Hi - This is an issue which is of great importance to persistent identifiers on the web, and one which I thought should be brought to the attention of the c4l community. It affects PURLs, ARKs, and in general any system that redirects a persistent or permanent URI to another, temporary URI. I did not, however, realize that there was active debate about it. Briefly, from [1]: 3.4 Do not treat HTTP temporary redirects as permanent redirects. The HTTP/1.1 specification [RFC2616] specifies several types of redirects. The two most common are designated by the codes 301 (permanent) and 302 or 307 (temporary): * A 301 redirect means that the resource has been moved permanently and the original requested URI is out-of-date. * A 302 or 307 redirect, on the other hand, means that the resource has a temporary URI, and the original URI is still expected to work in the future. The user should be able to bookmark, copy, or link to the original (persistent) URI or the result of a temporary redirect. Wrong: User agents usually show the user (in the user interface) the URI that is the result of a temporary (302 or 307) redirect, as they would do for a permanent (301) redirect. There is more info at [2]. You can find the email thread at [3]. best, Erik Hetzner 1. http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/NOTE-cuap-20010206#cp-temp-redir 2. http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/group/track/issues/57 3. http:[log in to unmask]