Colonel William A. Phillips

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.[1]

The Danish Agency for Culture and Palaces is the international authority for maintaining the standard and its registry.[2]

An ISIL is alphanumeric, with a maximum of 16 characters.[2] 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 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. 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.

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