 University Models for Research Identifiers. Remarks by Deanna Markham at the 160th ARL membership meeting. Convened by Lorraine Harry-Cohm. Welcome to this session titled University Models for Research Identifiers. I'm Lorraine J. Harry-Cohm, Dean of the Library of State University of Kansas. And I'm pleased to introduce to you this morning Deanna Markham who likely doesn't need any introduction to any of us. A colleague that we all know very well. In her role as managing director for Ithaca S. Plazar. Deanna is with us this morning to talk about Ithaca's work with ORCAT. To determine an acceptable business model to the university community. There will be time at the end of Deanna's presentation for questions and discussion. And I think we're ready to go right into the session if that's okay with Deanna. Good morning everyone. I would prefer standing out there. But I think it's hard to hear in this room particularly with the background noise. So I'll stand behind this barrier and forgive me. I had been at Ithaca for two days. When Craig Van Dyke from the board of ORCAT called and said, I understand you have a new role now and we need some help. Can you help us? I really knew almost nothing about ORCAT when he called. I have to admit I had heard about ORCAT being formed. ORCAT stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID. In case you don't know what that full name means. I did give them a lot of credit for a nice acronym. I thought ORCAT was really nice. I went to meet with the board in January. And they told me that they had hired a consultant to develop a business model. They thought it was a really good business model. They were well on their way. Then they made a presentation at a CNI meeting I think last spring, a year ago in the spring. And they learned in that meeting that a membership model didn't work for government agencies. Government agencies can't become members of things. So that really startled them and they decided it would be really helpful to have someone talk to universities and find out if the business model that had been proposed would work for universities or did universities have another business model they preferred. Because this is to be a 501C3 organization. It is made up, the board is made up of representatives from funding agencies, government agencies, the library community and the publishing community. And their mission, they have a long mission statement, but essentially their mission is they will create a central registry of unique identifiers for authors and contributors, thereby solving the disambiguation problem. And they go on to say that their goal is to connect, to be a kind of Uber service. Jay, Jordan and I were joking this morning that unique identifier is kind of an oxymoron since there are so many unique identifiers floating out there. But their plan is to have this overarching service that allows local systems, whatever they are using to connect to this overarching system and we will all know exactly who this author is. So I want all of you to understand fully that I am not representing orchid, I am not selling orchid, I am simply reporting on the results of our survey. We decided that in order to figure out if this business model was acceptable to people, we needed to make a series of phone calls. We agreed on a number and I also want to assure you that this is a non-scientific, non-random sample, non-everything you can imagine kind of study. Simply put, I called all of you and I said I'm trying to find the person on your campus who knows something about how you are managing identity systems. The most interesting part of this study is that to a person, these were the typical reactions. That's a really interesting question. I should know the answer to it but I don't know who's responsible on our campus. We're so decentralized, we have so many people who are working on this. I can't give you a single name. Other people said I'll get back to you but all of you were terrific. I simply could not have figured this out on my own because there really aren't central locations on campuses for this kind of work. Lorraine was wonderful at the University of Kansas. She ended up putting together a whole room full of people for me to talk to. What happened in this study is that I went from one person to another to another to another. So I thought I would be making 20, 25 phone calls and I made many, many, many, many, many phone calls in order to figure out what was actually going on on the campuses. On campuses where there's a medical school, there are completely different operations. In general, and I should also say, we submitted the report to ORCID on April 1st. The Board of ORCID meets on May 16th or 17th in Boston. So I am not really talking about the results that we submitted to ORCID because ORCID has to accept those results and then decide if it's going to distribute the report or not. I don't know what they will do with it. But I thought it would be interesting to talk to you about identity systems in general and what I think libraries might do to take a leadership role on the campus because what became really clear is that there were two kinds, institutions fall into two categories. There are those that want to buy something, plug it in and forget it. So companies like Academic Analytics have sold systems to a lot of universities and in talking to several provosts, the response was we need to know who has published what. We need to be able to look at productivity of our faculty. We need to be able to track faculty activity going back to institutions before they came here and going through institutions they'll go to after they've been here. We need help of figuring out Asian names particularly. Is this park or Kim, the same park or Kim in 50,000 other articles? We need that but we don't want to spend a lot of time thinking about it. On the other side there are universities that are thinking very hard about analytics of all kinds. They're developing systems on their campuses. They want to control that system. They want to be able to put data in and take data out and run the kinds of reports they want to run. So they want a system they have a lot of control