robert said:
I know of one fairly prominent commercial digital library (Eighteenth Century Online) that made the decision that the issues with using page numbers as unique identifiers are sufficiently hairy that they went with sequential *image* numbers (which are unique), and the database maintains as metadata the page number that goes with each image number (which may not be unique, sequential, numerical, or even present).
and that's a perfectly reasonable fall-back position that will work in any situation where the normal system won't. (actually, most normal cases are a subset of this, where the page-number and the image-number happen to match.) after all, these are books, comprised of sheets of paper that were bound together, with a natural consequence of _being_ bound being the enforcing of a specific linearity on those sheets. as long as the filenames -- when sorted by our various tool apps -- result in that _same_ specific linearity, there will be no uncertainty. (and, since we have the power to name them, we can ensure that.) the focus on exceptions here is making too much ado about nothing. it means you're talking about the wrong things -- there are questions which _do_ need to be discussed , but this is frankly not one of them. and it also means that you're making things unnecessarily complicated, which is not surprising, since that's the jack-in-trade forte of jon noring. the right approach is _a_simple_flexibility_ that gives the right outcome. -bowerbird