When library stuff follows you around

Yes, it is following me everywhere! I sat down for a nice, quiet lunch in the SLIS commons and as I am wont to do, I opened up The Chronicle of Higher Education, or "People magazine for academics," as one of my friends describes it. Low and behold I came across an article by Jennifer Howard titled, "Publishers Find Ways to Fight 'Link Rot' in Electronic Texts" in the Hot Type column.** The focus was on CrossRef. Lunch was ruined! I kid, I kid.

Howard does a nice job of describing how CrossRef manages citation linking through DOIs. One of the important points that Howard mentions (which I was also mentioned in this week's readings) was the collaborative nature of this whole endeavor. Thousands of publishers need to be on board with CrossRef and the DOI system for it to even work a little bit. The CrossRef association needs to exist to manage all of these DOIs. It is an important point to make. Additionally, much of the initial emphasis was on large publication houses, especially for STEM fields. Now, more and more small publishing ventures are being incorporated (although some find it hard to afford).

Another interesting point mentioned was that DOIs are useful for objects other than scholarly, text-based articles. If you are more interested in linking to data, then DataCite is the DOI consortium for you. It is interesting to see that there are multiple DOI associations. I am curious to know why CrossRef does not handle all DOIs. I imagine that each association has its own strengths that they can apply to different forms of digital objects.

A final interesting point was that the final frontier of DOIs is so-called "gray literature," which are reports not published in a scholarly venue (think government documents and white papers). They are usually housed in a spot on an organization's website and links are probably more prone to breaking than others. Gray literature is still cited, though, and therefor worthy of DOIs.

Howard also mentions Ars Technica's "DOIs and their discontents" blog post. This science-related blog frequently uses DOIs. However, they sometimes fail because the DOIs are sometimes published before the actual article. (Ars gets access to articles and their DOIs before they are published.) So you might try to click on the DOI, but it would just fail since the article hasn't actually been published yet.

I find it fascinating that publishers, organizations, and libraries have come together to create such nifty software that really enables users to find and link to material. DOIs get my stamp of approval!

**I realize that this link will not work. You can try waiting a month for the Chronicle of Higher Ed to plod through its subscription embargo on our licensed database. Or you can try tracking down a print copy for now.

Howard, J. (2010, October 31). Hot Type: Publishers Find Ways to Fight 'Link Rot' in Electronic Texts. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/article/Publishers-Fight-Link-Rot-in/125189/

Believe me, I find it very ironic that I am trying to discuss the merits of a text that is all about access and connection, and my readers will not even be able to easily click-through to the article.