over and develop. I think that's next door. One of the most telling things to me when I was talking to the Board of Orchid, they kept assuring me that they did not want this to be seen as a library matter. They wanted this to be viewed as a university issue. They did not want the membership fee for Orchid to come from the library budget. They wanted it to come from the university budget. But when I looked at what's happening on university campuses, the only place where this issue is really understood is in the library. The directors of research don't actually get this. Provost are aware of it but would like to keep it over here somewhere. When I looked for instances of success with the use of Orchid or implementing Orchid, it was at a health science library where the librarian had taken this on as a cause and was using the system to develop a data management system for his institution. So it occurred to me that this is an opportunity for libraries to think about this issue. There was to be a session following this one where Cliff Lynch was going to talk about identity systems generally. And I was feeling so happy about that because I think it's really important that this whole issue be discussed thoroughly by this community. But Cliff was caught in the storms and can't get to Chicago, so I think you get coffee instead of Cliff this morning. So I'll do a little bit of thinking about this broader issue with you and then I hope you will help others think about it too. The university's interest in identity systems is to track faculty publications to find a standard way to submit proposals to funding agencies, particularly government agencies. They're interested in benchmarking productivity and developing university analytics of various kinds. For the researcher, the advantage is if a system like this worked, you would have one identity number that you use for everything and you wouldn't have to figure out what am I supposed to do with this particular grant application or report to the university. It would be a relatively easy way to create bibliographies of your work to present to whatever forum you needed to present it to. But it's in the library where this issue has been dealt with for decades, if not centuries. We actually know something about identity systems. We've been using them for a long time. We know how to link them. We know how to produce bibliographies from them. It's hard, I think, for us to make our knowledge better utilized on the campus unless we get involved in these issues at the campus level. There are some serious issues with identity systems. Going down to the article level and tracking faculty productivity from year one to year end makes a lot of faculty very uncomfortable. They don't think this is such a great idea. There are also questions about what the university would be doing with this information. And even though it's supposed to be for submitting proposals and just keeping track of who's who, there are a lot of things that could be done with this information if collected universally. There are also systems that are being developed in other parts of the world. Orchid is supposed to be an international system. And I did talk in my telephone calls, I talked to European, Asian, and North American institutions. The ISNI, the International Standard Name Identifier, is developing a lot of momentum, particularly in the UK and in other parts of Europe as well. In Asia, there is very little understanding of the unique identifier issue. It was hard to explain what this was all about to some of the institutions I talked to. So the question I would pose for you is what is our interest in this? Data management becomes an important issue on campuses when we heard the three panelists at the end of the day yesterday. The theme that ran through their presentations is we are developing all of these data. We're working with collaborators from many different disciplines. Our work is collected in new and interesting ways who will take care of this and manage it. Name identifiers is one important piece of it, but it's pretty small piece. Is there a way that libraries can become more important in that data management process generally? And then I would ask, we have had name authorities in libraries since God was a boy or something. I don't know, a long time. The concern is that we've focused mostly on authors of monographs for our name authorities. But can't we be expansive enough to maybe do a little better than that and build on what we already have? We've invested an enormous amount of money in authority files in libraries. And how are those fitting into these systems is a question I would ask. And finally, I would ask a question of all of you that was asked by many people I talked to. How many separate institutions, organizations, I shouldn't say institutions, how many separate organizations are we going to support as a library community? Here is another organization that is being formed that will require infrastructure. It will require people. And several librarians particularly asked, well, is there a way that some of these organizations can be combined so that the functions can be taken care of, but we don't have to create separate institutions? So I will stop there. We can talk about anything you'd like to talk about, but that's where this study is. I will say one more thing. When we submitted our report, we described in great detail the conversations we had with each institution. And we said, A, no one has any basic disagreement with the business model. That was our question. Is this business model acceptable? Answer, yes. We've seen this many times before. We do this all the time in universities. We support these kinds of things. But there are major issues to be addressed. And I told them in the report that the first problem you will have is finding the right person to talk to on the campus. And you need to be ready to invest a lot of time looking for that person. But I went into great detail about each discussion and then posed a series of questions for Orchid to think about. Thank you for listening. Music was provided by Josh Woodward. For more talks from this meeting, please visit www.arl.org.