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Human-Readable-IDs discussion (is 8 digits enough?)

peter
9 Dec '19
fhemme
10 Dec '19

From Andrea Loigman:

Hi @ann-marie - RA SIG thinks 10 digits would be the minimum. @Carsten Schwill reminded us that the German National Library is already using 9 digits and will need space to grow (made me wonder what LC is up to).

A random record from the LC catalogue from 2019 has a 8 digit record control number.

Ann-Marie
10 Dec '19

Thanks, everyone, for the feedback. Does anyone feel strongly that we should set the number of digits to something higher than 10? 10 digits will accommodate almost 10 billion each of instances, holdings, and item records, since the highest possible number for each would be 9,999,999,999 (or 9999999999 without the commas).

Ann-Marie
10 Dec '19

Hi all,

Last call - any strong feelings that 10 digits is not enough? I’ll be writing the update stories to the number of digits later today. My slight pushback to “let’s just let it be huge, like 12 or 15 or 20” is that the point of the HRIDs is to make them human friendly. Plus when do we get to the point of numeric absurdity - is it realistic that a system would ever reach a trillion, a quadrillion records? Between 2-character prefixes and 10 digits, we’re up to ca. 12 characters minimum, which feels like it’s pushing the limits of human friendly. So please speak up now if any concerns.