News release: “OCLC and Internet Archive today announced the results of a year-long cooperative effort to ensure the future sustainability of purl.org. The organizations have worked together to build a new sustainable service hosted by Internet Archive that will manage persistent URLs and sub-domain redirections for purl.org, purl.com, purl.info and purl.net. Since its introduction by OCLC in 1995, purl.org has become a key part of the Web, providing a source of Persistent URLs (PURLs) that redirect users to the correct hosting location for documents, data and websites as they change over time. With more than 2,500 users, including publishing and metadata organizations such as the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), purl.org has become important to the smooth functioning of the Web, data on the Web, and the Semantic Web in particular…”

“All previous PURL definitions have been transferred to Internet Archive and can continue to be maintained by their owners through a new web-based interface located at http://www.archive.org/services/purl. Continued sustainability, a new modern administration interface, and the removal or redirection of invalid URLs to a historical snapshot are significant improvements that both organizations welcome in this new service.”