An Update on Persistent Identifiers in Norwegian Biodiversity Data

Persistent identifiers (PIDs) are reference keys to pieces of digital information or digital objects (Meadows and Haak 2018). PIDs are long-lasting, trustworthy and ideally globally unique, allowing information to be unambigiously associated with a digital object. This allows, for example, collection objects to be annotated with data (e.g., improved geographic coordinates) from different web services and databases (Page 2008). In 2014, Norway began an initiative to provide all museum specimens at the University of Oslo's Natural History Museum (UiO NHM) with PIDs persistent and globally unique identifiers (PIDs) in the form of universally unique identifiers (UUIDs) prefixed by a persistent uniform resource locator (PURL) (Endresen and Svindseth 2014). This poster provides an update of progress made in this endeavor, and details the technical set up and workflow, as well as problems encountered and reflections on the process. So far, roughly 40% of UiO NHM's collections have PIDs entered in the Darwin Core materialSampleID field for the collections management system. The main technical problem has been in configuring the PURL service to set up redirects correctly. In the future, we plan to migrate from PURLs to the Handle system which provides identifiers for digital objects, or to using DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers), which are an implementation of the Handle system (Paskin 2017).