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Re: [Handle-info] Table of Handle Naming Authorities

Ray,

I know that Jane Euler sent you a short personal response, to make sure your question was answered, but I thought it would be good to get a more extended public response out to the list.

We've never published such a table. The prefix really has two meanings: 1) it identifies the organization that originally minted the handle, although ownership can change over time and so that may or may not be the organization currently responsible for the handle and 2) it identifies which handle service, i.e., defined set of handle servers, is currently responsible for resolving the specific handles under that prefix.

The second meaning is essential to the way the Handle System operates and that information is carried in the prefix handle - every prefix is itself resolvable as a handle under the 0.NA prefix, e.g., 0.NA/ 1895. Handle clients which don't otherwise know where to go to resolve a given handle begin by resolving the 0.NA/prefix handle. All of the prefix handles are contained in the set of handle system root servers.

The first meaning, the original creator of the handle, is less essential and in some cases could be misleading. In some cases individual sets of handles under the same prefix can wind up being the responsibility of multiple organizations. This has happened a number of times within the DOI world, when journals have changed hands from one publisher to another, such that multiple publishers are responsible for all of the handles (DOIs) under a single prefix. In other cases, entire prefixes have changed hands, e.g., when one organization is minting and maintaining handles on behalf of another organization and that relationship changes for whatever reason.

All that said, an email address for the currently responsible party should be found in the 0.NA handle, with the exception of some of the older prefixes. Since the 0.NA handles generally don't have a URL which would result in an http redirect, you can see those handle values by simply resolving any 0.NA handle through the hdl.handle.net proxy server, e.g., using one of your examples

http://hdl.handle.net/0.NA/1721

will show an html rendering which includes the handle value for the EMAIL type

Index Type Timestamp Data

2 EMAIL Fri Nov 19 2004 14:20:28 EST kenzie@mit.edu

Larry

On Nov 1, 2007, at 10:09 AM, Ray Denenberg, Library of Congress wrote:

I've just subscribed to this list, and have a fairly basic question.
Apologies if this has been covered.

Where is a published table of handle naming authorities? A table something
like:

 1000      NLM
 loc         LC
 912       marine Biology Laboratory
1834     OceanDocs
1903     UMD Digital Repository
1721     dspace
1842     Edinburg

I'm sure it's somewhere obvious but I've looked everywhere I can think of
and I can't find it. Thanks.

--Ray Denenberg


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