Long live the knowledge!
Koikkalainen, Riitta; Frosterus, Matias; Pietarila, Emma; Vihervalli, Ulriika (2024-07-10)
Lataukset:
LIBER - Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche – Association of European Research Libraries
10.07.2024
Koikkalainen, R., Frosterus, M., Pietarila, E., & Vihervalli, U. (2024, July 10). Long live the knowledge! Proper metadata and how it is created with URN and other persistent identifiers. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12704477
CC-BY
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe2024071561176
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe2024071561176
Kuvaus
Presentation given in Liber 2024 conference (Limassol, Cyprus).
First published in Zenodo, Liber community.
https://zenodo.org/records/12704477
First published in Zenodo, Liber community.
https://zenodo.org/records/12704477
Tiivistelmä
Metadata matters, especially if you wish your digital objects to live long and flourish. Currently most people turn to search engines when in need of information on any subject. But no search engine knows anything other than what it is told. Telling is not possible without names or locations. In the era of digitalisation, high quality machine-readable metadata and machine-actionable identifiers have become more important than ever before.
With this in mind, the National Library of Finland has been providing persistent identifier services to higher education and cultural heritage organisations since the late 1990s. This free-of-charge, actionable and persistent identifier URN – Uniform Resource Name – is an internet standard able to encompass other identifiers under the same umbrella. URN is not limited to identifying documents, but rather it can be assigned to any kind of digital object. The functionalities of URNs are rather similar to DOIs and they can be used in similar ways, but they are not mutually exclusive. The URN standard includes sophisticated functionalities that can be tailored to the namespaces. However, there have been no practical implementations of this as of yet.
Based on feedback from URN end users as well as our in-house specialists, we now have developed new versions of the National Library of Finland’s open-source URN harvester and resolver. This aims to improve the use of persistent identifiers as means of interaction. The new features make integration of URNs easier and smoothen the flows of information. For example, the current URN resolver distinguishes between normal URLs and legal deposit URLs, allowing it to inform the end user if the object is only available in the legal deposit collection. Previously, mapping functioned as one-to-one. Now mapping functions as one-to-many.
By using URNs, one serves libraries, search engines, and, at the end of the day and most importantly, the end users. URNs realise FAIR by making the identified object findable, accessible and re-usable.
With this in mind, the National Library of Finland has been providing persistent identifier services to higher education and cultural heritage organisations since the late 1990s. This free-of-charge, actionable and persistent identifier URN – Uniform Resource Name – is an internet standard able to encompass other identifiers under the same umbrella. URN is not limited to identifying documents, but rather it can be assigned to any kind of digital object. The functionalities of URNs are rather similar to DOIs and they can be used in similar ways, but they are not mutually exclusive. The URN standard includes sophisticated functionalities that can be tailored to the namespaces. However, there have been no practical implementations of this as of yet.
Based on feedback from URN end users as well as our in-house specialists, we now have developed new versions of the National Library of Finland’s open-source URN harvester and resolver. This aims to improve the use of persistent identifiers as means of interaction. The new features make integration of URNs easier and smoothen the flows of information. For example, the current URN resolver distinguishes between normal URLs and legal deposit URLs, allowing it to inform the end user if the object is only available in the legal deposit collection. Previously, mapping functioned as one-to-one. Now mapping functions as one-to-many.
By using URNs, one serves libraries, search engines, and, at the end of the day and most importantly, the end users. URNs realise FAIR by making the identified object findable, accessible and re-usable.