Start date: 1 May 2003
End date: 31 August 2003
Funding programme: PALS Metadata and Interoperability programme (phase 1)
JISC theme(s): Information environment
The project is carried out by The Stationary Office (TSO), the DOI Registration Agency in the UK, in partnership with Edexcel International, Granada Learning, Schemeta Limited and University of Sunderland. It aims to provide practical support for publishers, institutions, JISC and its services in the implementation of Digital Object Identifiers, DOIs.
DOIs are global and persistent values that are uniquely related to a single entity. They can be stored and resolved through a registration agency such as TSO. The basic set up service involves the assignment of an identifier and the maintenance of some basic information that links to the name of an account, user and date.
It is the resolution of the DOI that provides the community with a valuable and useful service. A set of metadata provides enough information about the resource that enables it to be resolved, for example to one or more URLs that may be maintained by the publisher or TSO. The identified asset may be physical, digital or may be a metadata record about a published resource.
This project considers the delivery and management of resources through the assignment, use and resolution of persistent identifiers. Guidelines will be developed on how to use the TSO registration agency for DOIs. It will devise a framework for publishers of all types of learning materials. Following a pilot implementation it will produce a report of use cases from the perspective of publishers and universities and colleges.
The use and value of DOIs for the providers of learning platforms (MLEs or VLEs) will be piloted and reported. The project will also investigate a minimum core set of metadata, with application profiles to be associated with DOIs to meet the needs of information and content publishers in the HE/FE communities.
Use of DOIs for metadata instances for purposes other than resolutions of actual published objects will also be considered. For example: - for metadata instances, events, people and packages.
To support dissemination, TSO is going to organize a range of twelve seminars and workshops after the end of the project for publishers, policy-makers and practitioners on metadata, identifiers and interoperability issues and practices. Sectors targeted for these seminars include education, health, central and local government and publishing.
The final report entitled "Digital Object Identifier for Publishing and the e-Leaning Community" is available