Introduction for librarians and repository managers

As a librarian, you have a strong background in information science and you understand the importance of extensive and well curated metadata. Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) can help you retrieving and sharing information by providing a shared interface to find and exchange metadata.

The most extended PIDs for objects in scholarly communication are DOIs. Crossref and DataCite assign DOIs to publications and research data, respectively. When it comes to people, like researchers and other contributors, ORCID iDs provide a unique identifier allowing their contributions to be more easily connected together.

As the bridge between the final researcher and the scholarly communication environment (publishers, repositories, funders and others), librarians play an key role in the adoption of PIDs. You can provide training, examples and support so every research community profits the most out of the solutions enabled by PIDs.

Many libraries come to Crossref for an account to use retrieve metadata using OpenURL. You can find details on how to do that at: https://www.crossref.org/community/librarians/ and more information on other ways to collect and use Crossref metadata to improve the discoverability of content for researchers.