About the Handle System

The Handle System, developed by Corporation for National Research Initiatives, is an infrastructure on which applications serving many different purposes have been built. Among the objects we know of that are identified by handles are journal articles, technical reports, books, theses and dissertations, government documents, metadata, distributed learning content, and data sets. Handles are being used in digital watermarking applications, GRID applications, and repositories, registries and more.

Version 7.0 of the Handle System software, released in December 2010, was a major system upgrade. The current version is 7.2.1, released March 2013.

There are thousands of handle services running today, located in 70 countries, on 6 continents; more than 1,000 of them are at universities and libraries. Handle services are being run by user federations, national libraries, national laboratories, universities, computing centers, national and local government agencies, contractors, corporations, and research groups.

The number of prefixes, which allow users to assign handles, is growing and exceeds 200,000.

The International DOI Foundation's implementation of handles, the DOI^® System, has More than 82 million registered handles.

Today there are six top-level Global Handle Registry^® servers. Those servers, and the proxy servers (that are known to CNRI) that pass requests to the system from the web, receive between 75 and 100 million resolution requests per month.

The Handle System infrastructure is supported by prefix registration and service fees. The majority of those fees come from single prefix holders, while the largest single contributor is the International DOI Foundation.

The original version of the Handle System technology was developed with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Contact hdladmin@cnri.reston.va.us for more information.