Time: Friday, 9. November 2007, 10:30 - 16:30
Location: SUB Göttingen (New Building), Germany, How to reach
Workshop language is English.
The number of participants is limited to 30.

Persistent identifiers are a central concern in the longterm accessibility of digital resources. Measures for longterm preservation are effectively lost if the resource itself is "lost" due to a broken identifier, in other words, if access fails because the linkage between a digital object and its identifier no longer works. Name resolvers and persistent identifiers have been developed to cope with this challenge, but this area is currently characterized by a multitude of approaches and systems for which no well-defined and common criteria have become widely accepted yet. What are the general conditions for real longterm validity of identifiers? What technical and organisational conditions have to be met by single institutions or a network of institutions so that persistent identifiers will stand the test of time and be interoperable? Can the concept of trustworthiness which has been pursued in the area of repositories be adapted to persistent identifiers and, if so, how?

To explore some of these questions, the standards working group of the German nestor (Network of Expertise in Long-Term Storage of Digital Resources) initiative undertakes a project for the DIN (German Institute for Standardization). The aim of this workshop is to present and discuss first results of this effort, to initiate a communication process in the community and to plan follow-on work. The participants come from different nestor institutions, stakeholders and interested international experts.