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Kyle, I like your approach, just not sure how best to make it happen. What I dislike about purls (of all brands) is that they hide from you some key information -- mainly, who is the maintainer of the URL. When I see http://id.loc.gov/.... I know that I'm looking at an ID maintained by LoC, and therefore I assign it a certain level of trust. When I see http://purl.org/... I don't know who I am really dealing with. I know that Kunze had a solution for this in his Ark spec, but it unfortunately isn't used. (There is a way to query the URI/URL for information about the minter/maintainer.) kc Quoting Kyle Banerjee <[log in to unmask]>: >> >> We want to use urls in our MARC records and EAD to link to content in our >> Fedora repository as well as things like web pages on our company's website. >> What are you folks using out there for this? The Handle System seems to be >> a good choice, or a purl service. I might also use it to link to Fedora >> content as well. >> >> Ideas, suggestions? >> > > I haven't found anyone who buys my take on this problem, but I'm offering it > anyway. > > IMO, persistent URLs are a lost cause and are often an outright liability. > Instead of messing with persistent URLs, the emphasis should be on > persistent identifiers. > > Here's the rub -- no amount of indirection or abstraction can alter the fact > that *people* ultimately say where things are. Purls, handles, and all other > resolution services must be told where the item actually is in order to > work. > > When this doesn't happen (and it often doesn't as I've encountered plenty of > dead purls and handles), finding the real item is that much harder because > you don't even have the original URL which can be a useful access point for > finding related materials and is even helpful for finding items that moved > elsewhere. There is also the issue that a resolution service itself is > dependent on key things that make ordinary URLs unstable such as > organizational changes. > > It's much easier to just embed a unique identifier. As a practical matter it > doesn't matter much how this is done (though there is some utility in having > a predictable URL friendly syntax). The item can move anywhere, access > becomes less dependent on specific technologies, and so long as an indexing > engine that your discovery interface can connect to has access to the item > or metadata, you're set. > > kyle > -- Karen Coyle [log in to unmask] http://kcoyle.net ph: 1-510-540-7596 m: 1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet