Report on the Handles Beta Test |
Thursday, 06 March 2008 | |
In March 2007, representatives from several GPO business units formed a team to conduct a Handles pilot project. Results of the project were to support GPO’s Federal Digital System team on its implementation of Handles. Handles, like PURLs, are persistent identifiers for Internet resources. Both PURLs and Handles resolve through an intermediary database which can be updated to reflect changes in the location of the internet resource. At the request of GPO’s Chief Information Officer, Library Services and Content Management (LSCM) staff initiated the creation of Handles in August 2007. After conducting internal (alpha) tests, an external (beta) test was announced at the Depository Library Council Conference in October 2007. The purpose of the beta test, which ended November 26, 2007, was to gauge the Federal depository library community’s response to Handles and to a range of possible naming conventions. The Handles naming conventions fell into two broad categories – intelligent (containing descriptive characteristics) and non-intelligent (containing no descriptive characteristics and created or assigned automatically). Beta Test ResultsThe test, which was conducted from October 15, 2007 through November 26, 2007, revealed the following:
Recommendations
Requirements
ConclusionThe depository community is more interested in the functionality of persistent names than the specific format utilized to create them.
|
|
Last Updated ( Thursday, 20 March 2008 ) |