Library Cataloging
News about 856 links from LOC.
- Relying On Web Services
Recently we have had two examples of trusted resources being off line for an extended time. A few weeks ago the GPO PURL server was down for several days. This meant that thousands of links in library catalogs around the globe were broken. Now the NASA...
- Link Evaluator
Link Evaluator is a free Firefox add-on from OCLC.Link Evaluator is a Firefox extension designed to help users evaluate the availability of online resources linked to from a given Web page. When started, it automatically follows all links on the current...
- Catalogablog Rss Feed
If anyone is pointing to http://www.voidstar.com/rssify.php?url=http://www.catalogablog.blogspot.com/ please change to one of the links available on the site page. Voidstar has shut off their RSS service. I've not had that link posted for quite some...
- Urls
The article Unlocking URLs: Extensions, Shortening Options, and Other Oddities by Greg R. Notess describes some of the more obscure forms of URLs. Understanding URLs can be important; there are enough of them in our catalogs. Once we could catalog an...
- Persistent Uniform Resource Locator (purl)
I'm not sure why these never have taken off like wildfire. There is a need for a system to redirect users to the proper item on the Web. The co-operative upkeep of links saves time and ensures that the links are checked and corrected more often. The...
Library Cataloging
Links in LC Records
News about 856 links from LOC.
I've received a couple of questions recently about the 856 links in LC records for the TOCs, descriptions, bios, sample texts, etc. and wanted to spread the word about what we did.
Every month, around the first of the month, folks run their link checkers to validate the links in their copies of LC records. The volume of traffic against our web server was tremendous. A couple of times it nearly brought the server down. We tried several things to minimize the impact if it looked like a link checker was running against the web server, but this didn't seem to help the problem. In the end, we moved all of the files that are in the 856 fields to a different, larger, more robust server. Apparently this is causing link checkers to report that there is a redirect and people are asking if they need to change the URL for the links. I would say that there is no need to change the 856 links from http://www.loc.gov... to http://catdir.loc.gov.... In fact, I am still adding the URLs as http://www.loc.gov...
LC is committed to maintaining these URLs, you should not be experiencing access problems with them except when running link checkers or maybe harvesters. I appreciate any reports of wrong connections or other serious problems with the files. By my count, we have over 710,000 links in the LC catalog now, so you can see this is a major commitment for LC.
- Relying On Web Services
Recently we have had two examples of trusted resources being off line for an extended time. A few weeks ago the GPO PURL server was down for several days. This meant that thousands of links in library catalogs around the globe were broken. Now the NASA...
- Link Evaluator
Link Evaluator is a free Firefox add-on from OCLC.Link Evaluator is a Firefox extension designed to help users evaluate the availability of online resources linked to from a given Web page. When started, it automatically follows all links on the current...
- Catalogablog Rss Feed
If anyone is pointing to http://www.voidstar.com/rssify.php?url=http://www.catalogablog.blogspot.com/ please change to one of the links available on the site page. Voidstar has shut off their RSS service. I've not had that link posted for quite some...
- Urls
The article Unlocking URLs: Extensions, Shortening Options, and Other Oddities by Greg R. Notess describes some of the more obscure forms of URLs. Understanding URLs can be important; there are enough of them in our catalogs. Once we could catalog an...
- Persistent Uniform Resource Locator (purl)
I'm not sure why these never have taken off like wildfire. There is a need for a system to redirect users to the proper item on the Web. The co-operative upkeep of links saves time and ensures that the links are checked and corrected more often. The...