Author Identification Using Standard Files

Precisely knowing who wrote a book or read in an audio book is constantly becoming more difficult, because the number of authors of the same name is growing all the time.

This problem is not exclusive to Asia, a name search for “Michael Bauer” returns over 100 different authors from the catalogue of the German national Library.

Scientists are not the only people who want their publications unambiguously attributed to them. Authors of both fiction and non-fiction as well as publishing houses want to make certain titles can be reliably and accurately attributed. The bookselling trade wants to suggest books to their customers written by authors whose books the customers have already bought, and not those of a different author who happens to have the same name.

To satisfy this demand, both libraries and scientific institutions have joined together to build databases to positively identify persons and organisations – the so-called standard files. Each person or organisation registered receives, in addition to various descriptors, a unique identification number. Referencing this author identification number allows positive, unambiguous identification in any title notification.

Metabooks, with over 2.5 million deliverable and 4 million out-of-stock titles wants to strengthen the unambiguous correlation of authors and to offer online merchants in particular a simple, effective tool for listing all publications by a given author. In order to unambiguously identify an author, Metabooks offers a choice of three distinct identification numbers.

GND -Joint Standard File: cooperative maintenance by German libraries and archives has built a directory of more than 3 million people and 1 million organisations, which may be investigated in the Catalogue of the german national library.
ISNI – International Standard Name Identifier: ISNI ISNI is a directory covering multiple domains synthesised from the library sector and the sciences. ISNI covers more than 8 million people and half a million organisations that can be searched at the ISNI-Website.
ORCID – Open Researcher and Contributor ID: ORCID ORCID serves to unambiguously identify scientific authors. It is primarily used by science publishers, some of whom require ORCID identification. Unlike library-related standard files, authors must register with ORCID themselves. There are currently more than one million entries in this database, which may be found here.