Information Identifiers

Learned journal publishers and users are aware of the increasing frequency with which the topic of “article identifiers” or “document identifiers” is discussed at meetings and in text. It should by now be clear to everyone in the learned journals community that in an electronic environment, information interchange will be both necessary and commonplace. To achieve this, we need to uniquely label or identify every item of information in such a way as to make it readily retrievable. Techniques used for doing this in the printed environment are not necessarily applicable to an electronic counterpart, and there is no single agreed way of identifying items of information such as journal articles. In this paper I review this issue under the generic heading of “information identifiers”, including the number of items we need to identify, the principles of identification, and an update of current activities on specific identifier proposals. Finally, there is a brief summary of other activities from related worlds: publishing, the Internet, library world, and metadata work.