It's not quite the same thing, but I worked on a project a couple of years ago integrating references/citations into a learning environment (called Telstar http://www8.open.ac.uk/telstar/) , and looked at the question of how to deal with broken links from references.
We proposed a more reactive mechanism than running link checking software. This clearly has some disadvantages, but I think a major advantage is the targetting of staff time towards those links that are being used. The mechanism proposed was to add a level of redirection, with an intermediary script checking the availability of the destination URL before either: a) passing the user on to the destination b) finding the destination URL unresponsive (e.g. 404), automatically reporting the issue to library staff, and directing the user to a page explaining that the resource was not currently responding and that library staff had been informed Particularly we proposed putting the destination URL into the rft_id of an OpenURL to achieve this, but this was only because it allowed us to piggyback on existing infrastructure using a standard approach - you could do the same with a simple script, with the destination URL as a parameter (if you are really interested, we created a new Source parser in SFX to do (a) and (b) ). Because we didn't necessarily have control over the URL in the reference, we also built a table that allowed us to map broken URLs being used in the learning environment to alternative URLs so we could offer a temporary redirect while we worked with the relevant staff to get corrections made to the reference link. There's some more on this at http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/telstar/remit-toc/remit-the-open-university-approach/remit-providing-links-to-resources-from-references/6-8-3-telstar-approach/ although for some reason (my fault) this doesn't include a write up of the link checking process/code we created. Of course, this approach is in no way incompatible with regular proactive link checking. Owen Owen Stephens Owen Stephens Consulting Web: http://www.ostephens.com Email: [email protected] Telephone: 0121 288 6936 On 23 Feb 2012, at 17:02, Tod Olson wrote: > There's been some recent discussion at our site about revi(s|v)ing URL > checking in our catalog, and I was wondering if other sites have any > strategies that they have found to be effective. > > We used to run some home-grown link checking software. It fit nicely into a > shell pipeline, so it was easy to filter out sites that didn't want to be > link checked. But still the reports had too many spurious errors. And with > over a million links in the catalog, there are some issues of scale, both for > checking the links and consuming any report. > > Anyhow, if you have some system you use as part of catalog link maintenance, > or if there's some link checking software that you've had good experiences > with, or if there's some related experience you'd like to share, I'd like to > hear about it. > > Thanks, > > -Tod > > > Tod Olson <[email protected]> > Systems Librarian > University of Chicago Library
