[Web4lib] persistent urls- clarification

[Jonathan Gorman]

Karen,

I noticed your earlier request and thought it was a bit odd.  How are we 
supposed to provide guidance to you without knowing what OPAC software you 
use?  There are some systems that offer the ability to make urls that will 
invoke a search for the user.  I suppose you could create some proxy 
software that would act as an generic in-between, but that sounds like a 
possibly difficult path.  Does your software have session ids, caching, 
cookies, etc?  All of these could affect a generic attempt.

I'd advise checking your manual or asking a mailing list that is specific 
to your OPAC since the easiest solution is to use the existing software 
"hooks".

> What I'd like to see examples of (if such a thing even exists) would be 
> library web site pages with links that lead to search results such as 
> "videos", "dvd", etc.

I have not heard PURLs associated that much with web services as I have 
with digital objects.  The short and sweet is to give in an address that 
will always return that object.  This is a little different than a "canned 
url" of a web service that always returns a set of results.  In the first 
case, it resembles an ISBN.  Imagine browsing through the opac 
and knowing that the book you want to find is always in 2xxx.xx. 
At some point the library switches over from LC to Dewey.  If you happened 
to have the isbn scrawled somewhere you can still find 
the record (and hence the physical location).  If you have the "number" of 
the digital object, you can retrieve it even if the files have been moved 
around.

On the other hand, web services offer a "url language" that allow you to 
construct urls that will return certain results. For instance, using 
Amazon's web services you can type in a url that is always the 
same and get the top ten records that matches the search term.  These are 
typically called "canned searches" in the library world from what I've 
seen.

I could be making too much of an arbitrary distinction here.  But what you 
are describing doesn't look like purls, they look like web services/canned 
searches.  There is no standard "language" for web services across OPACs 
so you need to research what is available for your catalog.


Jonathan T. Gorman
Visiting Research Information Specialist
University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana
216 Main Library - MC522
1408 West Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801
Phone: (217) 244-4688

On Thu, 17 Nov 2005, Karen Davis wrote:

> Maybe I don't understand something, or maybe I just need to be clearer 
> in my request:
>
>
> I heard this mentioned at IL 2005, but maybe I misunderstood what was being said. To me, a persistent url is an address that, if you code it as a hyperlink, will result in a consistent product, e.g a list of all the videos in the catalog.
>
>
>
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