Goals
Note: Questionable goals are in red
For Identifiers
- Generally, these identifiers should be branded to Cornell through the use of a Cornell-based DNS name for the resolver; however, it should be possible to use the resolver with an alternate non-Cornell DNS name for consortia and other non-Cornell-branded needs.
- Identifiers must be permanent
- Identifiers must permanently resolve to a digital object
- Simplicity (of description and implementation)
- Support for OAI-ORE structuring
- Support for vitality checking
- Compatible with the Handle System and supports Handle System metadata
- Needs to support multiple repositories and naming schemes
- Makes sense in context of VIVO, arXiv, OAIS (CUL), Voyager Catalog, and WorldCat
- Compatible with multi-institution collections where Cornell branding is inappropriate
- Support for "private" identifiers (e.g. for dark archive or internal digital objects)
- Identifiers should be short (so use 26 letters plus numbers)
- Identifiers should be easy to copy by hand - separate every 4 characters with a dash
- Identifiers should be (mostly) opaque
- Must be resolvable through a web browser
- Must be unique without the DNS name portion of the URL
- Should include a check digit
For Resolver and System
- Supports billions of identifiers with very fast resolution
- Robust architecture and implementation - a highly available system
- Need to avoid unbounded generation of surrogate persistent identifiers
- Should support multiple delivery formats for an identifier
- Must support splitting collections (what does this mean?)
- Need a lightweight understanding of identifier equivalence
- Need a way to integrate outside PIDs with Cornell (what does this mean? examples?)
- The identifiers and the associated content should be easily discoverable by Google
- The overall system should integrate well with the "web architecture"
- Should have a PID corresponding to every Cornell NetID