Implementing persistent identifiers

This report was written to explain the principle of persistent identifiers and help institutions decide which scheme would best fit their needs. It discusses Handles, Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), Archival Resource Keys (ARKs), Persistent Uniform Resource Locators (PURLs), Uniform Resource Names (URNs), National Bibliographical Numbers (NBNs), and the Open URL, providing examples and extensive references for each.