I want to look over this posting more carefully, but I did want to get one thought out quickly. Please, let's not overload Handles even more. There are sites, I've heard, that would like to do away with Handles and use something else for durable universally-unique external identifiers. That's hard to do if we wire Handles into everything.
What we want, it seems to me, is an additional durable identifier which requires only local uniqueness and has *no meaning* in isolation. The last property excludes Handles and DB IDs alike. What this means is that we need, probably, just a simple serial number facility, which is used to name every object created. These names are not used internally by DSpace (as DB IDs are); they exist solely for users to identify "that object you mentioned before". This way, those names can be permanent (unlike DB IDs), don't tie us to specific external services (like Handles), and can't tie us down to specific internal organization (like either). -- Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer mw...@iupui.edu Machines should not be friendly. Machines should be obedient.
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