[Esip-preserve] Another Slant on Identifiers

[Bruce Barkstrom]

As I have been going through my use case documentation for the glacier
photo collection, it occurred to me that identifiers of unique objects are
useful not only for finding objects "outside" a particular archive; they are
also useful for inventory control within an archive.

This is perhaps easier to see for physical objects, like photographic
negatives or photographic prints.  If you identify a negative, say, with
a particular ID, then you could create a "ledger" (or inventory record)
that contains the current location of the object ("look at shelf 34 in
rack 25") and the previous locations ("used to be on shelf 25 in rack
15").  In an old-fashioned accounting system, the transactions that
change the state of an inventory would appear in an accounting "journal"
that the accountants would periodically use to enter transactions to
the ledger accounts.

We haven't had any discussion I can recall about how the identifiers
would be used in such a system.  I suspect identifiers would be
even more important in this context.  Such an inventory system
would be a natural place to deal with provenance tracing (noting
that the ledger accounts could include IPR).  They would allow
systematic auditing of an archive's inventory.  They might even solve
(or partially solve) the "orphan file problem" that we talked about earlier.

Any comments?

Bruce B.