PID NL - A Workshop On The Use Of Persistent Identifiers In The Netherlands.
On November 20th 2019, RDA-NL in collaboration with Datacite, 4TU.Research Data, ORCID and SURF organized a workshop in Den Haag with a focus on PIDs. The workshop was specifically directed to a Dutch audience, even if the english language adopted reached out to the multilingual community present during the day.
The event was attended by 70 people from the Netherlands and Belgium from a wide variety of institutions, such as universities, research centers, data centers and research libraries. The morning was structured with plenary presentations, while in the afternoon two series of three parallel hands-on sessions took place (the full programme of the event is available here).
Lisa de Leeuw (RDA-NL) introducing the day. Photo by Helena Cousijn
The day was chaired by Lisa de Leeuw, coordinator of the Dutch RDA node. In the plenary presentations Dutch experts introduced the importance of PIDs in the context of good Research Research Data Management practices (Maria Cruz, Esther Plomp) and focussed on PID types such as DOI and researchers' PIDs - ORCID (Madeleine de Smaele, Peter Verhaar). Hylke Koers investigated the power of PIDs through poetry. In the afternoon the participants were engaged through hands-on sessions that touched on a number of topics/ research areas related to PIDs.
Maria Cruz (NWO). Photo by Helena Cousijn
The workshop participants had to select among very interesting parallel sessions, divided into two time slots. In the first time slot three very different (for the research field they represent) workshops: the first one was an introduction to PIDs, held by Helena Cousijn and Ivo Wijnbergen. The second one, organised by Marcel Ras and Remco Veenendaal, focussed on the approach the Dutch Digital Heritage Network (DDHN) took to get persistent identifiers implemented at cultural heritage organisations, that is: harmonising PID information on cultural heritage websites, providing end user information about PIDs and providing best practice PID implementation documentation for cultural heritage organisations. The third session, presented by Sharif Islam, highlighted the importance of unambiguously identifying and linking physical specimens. The session presented one of the core aspects of DiSSCo (a Research Infrastructure (RI) aiming at providing physical and virtual access to 1.5 billion biological and geological specimens in Europe) architecture -- the Natural Science Identifier (NSId): a neutral, unique, universal and stable long-term persistent identifier for Digital Specimen.
One of the break-out sessions. Photo by Helena Cousijn.
The second part of the afternoon saw three other interesting parallel sessions (the 101 wijzer was repeated in the second afternoon slot). René van Horik and Mark van de Sanden presented the activities of RDA and activities in which it supports the adoption of PIDs. In RDA this mainly takes place within the PID Interest group, the PID kernel group and the RDA Europe Project https://www.rd-alliance.org/rda-europe. The last session was presented by Chris Baars and Madeleine de Smaele and focussed on the FREYA work on the PID GRAPH. In particular this session presented the pid graph applied to NARCIS, the Dutch national portal with information about researchers and their research outputs. The workshop continued with a hands on session in which the audience, divided in groups, was requested to think of case studies where they could see applications of the PID graph.
The day concluded with a well deserved drinks and networking session. "During the lunch and breaks, I met new colleagues from the RDA community, and talked to some people I already knew" comments Remco Van Veenendaal. "This combination of meeting old and new colleagues, and inspiring workshops made it a very useful event".