Persistent Identification for the Permanent Referencing of Digital Resources—The Activities of the EPICUR Project

Abstract

ABSTRACT Long-term referencing of online publications (for example, research papers embedded in a distributed heterogeneous information environment) presents several challenges. In order to address the challenges, two main things must be taken into account: • A method for location-independent referencing by means of Persistent Identifiers (PIs) • The long-term access to digital objects by means of (long-term) preservation These imply that long-term referencing is not only an issue of a technical implementation of PIs, but also a matter of a political and organizational infrastructure. These starting points underlie the PI-related activities at Die Deutsche Bibliothek (the German National Library) that are occurring in the framework of the EPICUR (Enhancement of Persistent Identifier Services-Comprehensive Method for Unequivocal Resource Identification) project. This article discusses cooperative URN management at Die Deutsche Bibliothek within the EPICUR project. It presents results concerning the framework of URN assignment and administration, resolving services, and standardization within bibliographic information services.