Digital Author Identifier

{{short description|Unique number to all academic authors in the Netherlands as a form of authority control}}

The Digital Author Identifier (DAI) was a Dutch initiative to create an person identifier for researchers to (1) enhance linkability of scholarly communication and other types of output to a single author and (2) to disambiguate between authors with similar or even the same names.{{Cite web |last=van der Feesten |first=Maurice |title=Surfnet Wiki |url=https://wiki.surfnet.nl/display/standards/DAI |access-date=2025-02-22 |website=DAI}}

As a form of authority control, DAI was envisioned to assign a unique national id for every author active within a Dutch university, university of applied sciences, or research institute. The DAI is prepared from the ISO standard "ISNI" (International Standard Name Identifier). The DAI links the PICA database in institutional libraries with the METIS national research information system subsequently made available to international search engines. Specifically, SURFfoundation{{Cite web |title=SURFfoundation |url=http://www.surffoundation.nl/en/Pages/default.aspx |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090618101300/http://www.surffoundation.nl/en/Pages/default.aspx |archive-date=2009-06-18 |access-date=2009-07-01}} has, in cooperation with OCLC PICA,[http://www.oclc.org/uk/en/default.htm OCLC PICA] created a connection with PICA National Thesaurus Authornames (NTA) that is supplied and maintained by university libraries. Important to this is the connection between the research information system Metis[http://metis.hosting.kun.nl/metis/default.cfm?i=aboutmetis Metis] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070222011652/http://metis.hosting.kun.nl/metis/default.cfm?i=aboutmetis|date=2007-02-22}} and the repositories.