A brief history...

Instant messaging has been around on the Internet for longer than the World Wide Web. In its earliest, purest (and, it's probably fair to say, crudest) form, it was possible to use the Unix command line tool write to output a message to another user's terminal, provided that they had previously typed mesg y (i.e. messaging yes), or indeed to directly echo or even cat the contents of a file to another terminal.

Why do identifiers matter for research?

Imagine that you are a senior manager in an institution within the UK Higher Education sector with responsibilities for research: you have read some basic details about unique researcher identifiers and perhaps institutional identifiers. However, it may not be immediately apparent just how important these issues are, which may seem on the face of it to be a relatively superficial and/or trivial organisational matter. Clearly, any such strategic decision-maker will long have been aware of the demands of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and its predecessor the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), in which successful reporting of the best research outputs of university departments is crucial to the on-going funding of the institution. This is particularly central to the work of research-led universities, which is an increasingly competitive sector: even universities that formerly focussed more on teaching than research are increasingly aware of the need to drive up standards of quality research in order to secure additional funding.

What need is there for unique identifiers?

Put in relatively non-technical language, there is an increasing concern in information science in general to uniquely identify different things, organisations or people that could otherwise be confused, whether on the Internet or in the physical world. In technical terms, these are all referred to as resources (even if people might find it vaguely demeaning in normal language to be considered as such).

On the 21-23 September 2011, I attended the Eleventh International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, known as DC-2011 to its friends but #dcmi11 to the true elite. The National Library of the Netherlands (KB) in The Hague made a pleasant setting for the event, although it was perhaps too small.