Special feature: Why We Need Information Identifiers

I have a friend who has created a category of life she refers to as ‘Boring but Necessary’; item identifiers as a topic are the very model of what she had in mind when she coined that term. One may, therefore, be well within his or her rights to ask why so much time and space has been devoted, both within our industry and within these very pages, to a topic that has such seemingly low social merit.The answer, of course, lies in the fact that the successful design and implementation of item identifiers – in this case the items identified being information items – is one of the single most critical factors in being able to conduct electronic commerce. They become the universal codes used to identify the items that publishers have available for sale. Even more interestingly, they come to identify items that customers may want to buy having seen the item in another commercial environment. The current application that comes most readily to mind is that of a bookseller who sees a book at her competitor’s shop – a book she’s never seen before and that is just right as a secondary feature at an autographing party she has coming up in three weeks. She jots down the ISBN (International Standard Book Number), looks it up in her wholesaler’s online catalog, and orders 50 copies. The commercial transaction was able to occur because of three principles that were Special feature Why We Need Information Identifiers