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GCN Home > 08/22/05 issue

It Pays to be Persistent

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

“Document Not Found.” Is there a browser message more annoying?

With its Information Bridge program, the Energy Department’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information is trying to do away with such messages. The agency is giving its research documents permanent addresses on the Web so they can always be found. Ascribing permanence in an online world is no easy feat, but it may go a long way toward minimizing “Document Not Found” messages.

The first decade of the Web was a time of fluidity for government agencies. Early adopters posted agency material, only to have it shuffled around as new IT initiatives and enterprise architectures uprooted the order of documents. These days, when someone types in an older Web address for some agency page, chances are they’ll see an error message. Equally problematic is the fact that, as copies of documents proliferate across the Web, updates go unnoticed. And these sorts of problems will only grow worse over time.

To address these concerns, Energy and other agencies are embracing the idea of “persistent identifiers,” which assign documents permanent online addresses. No matter how many changes the agency makes to its IT architecture, documents with persistent identifiers will always be accessible through the same address.

Technically, persistence is easy. It mostly involves recognizing that someone within that agency needs to manage the task. Energy maintains a set of servers that contain a list of all the assigned permanent addresses, written in the Permanent Uniform Resource Locator format. Those addresses are mapped to the current addresses where documents reside.

“In the old days, everybody relied on a report number to find a document. Now people use PURLs,” said Sharon Jordan, assistant director at OSTI in the Office of Program Integration.

So far, it has been mostly the scientific and library communities that have embraced permanent document identifiers. Eventually, all agencies may have to grapple with them.

Forever Marked
Energy’s Information Bridge program gives users the ability to search Energy research and development documents, including papers published in scientific journals as well as “gray literature,” or working papers, informal presentations and other unpublished but still pertinent material.

The material ranges the gamut of Energy research, covering physics, chemistry, materials, biology, environmental sciences, energy technologies, engineering, computer and information science, renewable energy and more. Operational since 1997, Information Bridge’s material stretches back to 1995.

More news on related topics: Software Applications, Storage Management, Content / Record Management, Web Strategies



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