A digital object may incorporate information or material in which copyright or other rights or interests are claimed. There may also be rights associated with the digital object itself. Formally, a handle is just a unique string. Some servers may treate a handle as nothing more than a unique string, and, for example, provide a service in which a handle is mapped to an actual repository or set of repositories. The repository may contain other related information and management systems.
Repositories provide users access to stored objects under some set of policies.
The transaction record may contain entries such as the time and date of each request for retrieval, the identity of the requesting party, the handle for the object, and the applicable terms and conditions including amount and method of payment. The properties record and the transactions record will contain globally defined data elements and may contain locally defined data elements. There is one logical IR server for each authority, but it may be replicated or otherwise distributed for reliability or efficiency. IR Servers may be nested into logical hierarchies as appropriate. In particular, an IR Server for a given repository need not be made publicly available and the information contained within it may be provided at several logically higher levels.