Visual image persistent identifiers

Rick Silterra sent this proposal to Liz:
Liz,

I'd like us to work on assigning persistent URLs to all our visual items in artstor. At this point, I would suggest handles, as we have a handle server, and a task force on persistent identifiers recommended that a while back.
https://confluence.cornell.edu/display/PIDS/Home
(sorry, no handle for the report address!)

Pete hoyt working on some tools for handle maintenance from the web. There are already batch tools
for this. Step 1 (see below) at least does not need to be a whole lot of work –
if we have a spreadsheet of image id's, and artstor or luna id URL's, we
can generate persistent ids very quickly. I don't know how much work is involved
in reloading data WITH these things, but I got the impression that doing that was not a major effort.
Of course, even it it is not a major effort, the work might take a while to get into the queue of
things for ArtStor. Please correct me if I am wrong.

Different aspects of this problem:

1) I'd like to see a 'persistent url' field in the metadata for our
collections. this should be displayed to the user
with a note to 'use this url to refer to this item'.

2) I'd like to see us have a discussion with ArtStor about these –
maybe we can work out a way to get these assigned
at record creation time. This would take some technical work on our
part, and on their part.

3) I am not sure how shared shelf works into this – Do items there
have their own URL that changes when they go into
'ArtStor' itself? When (a collection, an item) moves from 'ArtStor'
to 'OpenShelf' (is that the right term?) does it change it's
URL?

I'd like to get this implanted into the work flow, so
how can we move this along? who needs to be involved?

Thanks a lot,
Rick

Liz replied:

I think this is a good idea. We probably need to develop two different workflows – one for our current ARTstor Digital Library collections, and one for the collections which we upload into Shared Shelf.

ARTstor Digital Library:
I don't think it would be difficult to get a spreadsheet of image IDs and URLs from ARTstor. The difficult part would be getting ARTstor to upload our handles into the metadata. It often takes ARTstor 4-12 months to upload new collections/metadata! We'd need to push them on this. Another question is whether we want to wait until we move these to Shared Shelf to add handles...

ARTstor Shared Shelf:
We have a lot more control in this environment. We can create new metadata fields and add/edit metadata as we wish. Since Open Shelf is still under development, we don't know exactly how/when the URLs would be assigned. The earliest we will start moving collections into Open Shelf would be during summer 2011. In the meantime, it is worth having a conversation with ARTstor about the logistics of URLs and handle creation.

How about putting a meeting on our calendars to have a preliminary discussion? It would make sense for Danielle, Mira, you, and I to be there (am I missing anyone on your end?). We can scope out the issues and decide on what we'd like to see from ARTStor. Thanks for following up on this.