A preservation policy states criteria by which materials in danger of loss through physical decay, orphaned formats, etc. are selected for preservation. In Networked Information Applications, Clifford Lynch poses five questions about identifier systems. Information professionals have always known that if you can't identify a work uniquely, you've got chaos. Now that the Web has blasted its way into public consciousness, the rest of the world has begun to recognize the same truth.
Identifiers are an enormously powerful tool for communication within and between communities.
Identifiers take on a new significance in the networked environment. This is the story of the genesis of the DOI, told by a participant in the project. To protect intellectual property, we must unambiguously identify each item needing protection. This article appears in the Web version only of Ariadne. The Dublin Core is a 15-element metadata element set intended to facilitate discovery of electronic resources.