Last year, Bill Kehoe and I created some basic Web Services for creating persistent identifiers using our fledgling Handle System implementation at Cornell University Library, and we have finally gotten permission to release the software under a open source BSD license. We created this software for our own needs at CUL, and our primary goals were to simplify the Handle System API for creating persistent identifiers and to allow the Handle System to be used more easily from within other platforms.

Recognizing the importance of consistently implementing persistent identifiers (PIDs), a group of librarians at Cornell University evaluated several PID strategies and chose to implement the Handle System. As a member of that group, the author immediately perceived cultural and technical challenges to adopting handles that included accommodating diverse computing platforms. The development of cross platform Web Services and corresponding client libraries are explored as a way to address these challenges and create new opportunities for future development and maintenance of digital collections.