Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Illustration by  Pat Hochstenbach The DOI URI Scheme: Utility or Branding? Herbert Van de Sompel 2024-11-13 A few days ago, Joe Wass published a blog post entitled " Falsehoods Programmers believe about DOIs ." It’s an excellent resource for developers that work with DOIs and a sobering read for those that attribute magical powers to DOIs. For about 10 years, Joe was a developer at Crossref , the major DOI registration agency for scholarly communication, so chances are high that he knows what he’s writing about. One of the highlighted falsehoods pertains to the challenges involved when bots attempt to resolve DOIs, following their nose from https://doi.org/ the-doi-name to eventually arrive at a landing page describing the scholarly artifact that has the-doi-name as its persistent identifier. Joe had previously described this bot Odyssey in detail in a Crossref blog post " URLs and DOIs: a complicated relationship " and now adds that “ the landscape has only got ...

In a previous post I covered the shut down of the NASA Technical Report Server , which has since come back online in a reduced capacity .  In this post we examine some of the peculiarities of the current state of NTRS, particularly with respect to Handles and Memento.  Earlier this week I needed to access an old NASA report of mine, ironically enough about NTRS, from 1996: Richard C. Tuey, Mary Collins, Pamela Caswell, Bob Haynes, Michael L. Nelson, Jeanne Holm, Lynn Buquo, Annette Tingle, Bill Cooper and Roy Stiltner, NASAwide Electronic Publishing System-Prototype STI Electronic Document Distribution: Stage-4 Evaluation Report, NASA TM-104630 (parts 1 and 2), May 1996. It is not a particularly enjoyable report; it is the kind of lengthy, multi-authored, sanitized, bureaucratic-engineering report that people write but don't read (a "better" summary can be found in AIAA-95-0964 ).  I probably have a pdf of the report somewhere in my files, but instead I pulle...