Where to put a serial number of an instrument?

[RKrahl]

The RDA Persistent Identification of Instruments Working Group seeks to explore a community-driven solution for globally unique identification of measuring instruments operated in the sciences. As explained in #1670, we evaluated DataCite DOIs and found them usable in principle for this purpose. There are however a few shortcomings. Some minor amendments of the DataCite schema would significantly facilitate its use for instruments.

This one is more an open question rather then a concrete suggestion: Instruments often have a serial number attributed by the manufacturer. it would be important to be able to put this number in the metadata. A possible place could be AlternateIdentifier. But in the discussion in the WG, it has been raised as a problem that there is no reliable way to indicate that this particular alternate identifier is meant to be the serial number. alternateIdentifierType is free text, so there is no guarantee that all issuers of instrument DOIs will use the same term to indicate "serial number".

[kjgarza]

👋 @RKrahl, we are tracking user stories in productboard. We have moved this issue there https://app.productboard.com/ .