Persistent Identifiers as IRO Infrastructure

The 2,500 museums, heritage collections and heritage sites in the UK house at least 200 million physical and digital objects. Being able to uniquely identify these objects is key to facilitating their use and curation - you cannot provide a researcher with access to an item or include it in an exhibition if you don't know what it is. Unique accession numbers are therefore a key component in all collection and library management systems but these only include the objects within an individual collection. To fully realise the potential benefits of our national collections in terms of the social and cultural life of the UK, the economic impact of the heritage sector, and the contribution to the UK's international prestige and influence, we need identifiers that will bring together all of the objects from all of the collections.

Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) that provide a long-lasting actionable reference to a digital object are recognised by UKRI as a key component of future research infrastructure enabling data discovery, access and citation. Facilitating wider adoption and consistency of approach to the assigning of PIDs to collection objects, environments, specimens and other relevant entities, is a key step to the persistent, unambiguous linking of collections in order to create a digital UK National Collection. However, the challenges, utility and wider benefits of PID implementation are less well understood across the heritage sector. While many individual institutions are using PIDs to a greater or lesser extent, to date there has been very little cross-sector or cross-collection collaboration and / or support to facilitate a cohesive approach that will maximise the benefits to all organisations.

This foundation project will bring together best practices in the use of PIDs from a collection perspective, building on existing IRO work and expertise developed through existing research projects. By sharing expertise and best practice, we will provide a framework and recommendations on the approach to PIDs for colleagues in local, regional and national institutions across the UK heritage sector. Through a mixture of workshops, desk research and case studies, the project will seek to answer questions such as 'What are the gaps in the existing PID landscape for heritage collections, buildings and environments?' and 'What should a PID infrastructure, strategy and governance framework look like for a unified UK national collection?'.

The project will deliver a set of recommendations to guide the selection, implementation and use of PIDs to heritage collections and related entities and concepts, as well as a number of case studies and supporting resources that can be used across the sector as a guide to real-world PID implementation. In driving the use of PIDs for heritage collections, the project will enable greater use of these collections in all contexts, but especially in research. It will allow improved linking across platforms such as Wikidata, making it easier to associate related concepts and metadata with canonical sources of artefact information and the artefacts themselves. It will provide for the curation and selection of this information from diverse sources to be displayed alongside artefacts in physical spaces and online viewers. Importantly, they will also make this increase in use more evident and measurable, through the improved metrics that PIDs support.

There are a wealth of stakeholders with an interest in the benefits of persistent identifiers as applied to heritage collections. It is important to separate out the direct benefits of the project from the wider benefits that increased persistent identification of heritage collections brings. Firstly we list those who will directly benefit from the project outputs, and secondly those who will benefit in wider use of PIDs:

Direct beneficiaries:
Holders of heritage collections, both cultural and scientific; in the UK and internationally; and whether local, regional, national or private: The project will set global standards in the field, so that organisations that hold heritage collections will be able to apply the recommendations coming out of the project, enabling them to implement persistent identifiers based on lessons learned by peer organisations. The work will allow small collections, archives and museums to learn from the experience of others, making implementation easier for them, and will make it quicker for them to realise the benefits of PIDs.
Curators: Through involvement in project workshops and through the project final recommendations and case studies, we will build capacity in the field, empowering curators to make the case for organisational implementation of PIDs and take an active part in that implementation. This will be critical to the project to ensure that any proposed solutions meet a genuine need within and across the sector. More broadly, the role of curators in maintaining items and their availability can be recognised.
Heritage IT staff: With recommendations on applying PIDs in a wide variety of contexts, IT staff will have resources for building business cases for PID implementation and the details that will make it simpler for them to apply according to best practices across the sector.
PID providing organisations: Services providing and supporting maintenance of PIDs will better be able to support their heritage-based users, with a better understanding of their particular requirements and barriers.
System vendors: Organisations that provide services for the management of collections will also be able to understand the requirements and barriers to PID implementation, and what they may be able to provide that will support greater use of PIDs.

Indirect beneficiaries:
Funding organisations (including DCMS): With wider implementation of PIDs, those providing funding for the collection and curation of national collections can be provided with both improved use metrics and greater value for money of those collections as they are cited and reused.
Researchers using national collections: Non-academic researchers will be able to locate items used as primary evidence in research more easily, creating greater trust in their work.
Creators/Contributors of items in national collections: With better implementation and linking of PIDs, individuals who have created, or contributed to, the creation of items can gain greater recognition for those contributions. This will come as a result of disambiguation of names through PIDs.
Others represented in national collections: Communities and peoples with a historic connection to collections and the items they contain will be able to link their voices and interpretations of items unambiguously. In this way, collection holders also benefit by bringing those diverse perspectives.
Visitors: The various online and onsite visitors to the heritage organisations will benefit from the increased capacity and tooling to experience the national collection digitally, and through the community lenses that will be enabled by PIDs.
Academics: Please see more detail within 'Academic Beneficiaries'.