[Esip-preserve] Citations guideline revisions

[Greg Janée]

The Handle and DOI systems support "multiple resolution" which can be  
used for, among other things, describing the multiple locations at  
which the object may be found.

I don't know how often this capability is used in practice, but  
multiple resolution would seem to be a great help in thinking of an  
identifier as identifying an abstract object (e.g., a version of a  
dataset)  for which there may be varying numbers of copies in  
existence at any given time.

Regarding Mark's comment, is it ever desirable for an object to have  
more than one persistent identifier?  If it takes some amount of  
awareness and responsibility and effort to maintain one identifier  
over time, doesn't that burden get multipled N times if there are N  
identifiers?  And then there's the diluting effect of having more than  
one identifier, which causes confusion (which identifier should I  
use?), plays havoc with citation counting and search system ranking,  
etc.

-Greg

On Jul 25, 2011, at 12:02 PM, Mark A. Parsons wrote:
> Yes, use as many identifiers as you like, but you should probably  
> only use one in a citation. The publishers would probably prefer  
> that be a DOI (at the moment at least).
>
> Cheers,
>
> -m.
>
> On 25 Jul 2011, at 12:22 PM, Bruce Barkstrom wrote:
>> One question that I don't think we've addressed is whether having a  
>> single
>> source of redirection will decrease the probability of losing  
>> information due
>> to the loss of multi-site replication.  Going to the multi- 
>> identifier approach
>> would be more consistent with multi-site distribution of locators.
>>
>> Bruce b.