PersID
Scholarly Communication - Infrastructure
Status: Current
Persistent access to electronic scholarly and cultural resources
Persistent access to digital publications and other electronic resources over time is an increasingly important aspect of the scientific and cultural heritage communities. “Persistent access” to scholarly and cultural information requires an unambiguous identification of information objects through a persistent identifier.
PersID combines expertise
Ten national organisations in eight European countries have combined their expertise in the PersID initiative to establish an infrastructure for Persistent Identifiers. There are many ways to set up such an infrastructure. The partners have chosen to use ‘Uniform Resource Names for National Bibliography Numbers’ URN:NBN as we regard this to be the most open and versatile system. It is able to accommodate existing national URN:NBN identifier schemes as well as other systems (DOI, Handle, ARK, etc.) within the overall URN scheme, using proven methods and technologies in an open and transparent way. The project has provideda shared Persistent Identifier resolver service which is able to resolve requests to local URNs but also to other Persistent Identifiers.
Scholarly community in control
In the PersID project a technical infrastructure has been established that meets the needs of the scholarly and cultural heritage community. Therefore all stakeholders in the Persistent Identifier life-cycle (naming, registration and preservation of digital objects) have been involved: from the researcher who is dependent on adequate dissemination of research outcomes, to libraries and authorities who manage the identifiers, to preservation agencies who guarantee the integrity of digital objects. In the project, higher education, research and cultural heritage work together to establish a trusted and well governed service infrastructure for common use.
The reports
The final reports of the project are now available for download.
A flyer on the project is also available.