Universal Access to Cultural Heritage Material: The Europeana Resolution Discovery Service for Persistent Identifiers

Within the cultural heritage community, it is increasingly common to distinguish the tasks of identification and addressing the object by using a location-independent Persistent Identifier (PI) such as a URN (Sollins et al., 1994), a DOI (DOI, 2010), or a Handle (Handle, 2010) linked to a URL describing the object location in an institutional repository or a digital long-term preservation system run by a national library. This way, the problem that a digital object is inaccessible if the content provider moves it to a different location can be solved since the object can still be found using the PI.