GPO PURL Referrals:UW-L Catalog vs PrimoMICHAEL CURRENT, UW-LA CROSSE

GOVERNMENT INFORMATION DAY, JUNE 6, 2014

What is a PURL Referral? A PURL is a Persistent URL where GPO is responsible for keeping the link working, even when the actual resource changes URL.

In doing its job, the GPO PURL server records the DNS name/IP address of the web server that a user was visiting when clicking on a PURL.

GPO makes this data available to FDLP libraries.

If you know the names/IPs of servers where your users find PURLs, you can find counts of PURL usage for your campus.

This assumes you have servers (catalog, web server) unique to your institution (issue for UWs moving to shared servers)

http://purlreferrals.fdlp.gov

Most recent 12 months here.

May need both DNS names and IP addresses.

http://purlreferrals.fdlp.gov

http://www.fdlp.gov/file-repository/collection-management/purl-referrals

Archival PURL Referral Downloads

Find (Ctrl-F) your server DNS names and/or IP address.

In this report, every unique DNS name and IP address is listed separately. Tedious to total!

The Big Question If someone were to gather recent PURL usage data across UW System catalogs, and compare that to System-wide PURL usage via Primo, we’d be able to say whether the UW move to Primo is helping or hurting the cause of advocating the use of government information on the part of the UW community. It might also tell us something about the effectiveness of “resource discovery” tools in general.