A Survey of Standards for Identifying Serial Items on the Internet

ABSTRACT This article explores current and proposed standards for identifying serial items on the Internet. Use of these standards will result in a library's ability to purchase individual electronic journal titles as well as component pieces (articles) and provide detailed catalog links to them. In addition, the standards could enable sophisticated copyright management systems. The standards discussed include the following: the Serial Item and Contribution Identifier, the Digital Object Identifier, the Publisher Item Identifier and the Internet standards, Uniform Resource Locator and Uniform Resource Name, for naming and describing networked resources on the World Wide Web.