International Standard Identifier for Libraries and Related Organisations

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The International Standard Identifier for Libraries and Related Organisations (ISIL), ISO 15511, assigns a unique number to every library in the world.

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 issued by that authority. All two letter prefixes are reserved for the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code, followed by an identifier assigned by that countries national library authority. Global-level identifiers can also be assigned, which are not associated with a particular country, e.g. 'oclc-' for the OCLC. 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.

[edit] External links

• ISIL Registration Authority
• Library Identifier Examples