[Dspace-general] To Handle or not?

[Brad Teale]

All,

We are going through the process of creating our Dspace instances, and 
are considering whether or not to use a Handle Server.  I'm currently 
the voice of opposition for a few reasons, but I'm looking for good 
technical reasons to use Handle.

My reasons for not using Handle are:
- The idea of Handle is to use a URN, however, the URN RFC (2141) has 
not gained traction since its creation in May 1997 and browsers don't 
support URN for the most part.

- Handle/CNRI hasn't created a URN namespace (hdl:) for itself as of 
2006-12-01 (http://www.iana.org/assignments/urn-namespaces).  Do they 
not believe in the URN specification?

- The Handle server itself acts as a more complicated DNS server.  Why 
add an extra layer over a system that works well.  When will we add a 
system on top of Handle?

- DNS maps easy to remember names with hard to remember numbers.  Handle 
uses numbers to identify unique institutions.  If people have a hard 
time remembering numbers, why would I choose something like 
http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/34898 for my system?  Or when will Handle 
have a DNSish syntax like http://hdl.handle.net/mit.dspace/34898 or 
something similar?  If it already exists why not just use 
http://dspace.mit.edu/34898?

- When you go to a handle URL that doesn't exist (possibly moved or 
removed), your system doesn't know.  You get Handle's 404 page, not the 
institution that hosts the data, so how are you informed of these requests?

- Since Handle maps URNs to URLs, how much time does it take to maintain 
another DNSish system?

- Persistent URI/URLs are a business problem not a technology problem. 
What happens when handle.net moves or changes its name?  Does CNRI 
guarantee that will _never_ happen?

I hope someone can give me some technological reasons to use Handle.

Thanks,
-Brad

-- 
Brad Teale                            Web Application Developer
Digital Library Development Lab       University of Minnesota Libraries
teale003 at umn.edu                      612-625-0473