EZID (easy-eye-dee) is a service offered by the University of California Curation Center (UC3), part of the California Digital Library (CDL). EZID makes it easy to create and manage unique, long-term identifiers for digital content.

This one-year project, a collaboration between JISC, EDINA and UC3, will investigate and develop the infrastructure which might support an EZID UK service. In particular, and different from the current EZID setup, how individuals and organizations can more easily acquire long-term identifiers without the need to subscribe to a larger service package. Hence lowering the barriers for individuals and smaller organisation to acquire such identifiers, further encouraging self-publishing and other forms of scholarly communications, including the work of amateur scholars, and support for Open Access publications.

The project will develop infrastructure that might support an EZID UK service by:

• creating a UK branded EZID user interface (for ARKs and URNs initially).
• working toward expanding the technical and policy infrastructure to support users having a short-term relationships with EZID (i.e. one-at-a-time identifier creation).
• establishing a live replica of the backend N2T (Name-to-Thing) ARK/URN resolver service to ensure high availability and disaster protection by providing a hot failover for the resolver.

Periodic updates will be made to the project page during the coming year alongwith a summary at the end of the project.