In archives it helps to have PIDs: Persistent IDentifiers. PIDs help organisations attribute data to consistently identified objects. There are many PID-schemes. Books can be persistently identified by their ISBN. In science, DOIs are popular to identify scientific articles. And there are plenty of other persistent identifiers.

What most of them share is the following: they need registration. And while that could be a good thing, I’ve seen well meant attempts at creating a PID where the central entity went rogue, links are dependent on some centralised resolver and it all falls apart.

The requirements

When I was tasked to create a long lasting QR label the requirements were clear:

• The basis had to be a URL (QR Codes can contain anything, but URLs deliver the best UX)
• It should have a fallback: the URL should not be a meaningless string; it should at least contain an identifier it was once assigned; in the …

Notes by Luke Wroblewski on the Martin Belam (Guardian) talk at EuroIA:

Up front, the team did not get their API model right. They tried to use ISBNs for books and did not heed advice that ISBNs are “evil”.

Sounds quite familiar :)

They (ISBN numbers, ed.) are a physical system not a digital system. They don’t identify a unique work but a specific edition. They don’t cover anthologies, they are added to CDs, calendars and even card displays.

Lately I’ve been wanting to slam my head quite a couple times for a similar reason: not choosing the right identifier. While much of the data I work with lately has multiple codes/numbers that look like unique identifiers usable in the digital environment I am building. None of them, however, fitted my desired digital world view. While I could have adopted the real world view underlying the existing identifiers, that view did not fit the …