Farewell from Adam Buttrick

For a little over two years, I’ve had the honor of serving as product manager for the persistent identifier (PID) portfolio at the California Digital Library. I came to the role from a data science and machine learning background, working previously at Crossref, where I built the initial data infrastructure for ROR. This role was my first real encounter with PIDs, approaching them as a series of data engineering challenges, as I had done in prior roles in the world of museums and libraries. At CDL, I came to know them more fully, across their full life cycle, in real research and institutional workflows. My job was to support adoption and integration, and to turn community needs into features and services that people could use, both across the UC system and around the world.

For personal reasons, I’m now leaving CDL. The PID portfolio is in good hands with the UC3 team, and the work will continue.

The lesson I’ll carry with me from this time is how much PIDs are plumbing. Researchers and institutions rarely notice them until something goes awry or their metadata falls short. This makes their value both easy to understate, but also their maintenance and continued development so consequential. When PIDs work, they’re almost invisible, their value is found elsewhere. A funder easily tracks the impact of its grants, a university sees the full reach of its work, a researcher’s dataset gets reused and credited. It all looks seamless, but in reality depends on many people working tirelessly to build infrastructure that persists, connects, and carries accurate metadata forward.

Reflecting a bit on my time on the team, a few initiatives further stand out. With ROR, I helped bring the registry to maturity as the default identifier for research and funding organizations, scaling its curation processes to meet tremendous growth in demand, synthesizing and reconciling new global, multilingual data sources, and supporting its adoption at scale through automation, including things like new affiliation matching services. With the ARKs community, I guided the rebuild of its core infrastructure through to launch as modern applications and developed curation workflows to support its growing adoption. And I helped launch COMET, which aims to improve PID quality by channeling large-scale community enrichment into sources like DOI metadata, extending the model that guided ROR’s success.

One of the best parts of my role was coming to understand CDL as a truly unique place. Despite being a small team, it brings together institutions and people from around the world around a shared vision, drawing upon the capacity of the University of California to make that vision a reality. Colleagues share ambition without competing with each other and work tirelessly to support each other’s goals.

Fostering that kind of culture in the face of the many real challenges our community faces truly matters. AI is reshaping scholarly communication in ways that are still uncertain. PID adoption remains uneven around the world, and closing those gaps has become harder as institutions and infrastructure face funding pressures. Still, I’m confident CDL is equipped to adapt and lead. Its convening power, collaborative culture, and clear-eyed strategic vision are exactly what moments like these demand.

Whether in leading global stakeholder conversations about metadata enrichment or processing a single ROR curation request, I’ve seen how much the community values these services and the people behind them. It has been an honor to do this work. I’ll miss my UC3 teammates and my colleagues across all of CDL, but I can’t wait to see their continued impact.