I have been very slow to use the potential of a digital object identifier (DOI). I think this is in part because much of my work is a public space away from DOI Registration Agencies.
Today I discovered Laurence Horton‘s excellent explanation of the use of DOIs. He discusses the use of a DOI “to provide a stable, persistent, resolvable reference taking users to an object, even if web addresses or other references to the location of an object, or its content, change”.
He notes, however:
What DOIs are not is a symbol of data quality. You can attempt to define “quality” but the problem is using DOIs as a proxy. Just because something has a DOI does not mean it is good
There is a DOI Handbook to provide detailed information about the DOI system and its compliance with the ISO 26324 standard (digital object identifier system).
Paola Mazzucchi provides a detailed account of the 2014 DOI Outreach Conference held in Milan. I enjoyed the diversity of her report and was particularly interested a development in Taiwan that seeks “to identify educational content in open online course, delivered either to local universities students via the university platforms or globally via Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)”.
I noted too Paola’s mention of work underway “to build a linked identification and metadata network supporting cross-domain interoperability and exploit network technologies to enable new services”.
Photo Credit
Army Photograph Contest 2004 (Brittney Rankin, CC BY 2.0)
