Some quick facts about the Handle System.

• There are over 1,000 handle services running today, located in 63 countries, on 6 continents; more than 750 of them are at universities and libraries.

• Handle services are being run by user federations, national libraries, national laboratories, universities, computing centers, national and local government agencies, contractors, corporations, and research groups.

• The number of prefixes, which allow users to assign handles, is growing and exceeds 212,000.

• The International DOI Foundation's implementation of handles, the DOI^® System, has over 45 million registered handles.

• There are four top-level Global Handle Registry^® servers that receive (on average) 68 million resolution requests per month. Proxy servers known to CNRI, passing requests to the system from the web, receive (on average) 50 million resolution requests per month.

• The Handle System infrastructure is supported by prefix registration and service fees. The majority of those fees come from single prefix holders, while the largest single contributor is the International DOI Foundation.

• Among the objects we know of that are identified by handles are journal articles, technical reports, books, theses and dissertations, government documents, metadata, distributed learning content, and data sets. Handles are being used in digital watermarking applications, GRID applications, repositories, and more.