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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 41 | October 1999


The NLA at work

PANDORA’s PURL Service to indexing and agencies

Readers of Gateways will now be familiar with the regular progress updates on PANDORA (Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources of Australia), the National Library’s initiative to ensure long-term access to Australian Internet publications.

There are currently 300 titles in the archive, many of which have been added more than once, and some of which are no longer available from the publishers’ sites. A list of titles in the archive and direct access to them is available at http://pandora.nla.gov.au/

Earlier this year, PANDORA staff became aware of the difficulties that indexing agencies are encountering with citations for online documents. To help readers gain direct access to online resources, some indexing agencies have begun to include the URL, but broken links are making the service less useful.

The National Library has offered a solution to this problem. On request from indexing agencies, it archives titles and provides a PURL for them, thus guaranteeing that links from citations in indexes and abstracts to the copy in the archive will remain permanently viable. The item will therefore remain accessible to researchers even when the title is no longer available from the publisher’s site.

This service is available to indexing agencies anywhere in the world that are indexing Australian Internet publications.

The National Library is very pleased to be able to work with indexers in this way. Subject experts in their field, they are identifying and describing online publications that have long-term research value and should be preserved in the national interest. Cooperation with them will assist the Library to enrich the content of the PANDORA Archive.

A PURL Resolver Service has been available on the Library’s Web site since 1997. It enables the creation and resolution of PURLs which are also created for all titles in the PANDORA Archive.

According to OCLC, which developed the software, ‘A PURL is a Persistent Uniform Resource Locator. Functionally, a PURL is a URL. However, instead of pointing directly to the location of an Internet resource, a PURL points to an intermediate resolution service. The PURL resolution service associates the PURL with the actual URL and returns that URL to the client. The client can then complete the URL transaction in the normal fashion. In web parlance, this is a standard HTTP redirect.’

The advantage of this is that the URL associated with a document can be changed any number of times and the researcher citing the PURL can still locate it, as long as the link between the PURL and the current URL is maintained by the publisher, library, or other responsible agent.

Information about the National Library’s PURL Resolver is available at http://purl.nla.gov.au/. For further information about the service to indexers or the PURL Resolver please contact Margaret Phillips by email at mphillip@nla.gov.au

| Contents list for this issue of Gateways |

Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: lkirwan@nla.gov.au

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