Once Upon a Time in a Library, Was Born a PID

Abstract

The French landscape has something peculiar : a library traditional authority file has evolved as a robust and disseminated PID provider system called IdRef. Born in the union catalog for French HE institutions, it has been gradually implemented for PhD thesis, archival material, OA repositories, learning material, academic publishing and is now also used beyond the national boarders, in the French-speaking parts of Switzerland and Belgium. A community of more than a thousand people rooted in bibliographic environments enrich and curate a database with strong semantics. Now walking closely together with ORCID, it is looked as a potential key for CRIS in universities. The organisational, technical and political challenges of such a evolution will be debated.