EZID: Easy Identifier and Metadata Management

EZID (pronounced easy-eye-dee at ezid.cdlib.org) is an innovative service supporting the creation and management of identifiers, their accompanying metadata, and long-term access to things on the Internet. It is one of the few services that can supply a diversity of identifier and metadata types, and do so at the earliest stages of content development, long before the content is archived or its value is understood. EZID is run by a team within the California Digital Library (CDL), which serves the libraries of the ten campuses of the University of California, partners with national libraries, maintains the ARK identifier scheme, and belongs to global identifier organizations such as DataCite and CrossRef (FIG. 1). Started in 2010, EZID now has over 100 customers on three continents and users on all continents. In fact it is the largest and fastest growing member of the DataCite consortium. The EZID user interface is currently being revised to support multiple languages. FIG. 1. Organizational context of EZID at the CDL. EZID is unusual in supporting different kinds of identifiers. Its identifiers and metadata can describe anything of any type: documents, films, digitized maps, datasets, fossils, stars, vocabulary terms, people, etc., and it supports any identifier scheme (currently ARKs and DOIs), as well as a variety of metadata profiles, such as Dublin Core, Kernel, and DataCite. Also unusual is that identifiers may be used for objects that are still under development. An EZID client can create “reserved” identifiers that are held privately until, for example, a draft manuscript citing them will be published. A demo mode allows anyone (no login required) to create fully functional temporary identifiers. Clients can create and use “preservation-ready” identifiers for objects that are incubating or speculative; such objects need not receive a new name when (or indeed if) they are officially published or archived, perhaps years later. While any URL can be made persistent by carefully managing a local web server and its redirection tables, some organizations need help doing this. EZID provides them with both a user interface and an API (application programming interface) to make centralized metadata