Our use of PURLs is made possible by OCLC's recent release of enhanced PURL software that includes an integrated URL checker application, the ability to machine generate unique, consecutively assigned accession numbers, and a basic exceptions report module that identifies broken links. Working with OCLC, we have participated in the development of a freely available new release of OCLC's PURL software that contains features that are essential for large scale use of PURLs.
PURLs are of critical importance to our efforts to provide continued access to electronic titles.
With a PURLs server environment, which provides for easy maintenance of URLs for association with PURLs, we avoid labor intensive work associated with maintaining URLs within bibliographic records in both OCLC and our Catalog application on the Web. With PURLs, our catalogers spend most of their time producing cataloging records. Without PURLs, our catalogers would spend less time in producing records and more time in updating bibliographic records in both OCLC and our Web site. The 856 field of most records in the Web edition of The Catalog of United States Government Publications representing electronic titles posted from January 1998 through the present now contain PURLs. PURLs embedded in entries for electronic titles provide the redirect function for this application.