A Primer on Digital Object Identifiers for Law Librarians

Digital object identifiers have not received much attention by law librarians, but they may become more useful in the near future. This paper explains digital object identifiers and discusses how they are relevant to law librarians.


DOl Functions
Conceptually, DO Is are pretty simple.At their base, they persistently identify and point to digital objects.Suppose you find an article online that you wish to use.
You note its Uniform Resource Locator (URL) so that you can access it again later.You misplace your sticky note and find it two years later while searching your desk for some gum, and are immediately inspired to find that article again.
But when you type in the URL, all you find is some page that says "sorry, the page you are looking for it is not here anymore, and we do not know where it went."Sure, if you remember any other bibliographic information, like the article's tide or authors, you could do some searching and you may find it again.
On the other hand, it has been two years, so you may not remember any more details, and it is also possible that the article has, for whatever reason, just been deleted from any reasonably accessible website.
The problem is that a URL directs your computer to a spot on another computer.If the article is moved from one spot to another spot, like when a website is redesigned or domain names change hands, that URL will not work anymore (unless some other mechanism like a redirect is used).Instead of pointing to a location on a computer, a DOI points to d1e article itsel£So, if you had entered the article's DOI into a resolver, your computer would have found the article, even if it had been moved around theW eb in the last two years.If you still could not find it, then either it is actually not online anymore or the article's DOI registration had not been kept current, which is certainly possible, but less likely than a broken URL.
DOis might look like a random string of characters, but they are actually based on a standardized scheme that is in the final stages of becoming an ISO standard.Every DOI starts with a "IO." prefix to designate it as a DOL A publisher prefix comes next that indicates the original registrant of the DOL After the slash is whatever unique set of characters the publisher chooses.
Although DOl-based URLs can be used, DO Is themselves are not URLs and do not depend on web browsers, making it more likely they will be usable in postbrowser technology.If a journal is transferred to another publisher, the publisher Trends prefix will remain, but since the prefix is not part of any publisher's brand, there is no need to change the DO Is for branding purposes.
Publishers register articles to obtain DO Is.

Implications for Law Librarians
The primary value ofDOis for librarians is that they are persistent identifiers for scholarly articles.A number of studies of the literature in fields such as law, CrossRef' s linking system relies on the participation of many publishers.A small study I conducted, available at http:// works.bepress.com/aallcallforpapers/65/, indicated that very few law reviews assign DOis to their articles or include DOis in their footnotes.While this limits the usefulness of DO Is for legal researchers, DOis are still valuable for accessing and citing articles in other disciplines.As legal scholarship becomes more interdisciplinary and more law professors have scholarly interests in the intersection of law with other academic fields, law librarians will probably encounter more articles with DO Is.Should law journals use DO Is in their footnotes or assign DO Is to their own articles?Including DOis or DOl-based URLs in footnotes when possible will increase the reliability of references to online scholarly articles, but it will also require some additional work by journal staff.My study details how I found DOis using bibliographic data for articles.Although the Bluebook encourages citing to the most permanent and reliable version of a source, it does not mention DO Is, which significantly reduces law journal editors' incentive to use them.The The International DOI Foundation (IDF) designates registration agencies, including CrossRef, the agency that handles DOis for most scholarly publications.In addition to paying fees for DOis, publishers commit to providing current metadata about the articles and updating the articles' online locations.When a researcher resolves a DOI, she is sent to the current, publisher-designated version of the article, even if the article has moved from its first online location.Resolving DO Is simply requires adding "http:// dx.doi.org/"before the DOI to make it a URL, such as http:// dx.doi.org/IO.I234/vln5a6.DOis can also be entered into resolvers on CrossRef, http:// crossref.orgor the IDF' s http:// www.doi.orgwebsites.Both websites also contain much more detailed technical information on how the DOI System works.
CrossRefhas built additional services on the DO Is it administers.Publishers who obtain DOis agree to provide metadata about every article and can also provide lists of all cited references in each article.This enables CrossRef to connect cited and citing articles together with their DO Is.An example is an article from the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies ( doi: IO.I093/ ojls/22.3.497).Links to articles in CrossRef' s system that cite this particular piece can be seen at medicine, and science has found that, over time, a large number of URLs break and fail to accurately direct researchers to cited sources.DOis are more resistant to this breakage; if you see a DOI on an article, then it is probably better to include the DOI or a DOI-based URL in your cite to the article instead of the normal URL because the DOI is more likely, in the long term, to be useful for future researchers.If you see a DOI in a footnote or reference list, using it is a good way to retrieve the article, with the caveat that DO Is lead to the publisher-http:// ojls.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/ crossref-forward-links/22/3/ 497.This useful tool helps researchers find additional relevant articles and supports articlelevel impact metrics.Shepard's, KeyCite, and HeinOnline' s ScholarCheck connect citing articles within each vendor's database, but these systems require a subscription to access and are not interoperable with each other or with DOis that link non-legal articles.
While DOis have taken a role in article linking and references in non-legal academic fields, they have thus far not been paid much attention by legal researchers.By maintaining at least basic familiarity with the function and use of DOis, law librarians will be better equipped to assist researchers with interdisciplinary research, to advise professors and journals if they start thinking about using DO Is, and to improve the reliability and usefulness of scholarly citations.BenjaminJKeekRe!CrenceLibrarian WolfLawLibraip William&MaryLawSchoo£Williamsbur~ Virginia; email: bjkeele@wm.edu.Copyright 2010 by Benja1mn J Keele.This article is distnbuted under the terms of the Creative C01mnons Attnbution License http:/ /creativecOimnons.org/licenses/by /3.Q which penmts unrestricted use, distnbution and reproduction In any medium, provided the onjpnal author and source are credited Trends is published by TrendsConclusion