From OCLC:
OCLC and Internet Archive today announced the results of a year-long cooperative effort to ensure the future sustainability of purl.org.
The organizations have worked together to build a new sustainable service hosted by Internet Archive that will manage persistent URLs and sub-domain redirections for purl.org, purl.com, purl.info and purl.net.
Since its introduction by OCLC in 1995, purl.org has become a key part of the Web, providing a source of Persistent URLs (PURLs) that redirect users to the correct hosting location for documents, data and websites as they change over time.
With more than 2,500 users, including publishing and metadata organizations such as the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), purl.org has become important to the smooth functioning of the Web, data on the Web, and the Semantic Web in particular.
“We share a common belief with OCLC that what is shared on the Web should be preserved, so it makes perfect sense for us to add this important service to our set of tools and services, including the WayBack Machine, as part of our mission to promote universal access to all knowledge,” said Brewster Kahle, Founder & Digital Librarian, Internet Archive.
Lorcan Dempsey, Vice President, Membership and Research, and Chief Strategist of OCLC, welcomed the announcement as “a major step in the future sustainability and independence of this key web infrastructure. OCLC is proud to have introduced persistent URLs and purl.org in the early days of the Web and we have continued to host and support it for the last 20 years. We welcome the move of purl.org to the Internet Archive, which will help them continue to archive and preserve the world’s knowledge as it evolves.”
“We appreciate OCLC’s support of purl.org for more than 20 years, and we look forward to working with the Internet Archive moving forward”, said Stuart Sutton, DCMI Managing Director.
All previous PURL definitions have been transferred to Internet Archive and can continue to be maintained by their owners through a new web-based interface located at http://www.archive.org/services/purl. Continued sustainability, a new modern administration interface, and the removal or redirection of invalid URLs to a historical snapshot are significant improvements that both organizations welcome in this new service.
Resources
Direct to New PURL Administration Interface
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