>>> On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 9:09 AM, Bill Dueber <[email protected]> wrote: > 2. Should III (and others), when acting as a user agent, be such a dick?
In Innovative's defense, the URL verifier is a very limited and configurable 'robot'. - It only verifies the HTTP header response codes for the URLs in the library's records. It does not crawl, fetch or spider from there. - It can be configured by Innovative to run at different times. It can be configured to not run automatically at all. - It can be configured to not crawl URLs that match certain patterns (e.g., handle.net, purl.org, purl.access.gpo.gov) that will always return a non-200 response or are otherwise pointless to verify (e.g., loc.gov/catdir/). It's a tool that is configurable. It's the libraries' responsibility to use it wisely. I do believe that Innovative should do more to educate their users on its appropriate use and should ship it disabled by default, but that doesn't release the libraries from their ultimate responsibility. HTH, David _____________________________________________________________________ David Jones mailto:[email protected] Library Systems Manager http://www.scu.edu/library/ University Library fax: 408-551-1805 Santa Clara University phone: 408-551-7167 500 El Camino Real Santa Clara CA 95053-0500 _____________________________________________________________________ Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -- Philip K. Dick
