[Esip-preserve] Another Slant on Identifiers

[Nancy Hoebelheinrich]

Hey, Bruce:
In my experience, content management systems of various sorts use such
identifiers upon receipt of whatever needs to be tracked, sometimes called
"accession" numbers.  The numbers could be used within a given system, and
depending upon how it was prefixed, outside systems as well.   In the
digital environment, again in my experience, this is an ideal use for UUIDs
with other identifiers serving other purposes that we've talked about more,
i.e., citation.  One of the things I hope we can think about for the
metadata testbed project is how well OIDs and other, less commonly known
identifiers could be used for this kind of purpose as well as for citation
purposes.  We'll have to beg the question as to how a content / digital
asset / inventory management system would use such identifiers to track
versions, and important characteristics such as provenance as you mention as
there are different solutions out there, but it would be useful to at least
look at the identifier schemes in terms of how they might facilitate such
tracking.
Nancy

On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 6:24 AM, Bruce Barkstrom <brbarkstrom at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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.
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-- 
Nancy Hoebelheinrich
Information Analyst
San Mateo, CA  94401
njhoebel at gmail.com
(m) 650-302-4493
(f) 650-745-3333
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