The Institutional Identifier (I2) Working Group was established at the request of the information supplier community, which lacked a robust, global identifier strategy for the organizations with which they did business.

The Journal Supply Chain Efficiency Improvement Pilot (JSCEIP), conducted from 2006 through 2007, demonstrated the improved efficiencies of unambiguous identification of organizational entities in journal supply workflows. The project also found that implementation of an institutional identifier would require a commitment by all parties in the supply chain to use such an identifier-and that there were many more players involved than originally thought. Additional issues were raised related to the metadata that should be collected for the identifier and how the data would be maintained. Since NISO has traditionally played a role in the promulgation of identifiers commonly used within the library and publishing communities, both nationally and internationally, members of the JSCEIP brought a proposal to NISO to develop an institutional identifier standard that could support a wide range of known and unknown digital information needs throughout the library and publishing environment. The proposal was approved by NISO's Business Information Committee and the Voting

Members in January 2008 and a NISO Institutional Identifiers (I2) Working Group was formed with the following charges:

• 1. Develop scenarios to represent the most compelling use cases for institutional identifiers that will engage all relevant stakeholders and identify their institutional identifier needs.
• 2. Develop a globally unique identifier string that is usable in the web environment, together with sufficient metadata to uniquely identify and relate the institution to its identifier.
• 3. Identify a strategy for the implementation of the institutional identifier, including identifying the hosting and technical needs, the legacy uses of institutional identifiers in the digital information space, and the identification of complementary initiatives that could be informed by, or interoperable with, the NISO I2 identifier standard.