Digital Object Identifier

Dr. Norman Paskin

Director, International Digital Object Identifier Foundation

Tuesday, 23 February 1999

8:30-9:00 Doughnuts and Coffee
9:00-10:30 Presentation

OCLC Auditorium
6565 Frantz Road
Dublin, OH 43017

In October 1997, The Association of American Publishers announced, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, an initiative to develop a "Digital Object Identifier" to meet the needs of the publishing community in the digital environment: an ISBN for the 21st Century. Over the past year that initiative has continued, with increasing visibility both within the publishing community and beyond.

Dr. Norman Paskin has been leading the effort and will describe the current status of the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) , together with its work-in-progress and future plans. He will cover a number of areas, including the development of the technical and management aspects of the original conception, and the changes which have occurred over the period since its original inception in its international potential, and the broadening of its potential scope. He will also describe how efforts have been made to use the DOI initiative as a means of bringing together several disparate efforts. The focus of these efforts will be on; recognition of metadata as key to DOI's success, (and how that has been dealt with), the alignment of the DOI with standards efforts, and the outreach ensure that DOI is useful to all components of the information chain.

The DOI has been presented at various stages of its development at conferences in both the USA and abroad. The seminar will allow a longer period than is usual at conferences enabling an in-depth coverage of many of the issues, which have been covered only briefly elsewhere, and an opportunity for open questions and debate on all aspects of the DOI.

Dr. Paskin became the first director of the International DOI Foundation in March of 1998. Prior to this he was with Elsevier Science, where he held a number of editorial, management and technology roles, most recently as director of publishing technologies. Dr. Paskin was educated at the University of Nottingham, UK; he holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry and has worked for twenty years in the scientific publishing industry in both the U.S and Europe. He was actively involved in information identifier issues for the STM (scientific, technical and medical) publishing community, and has published several papers on this topic prior to his role with DOI. His involvement with technology and information began with computer modeling using literature data in 1976. From 1994 - 1998 he was director of information technology development for Elsevier Science.