RFC 3188 (rfc3188) - Page 2 of 13

Using National Bibliography Numbers as Uniform Resource Names

RFC 3188      Using National Bibliography Numbers as URNs   October 2001


   A registration request for acquiring a Namespace Identifier (NID)
   "NBN" for national bibliography numbers has been written by the
   National Library of Finland on the request of the Conference of
   Directors of National Libraries (CDNL) and the Conference of the
   European National Librarians (CENL).  Chapter 5 contains a URN
   namespace registration request modeled according to the template in
   RFC 2611.

   The document at hand is part of a global co-operation of the national
   libraries to foster identification of electronic documents in general
   and utilisation of URNs in particular.  Some national libraries,
   including the national libraries of Finland, Norway and Sweden, are
   already assigning NBN-based URNs for electronic resources.

   We have used the URN Namespace Identifier "NBN" for the national
   bibliographic numbers in examples below.

2. Identification vs. Resolution

   As a rule the national bibliography numbers identify finite,
   manageably-sized objects, but these objects may still be large enough
   that resolution to a hierarchical system is appropriate.

   The materials identified by a national bibliography number may exist
   only in printed or other physical form, not electronically.  The best
   that a resolver will be able to offer in this case is bibliographic
   data from a national bibliography database, including information
   about where the physical resource is stored in a national library's
   holdings.

   The URN Framework provides resolution services that may be used to
   describe any differences between the resource identified by a URN and
   the resource that would be returned as a result of resolving that
   URN.  However, NBNs will be used for instance to identify resources
   in digital Web archives created by harvester robot applications.  In
   this case, NBN will identify exactly the resource the user expects to
   see.

3. National bibliography numbers

3.1 Overview

   National Bibliography Number (NBN) is a generic name referring to a
   group of identifier systems utilised by the national libraries and
   only by them for identification of deposited publications which lack
   an identifier, or to descriptive metadata (cataloging) that describes
   the resources.  In many countries legal (or voluntary) deposit is
   being extended to electronic publications.



Hakala                       Informational