Vast amounts of digital assets are now being produced and stored by research institutions. There is an obvious need to manage, discover and access these resources over time. As e-research projects have matured, it has become clear that Persistent Identifiers are crucial to meeting this need. Persistent Identifiers can be attached to any resource, asset, data set or other artefact. The identifier improves discovery and access over time, despite place and technology dislocation.

The National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) has noted that modern research is increasingly dependent on technological platforms that enhance the research community’s ability to generate, collect, share, analyse, store and retrieve information. Research data and collections will ideally exist within an environment of enabling and value-adding information services that support resource location, resource access, and resource analysis.

This workshop will focus on initial work within the PILIN project to develop a national shared persistent identifier management infrastructure. The PILIN project seeks to demonstrate the advantages of both “Utility” enabling infrastructure and “Value-Added” information services that use persistent identifiers. It will also provide the basis for the development of sustainable Australian Utility and Value-Added persistent identifier services.

The issues covered by PILIN are both technical and policy related. The project aims to offer a governance and policy framework setting that transcends current technological boundaries. The issues faced by persistence and pervasive objectives are as much policy and governance as they are technical.

The workshop will present interim findings from the PILIN project, elicit responses from the e-research community as to priorities for the project in 2007 (and for sustainable services in 2008 and beyond) and facilitate a debate about the type of persistence required by future e-research infrastructure.

Persistent Identifiers have been articulated as a key requirement in a number of digital asset environments (e-research, e-learning, cultural organisations). The PILIN project is demonstrating that there is much to be explored to meet the needs of the broad range of communities. However, at a PILIN stakeholder meeting in March 2007 it was discovered that the e-research requirements have much in common with other community requirements for persistent identifiers.

• Introduction to persistent identifiers
  • Basic concepts, technical solutions, and policy requirements
• Utility persistent identifier services
  • Overview of core identifier services being deployed by PILIN project
• Value-added persistent identifier services
  • Overview of potential value added services, e.g. relationship, metadata, aggregation, appropriate copy, movement, discovery services
  • Demonstration of some value-added services
  • Value-added service brainstorm and prioritisation activity
• Policy and best practice considerations
  • Identifier naming policies
  • What to identify and when
  • Policies for improving persistence
  • Curation and hosting models

Dennis Macnamara has worked in education for over 30 years in both public and private sectors. He has expertise in both managing the development of content and the delivery of services and has been responsible for designing successful business models for the design and delivery of flexible and innovative learning services.  Most recently at AEShareNet Dennis developed approaches to demystify the complexities of copyright, IP management and licensing so that practitioners can get on with business. It is imperative that intellectual property be carefully managed in e learning so that resources can be shared, traded and used as widely as possible. Currently Dennis is project manager of the PILIN project, another key jigsaw component for successful e business approaches to learning and research.

Dr Nigel Ward is Director of the Australian Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative Partnership Laboratory where he is responsible for international outreach and technical leadership. The laboratory is one node in the larger ADL Co-Lab network that is working to harness information technologies to support learning, training and job performance. The Australian ADL Partnership Laboratory works to promote and support ADL specifications and technologies such as SCORM and CORDRA within Australia. It also aims to represent Australian interests and requirements to the broader ADL community. Dr Ward manages the collaborative Federated Repositories for Education (FRED) project, which supports deployment of a service-based approach to developing federations of learning content repositories throughout the Australian education and training communities. Prior to his ADL Australia appointment, Dr Ward was an interoperability analyst at The Le@rning Federation, an initiative of state and federal governments of Australia and New Zealand that develops online interactive curriculum content for Australian and New Zealand schools. In previous roles he lead research teams investigating context sensitive access to information, socially mediated information exchange, metadata for the recordkeeping community, and architectures for resource discovery.