Innovating through digital transformation
The BnL’s various legal missions include the management of unique identifiers for publications of all types and formats. Thus the BnL is the national agency for the allocation of ISBNs, ISSNs, and ISMNs – identifiers, which are born in an analog environment, but are also applicable to digital publications.
Furthermore, the BnL has set up a long-term digital preservation strategy for born-digital content as well as digitized publications. In order to ensure permanent access to this part of the national heritage, the BnL has implemented a system of persistent identifiers, able to meet its needs, as well as the needs of any organization managing digital collections on Luxembourgish territory. This system of persistent identifiers, based on the ARK format, aims to preserve the access to Luxembourgish digital documents and to increase its visibility for users, as well as for search engine robots.
As manager of the service “persist.lu”, the National Library of Luxembourg commits:
to offer an ARK attribution service
to update URLs referenced by ARKs
to ensure the sustainability and unequivocal nature of this attribution and the “resolution” of the ARKs
to provide the necessary technical support for other partners
to maintain a redundant infrastructure to ensure the accessibility of the resolution service
to organize an annual monitoring meeting
Who can use persist.lu?
In principle, any digital object (e.g. e-books, e-documents…) archived by the BnL in compliance with its legal missions is incorporated into a long-term preservation system and receives in parallel an ARK identifier. This identifier in its URL form is accessible to the public and can be used by the producer in question in order to find their publication in the digital archive of the BnL.
Direct access to the persist.lu service in order to create and manage their own ARKs is limited to organizations, which manage digital collections and agree to comply with the conditions listed below.
Each external organization wishing to use the service commits:
to obtain their own naming authority from California Digital Library
to update the URLs referenced by ARKs in case of a modification of these links
to ensure the long-term digital preservation of objects in their collections referenced by ARKs
to implement a system to disclose the causes of the inaccessibility of an object, if the latter has been deleted
to ensure the accessibility of the URLs referenced by ARKs on the internet. They either give access to the digital object or display the conditions of access to the object
