Norman Paskin discusses the Digital Object Identifier

On Feb. 23, Norman Paskin, director, the International Digital Object Identifier Foundation, spoke to library professionals as part of the OCLC Office of Research Distinguished Seminar Series.

In October 1997, at the Frankfurt (Germany) Book Fair, the Association of American Publishers announced an initiative to develop a "Digital Object Identifier." Over the past year, Dr. Paskin has been leading the effort to continue the initiative that has been increasingly visible within the publishing community and beyond.

Dr. Paskin described the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) as a unique identifier of a piece of content and a system to access that content digitally--in essence, an ISBN for the 21st century. He said the needs of the publishing environment are changing. Articles are now multidimensional--multiple manifestations rather than an issue of print and a proliferation of citation types. A citation may be more than one "dimension," requiring a linked network of identifiers.

The problem is there is a need for better systems to keep track of works and the "rights" that are connected to those works. Different manifestations of a work can and should be linked together. URLs are not sufficiently reliable. Some data shows that 50 percent of URLs are not available after two years.

Resources and the Internet

Dr. Paskin notes that as we approach the 21st century, much is changing in technology and the information world. The Internet has become an invaluable resource. Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) are not always reliable because they only give a location of a resource. They are not appropriate for managing the content of that resource. In contrast, Uniform Resource Names (URNs) are global in scope, mean the same everywhere, and do not imply a location.

URNs are required to have global scope, uniqueness, persistence, scalability, legacy support, extensibility and independence. The DOI conforms to the URN syntax. The location of a resource could be achieved through a URN resolver.

The same URN will never be assigned to two different resources, so there is a unique quality, and the URN can be assigned to any conceivable resource. The DOI can conform to URN syntax, or any other similar standard. To make the names work, to make this happen for "content" industries, Dr. Paskin said, we need technical and management support of URNs and DOIs.

Technical Information

Dr. Paskin defines DOIs as an application of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives’ (CNRI) Handle System, which is a distributed computer system for naming digital objects and storing the names and the information that is needed to locate and access these items via the Internet. The CNRI Handle System enforces unique names and can be used with URN/URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) syntax. It associates a name with one or more "values" of a specific type and provides infrastructure for application domains such as digital libraries and electronic publishing.

Dr. Paskin said the DOI technology currently works with the Internet; it is in use now, and a managed system that guarantees persistence is currently being made available as an open standard. The DOIs are designed to be flexible enough to address digital services for all content types including abstract works, digital and print manifestations.

DOI and Metadata

Dr. Paskin described the efforts that have been made to use the DOI initiative to bring together several dissimilar efforts. He said that metadata is a key component to the success of the DOI.

He said many factors are involved in addressing the melding of DOI and metadata standards. The current DOI implementations assign a number for each piece of content, following the principles of URNs and provide a name, not a location, for content on the Internet, which may or may not be consistent with a given metadata approach. Combined with a metadata standard, the DOI offers a potential standard across all media sectors. It could even allow for a unique identifier and accessibility for "nameless" material. Of course, with the use of DOIs and metadata, reverse look up will be possible. Additionally, with consistent metadata there will be the possibility of quality control based on conformance to an agreed model.

Future of DOI

Dr. Paskin states that the DOI has the potential to be useful across the information world. It has been presented at various stages of its evolvement at conferences throughout the world. The focus for the future of DOI will involve projecting its scope, investigating metadata and creating standards, registration schemes and user guidelines.

Prior to Dr. Paskin’s involvement with the International DOI Foundation, he was with Elsevier Science, where he held a number of editorial, management and technology positions, most recently as director of Publishing Technologies. He has been involved in information identifier issues for the scientific, technical and medical publishing community, and published several papers on the topic prior to his current position with DOI.--Lisa Stickley is administrative secretary, OCLC Office of Research.