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

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.     

The Zeitschriftendatenbank and the Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek: An Update on Services

The authors discuss the Zeitschriftendatenbank (the German Union Catalog of Serials) and the Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek (the Electronic Journals Library). They then present an overview of the cooperative efforts to integrate the two databases at a functional level, the services that have resulted so far from these efforts, and the prospects for the future.     

不忘前事，警示未来

上世纪40年代,德国科学家曾为纳粹的扩张和人种政策服务,进行了种族学、优生学以及人类学等方面的研究,德国科学基金会为这些研究工作提供了资助。现在德国科学基金会通过在其总部树立警示碑,对那段历史进行认真反思,以求正视历史、警示未来。