Passing the Torch of Persistence: EZID Development Update

Persistent identifiers are the backbone of scholarly communication infrastructure and long-term digital preservation, key to supporting a fully networked research ecosystem. CDL’s EZID service has been a leading example in the library and research community for how digital curation tools can enable and be enabled by persistent identifiers. The goal of the EZID service was to make the practice of creating and maintaining persistent identifiers, well, easy, and this remains the core feature of EZID to this day.
Achieving persistence with digital objects is a challenge even with a service like EZID. And sadly, achieving persistence with the people behind such services is its own challenge. This week, CDL officially bids farewell (following a transition we announced last year) to EZID’s lead developer, Greg Janée, who is moving on from the system he built ten years ago and has ably maintained over the past decade—a system known not only for making identifier management easy, but also for its reliability, robust API, impeccable documentation, and stellar uptime stats. As the digital curation landscape has been transformed over the years, with new organizations emerging in the identifier space, EZID has been a model of persistence in more ways than one, setting a standard to follow that will be part of Greg’s enduring legacy.
Fortunately for the UC system and for CDL, we will continue to benefit from Greg’s skills and knowledge as he assumes a new position as Director of the UC Santa Barbara Data Curation Program. We know Greg will bring his deep expertise to a broad range of research and preservation activities at UCSB, and we are looking forward to working with him through the networks and collaborations ongoing between UCSB and CDL.
And fortunately for EZID, Greg is passing the torch to another developer, who will be supporting EZID’s valuable services as we move into this new chapter. The EZID team is thrilled to welcome Rushiraj Nenuji, who joined us on May 1 and will be working as our software developer and technical lead.
Rushiraj is based in Santa Barbara and has a 50-50 split appointment between CDL and UCSB, where he is a Science Software Engineer at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS). While he has been spending the last 2 months transitioning onto the EZID team, he is no stranger to UC3 as a past contributor to the Make Data Count project, which integrates with the Dash (soon to be Dryad) data publishing service. Rushiraj’s wide experience in front-end and API software engineering, informatics, and open scientific research infrastructure will be an asset for EZID as we pursue new directions and initiatives for the future of CDL’s identifier services portfolio.
Persistence and impermanence will always exist in tandem. And on this note, we bid farewell to Greg and extend a warm welcome to Rushiraj, who will continue the hard work of making identifiers easy and building on Greg’s efforts while exploring new directions for the future.
As always, if you have questions about EZID or about persistent identifiers in general, feel free to contact us at ezid@cdlib.org.