Although Tim Berners-Lee once famously declared that "Cool URIs don't change," factors beyond our control make it hard for most of us to avoid link rot. Geoffrey Bilder is the director of strategic initiatives for CrossRef, a company whose mission is "to be the citation linking backbone for all scholarly information in electronic form." CrossRef, in other words, is in the business of combating link rot.
The world of scholarly and professional publishing revolves around reliable citation. In previous podcasts with Tony Hammond and Dan Chudnov I've explored some of the technologies and methods used by these publishers -- including digital object identifiers and OpenURL -- to assure that reliability.
CrossRef plays a key role in that technological ecosystem. In this conversation, Geoffrey and I discuss how everyday blog publishing systems could offer the same kinds of persistence, integrity, and accountability provided by scholarly and professional publishing systems. And we explore why that might matter more than most people would think.
Geoffrey Bilder is Director of Strategic Initiatives at CrossRef, and has over 15 years experience as a technical leader in scholarly technology. He co-founded Brown University's Scholarly Technology Group in 1993, providing the Brown academic community with advanced technology consulting in support of their research, teaching and scholarly communication.
Bilder was subsequently head of IT R&D at Monitor Group, a global management consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 2002 to 2005, he was Chief Technology Officer of scholarly publishing firm Ingenta, and just prior to joining CrossRef, he was a Publishing Technology Consultant at Scholarly Information Strategies, where he consulted extensively with publishers and librarians on emerging social software technologies and how they may affect scholarly and professional researchers.
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This free podcast is from our Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators series.
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