KMLM List

[Grace Agnew <gagnew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Brian,

These are good questions, and I think we are still considering our 
approach to relationships.  We received some comments along these lines 
to our survey of library workflows, so your situation is not unique.  In 
one of our discussions, it was proposed that the need for a ID is very 
contextual, as you say, based on the organizational business need.  A 
public library may be a single entity for subscriptions to electronic 
databases but may purchase monographs at the branch level, so both 
entities in the hierarchy would need identifiers, and sometimes the 
branch would have a separate identifier and other times be subsumed as a 
subunit under the library system identifier.  We provisionally decided 
that any organization could apply at the whole or part organizational 
level for as many identifiers as needed by their workflow and that 
relationship would be built into the I2 structure to reflect the 
relationships among the entities identified.  We haven't decided how to 
reflect the relationships, but most likely via registry metadata, as the 
easiest strategy requiring the least infrastructure investment for 
implementing I2.

It is important to note the distinction between reflecting relationships 
among entities and among identifiers.  We expect the identifiers to be 
"dumb" unique strings, and assigned at point of need, and therefore not 
related to each other.  We do not  propose, for example, the use of 
prefixes to concatenate identifiers belonging to related entities 
together. We also note that relationships can be quite complex, 
particularly as organizations work more collaboratively in consortia to 
do things such as purchase electronic resources.  We expect to enable 
entities to relate to one another to support the business model that 
required the identifier, but we do not plan to assign identifiers that 
inherently relate to other identifiers.

So the short answer is that we are very aware of this need--both from 
experiences in our own settings and from the feedback we received during 
community scenario information gathering.  We plan to address this 
situation and are still in the discussion phase about it.  We'll post 
our discussions and provisional decisions about this and other issues at 
the website and solicit community feedback.  Any ideas/suggested 
solutions are extremely welcome!

Grace Agnew
I2 Working Group Co-Chair

Brian Tingle wrote:
> Hi,
>
>  
>
> I was wondering if the I2 work is going to address the use case of 
> institutions with arbitrary internal hierarchical (or even 
> non-hierarchical) relationships.  Or, trying to ask the same question 
> from a different direction, what is the level of organizational 
> subunit that can be assigned an identifier, and will the work address 
> the issue of organizational relationships between institutions?
>
>  
>
> I'm working on three or four different projects where this issue comes 
> up.  I often observe institutions where, in context A they may 
> represent their identity at a  different level of organizational 
> subunit granularity than in context B.  Is this an issue you are 
> grappling with / are going to solve for me? J
>
>  
>
> -- Brian
>
>  


--

Grace Agnew

Associate University Librarian for Digital Library Systems

Rutgers University Libraries

47 Davidson Road

Piscataway, NJ 08854

Phone: 732-445-5908

Fax: 732-445-5888