23 March 2022
The ISNI International Agency (ISNI-IA) has reported that a new, cross-sector ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier) project commenced in February 2022, having recently gained funding from The Ministry of Education & Culture and Finland’s Recovery and Resilience Facility. Orchestrated by Finland’s national ISNI Registration Agency, The National Library of Finland, and involving five Finnish Copyright Management Organizations (CMOs), the project’s goal is to acquire and assign ISNIs to rightsholders across the multiple sectors represented by:
- Gramex: CMO for performers and producers of recorded music
- Kopiosto: CMO for creative authors, publishers and performing artists
- Kuvasto: CMO for visual artists
- Sanasto: CMO for literary copyright
- Teosto: CMO for composers, lyricists, arrangers and music publishers
The project – which will run from February 2022 to December 2023 – will facilitate the identification of persons and organizations involved in or contributing to the creative industries in Finland, as well as the enrichment of the CMOs’ metadata for those entities across the music, literary, visual and audio-visual sectors – with a view to ensuring that their data remains reliable, discoverable and interoperable in Finland and beyond.
Representing well over 100,000 Finnish royalty recipients collectively, the CMOs involved in the project agreed that it was essential to adopt an international, public and widely-used identifier to ensure the project’s success and thereby improve the services offered to rightsholders. On this topic, Tim Devenport, Executive Director of the ISNI-IA, said: “The adoption of ISNI in the workflows of CMOs from five such diverse creative sectors emphasizes the value of unambiguous identification in copyright management as well as ISNI’s ability to act as a bridge identifier between other, sector-specific identifier schemes. We are delighted to have the opportunity to support the National Library of Finland – itself a skilled and innovative ISNI Registration Agency – in contributing to the successful enhancement of copyright management practices in Finland and beyond.”
This ambitious project will be coordinated and supported by the National Library of Finland, which will acquire ISNIs on behalf of the CMOs and copyright holders involved. Project Manager, Katerina Sornova said: “This project will be a significant initiative for the entire copyright management sector and will help to ensure that every creator can be internationally recognised and unambiguously identified in association with their creative works. We are so pleased to be embarking on this journey and cannot wait to see the difference it makes for the CMOs and rightsholders alike, both domestically and internationally.”