At Home among Strangers: Overcoming Tensions between Publishers’ and Library Data: The National Library of France’s Experimental Tool for Automated ISNI Attribution

The National Library of France (BnF, Bibliothèque nationale de France) is testing a new tool, called “ISNI Demande” (“ISNI Request”) which is designed for ingesting data on authors coming from publishers, creating provisional authority records, sending them to the ISNI international database, sending ISNIs back to publishers and giving librarians opportunities to use external data for establishing authority control on resources. The “ISNI Request” scope is focused on legal deposit and the French book supply chain so as to strengthen the BnF’s role and place in the national data ecosystem, in line with its legal missions. This new tool aims at overcoming differences between publishers’ data and library data in order to create a virtuous circle, by maintaining specific rules and needs for both. It also questions the scope of quality data the National Library is committed to and the librarians’ role regarding accelerating and growing data flows going in and out of the National Library system.