Or username.courses.year.semester.wesleyan.edu will take them directly to a subfolder . These translations are elegantly done through an Apache server, so that will be our choice. These naming conventions are in line with the concept of PURL, because, what we do at the backend in terms of moving the Unix directory structures around, if needed, does not affect the URNs. The individual user will see a desktop icon called Courses. The specifics of the directory layout will be the subject of discussion with the working group.
Every year has a folder with a subfolder for the semester, and a predetermined set of other folders.
We will manage this space using the data from PeopleSoft - folders will be automatically created with the subfolders for every section that the faculty members is scheduled to teach the following semester. When several professors teach the same section, we need to figure out what to do - provide a folder to everyone, or produce a single one in the first professor's directory space and symlink others to this one. In the former case, every professor is responsible for maintaining information in their folder. This is easy to manage from the Unix side. In the latter case, just one person has to manage the content, otherwise, we have to provide access to one professor's folder to a bunch of others, which will create a Unix nightmare.