I am a cynic and a skeptic and a pessimist, and I’m aware of it. So it’s no surprise to me–and if you’ve been reading for long, probably not to you, either–that I have very little hope for the URN or DOI idea ever really working out. (That is, the idea of giving every digital object a unique identifier, along the same lines as an ISBN\/ISSN, instead of relying on URLs, which are subject to change. An important point about these identifiers: they wouldn’t necessarily specify where to go to get any given Digital Object; they might just make one clearly discernible from another. Or a URN might resolve to multiple URLs.) I think managing something on that scale–a scale greater than that of DNS\/URLs, since each object would be identified, not just each server–is going to be, to put it very plainly, more trouble than it’s worth. There would be benefits to such a system, if it were ever fully deployed, sure, but how could it be done meaningfully? <\/p>\n
Is this blog post a Digital Object (in the sense of having its own identifier or URN, in the hypothetical scenario where there is such a scheme)? And if I change it a year from now because I think my writing style is embarrassingly informal, has it become a different Digital Object? If you copy it down and put it into your blog–hopefully with attribution–is it the same Digital Object or a different one? (By my reading, it’s the same, at least in the URN scheme. But when I go back and change my wording, it won’t change the wording of the copy on your blog.) <\/p>\n