DIY DOI: Leveraging the DOI Infrastructure to Simplify Digital Preservation and Repository Management

Abstract

This article describes methods for how staff with modest technical expertise can leverage the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) infrastructure in combination with third party storage and preservation solutions to build safer, more useful, and easier to manage repositories at much lower cost than is normally possible with standalone systems. It also demonstrates how understanding the underlying mechanisms and questioning the assumptions of technology metaphors such as filesystems can lead to seeing and using tools in new and more powerful ways.