EZID Service Update: November 2014
Recent Enhancements, News, and Activities
- DataCite’s Metadata Version 3.1 is now supported in EZID’s user interface. From the Create screen, select Advanced and DOI to see the new options. You can also use the new version options with the application programming interface (API), http://ezid.cdlib.org/doc/apidoc.html#profile-datacite.
- The EZID Team created new documentation called “Identifier Basics.” It explains our approach to EZID account setup, what we mean by “shoulders,” and the advantages and disadvantages of opaque identifier strings. Identifier Basics is available from EZID’s Documentation Tab (http://ezid.cdlib.org/home/documentation) and here is a direct link: https://confluence.ucop.edu/display/DataCite/Identifier+Basics. If you have questions about identifiers that aren’t answered here, please contact us.
- In addition, we updated EZID’s Service Guidelines, http://www.cdlib.org/services/infrastructure/docs/EZIDServiceGuidelines.pdf, to provide a set of Best Practices for ARK identifiers, including data persistence, metadata and target URLs. Clients that are using ARKs as part of their identifier strategy are asked to review these guidelines at their earliest convenience. They can be found starting on page 6 of the larger document.
- EZID’s tech lead Greg Janée created an automated means of checking the global consistency of our identifiers across the different systems involved (EZID, the ARK resolver, and DataCite). This is analogous to a repository doing a fixity check over its content. “Fixity check” is a preservation term referring to “the process of verifying that an object has not been changed in a given period.”1 For clients, this provides an assurance of stability in the EZID system.
EZID Partners and Clients
Our current EZID clients include academic institutions, government agencies, non-profit organizations and commercial entities. For the full list, see http://ezid.cdlib.org/home/client_list.
New this period:
- George Mason University http://www.gmu.edu/
- University of Kentucky Libraries, on behalf of the UK campus http://libraries.uky.edu/
EZID Service Description
EZID (easy-eye-dee) is a production service that gives researchers the ability to create and manage long-term identifiers so that they can to track usage, get credit for their work, share their data, and have the data reused for additional research. As a result, EZID identifiers also make it possible to increase citations, to build on previous work, to conduct new research, and avoid duplicating previous efforts.
EZID Service Manager
Joan Starr contact
EZID Training Materials, Guides, FAQs and Webinars
More information about EZID is available by contacting us. See also EZID outreach and webinars: http://ezid.cdlib.org/home/outreach.
Service Monitoring and Availability
For information about EZID status, please consider the following options:
- API inquiries; see the API documentation here: http://ezid.cdlib.org/doc/apidoc.html#server-status
- The CDL System Status page here: http://www.cdlib.org/contact/system.html
- The EZID Status Blog: http://ezidstatus.wordpress.com/
- The EZID RSS Feed (from the blog): http://ezidstatus.wordpress.com/feed/