numbers, IP address ranges, etc. to publishers, who manage this information in their systems in order to be able to authenticate authorized users when they come across the Web. This exchange of information is usually done with each publisher individually. At minimum, an Institution Registry could provide a central location for holding this information. An institution's registry record would be assigned a unique ID and the library could then give each of its service providers that unique record identifier. The service provider could retrieve the information by requesting the record that belongs to that unique ID. When information changes, there is only a single record to change, and an alert could be sent out from the registry.

Below is a list of supporting documents from the meeting:

• Agenda
• Presentation by Ed Pentz, CrossRef, and David Seaman, DLF
• Presentation by Sarah Porter, JISC
• Minutes

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