OCLC and the Internet Archive today announced the results of a year-long cooperation to ensure the future of purl. The organizations have worked together to build a new service hosted by the Internet Archive that will manage the persistent URLs and sub-domain redirections for purl, purl.com and purl.net.
Since its introduction by OCLC Research in 1995, purl has provided 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 whatsapp lead metadata organizations such as Dublin Core, purl has become important to the smooth functioning of the Web, data on the Web, and the Semantic Web in particular.
Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive said “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.”
Lorcan Dempsey of OCLC welcomed the announcement as “a major step in the future sustainability and independence of this key part of the Web and linked data architectures. OCLC is proud to have introduced persistent URLs and purl in the early days of the Web and we have continued to host and support it for the last twenty years. We welcome the move of purl to the Internet Archive which will help them continue to archive and preserve the World’s knowledge as it evolves.”