Peter Crowther wrote:
> What happens when an institution makes some mass change to its IDs -
> for example when UMIST and University of Manchester merged, and the
> old man.ac.uk and umist.ac.uk addresses all changed to
> manchester.ac.uk? Should there be a similar one-off mass change in
> Eprints? Similarly, but on a smaller scale, what happens when
> someone changes their name (for example after marriage)?
... and academics move, so change their email address - and you get a
break in their ID.
The email=id is fine in a closed system, such as a single IR, but as
soon as you want to follow an academic through their career (and if you
want the academics on board, you really need to), then it all falls
apart in a messy tangle.
Just looking at the Dutch Academic Information Domain tells us that we
need a national Digital Author Identifier system if we are going to
break out of the "isolated silos" model we currently have.
> I'm interested, as many people reckon email addresses can be used as
> unique IDs. They definitely can't in the general case, and it's a
> dubious assumption even in UK academia.
- and ePrints are not just a UK preserve... not even for UK authors: how
many are co-author with overseas partners?
--
Ian Stuart.
Bibliographics and Multimedia Service Delivery team,
EDINA,
The University of Edinburgh.
http://edina.ac.uk/
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
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