The International Standard Identifier for Libraries and Related Organisations (ISIL), ISO 15511, assigns
unique identifiers to libraries and related organisations, such as archives and museums.
The
Danish Agency for Culture and Palaces is the international authority for maintaining the standard and its registry.
An ISIL is alphanumeric, with a maximum of 16 characters.
Valid symbols are A-Z, 0-9,
solidus (/), hyphen-minus and colon.
An ISIL consists of a prefix identifying the authority which issued the ISIL, a dash, and then an
identifier
An identifier is a name that identifies (that is, labels the identity of) either a unique object or a unique ''class'' of objects, where the "object" or class may be an idea, person, physical countable object (or class thereof), or physical mass ...
issued by that authority. All two letter prefixes are reserved for the
ISO 3166-1 alpha-2
ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes are two-letter country codes defined in ISO 3166-1, part of the ISO 3166 standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), to represent countries, dependent territories, and special ...
country code, followed by an identifier assigned by that country's national library authority. Global-level identifiers can also be assigned, which are not associated with a particular country, e.g. 'oclc-' for the
OCLC
OCLC, Inc. See also: is an American nonprofit cooperative organization "that provides shared technology services, original research, and community programs for its membership and the library community at large". It was founded in 1967 as the ...
. The suffix is generally a pre-existing system of identifying libraries; thus, ISIL unifies existing systems around the world rather than instituting an entire system from scratch.
References
External links
*
*
Library science
Identifiers
ISO standards
Unique identifiers
{{standard-stub