Author archives

Hi! My name is Ed Summers and this is my weirdly named website. I’m a software developer, teacher and researcher working at the intersection of libraries, archives and the World Wide Web. I’m interested in how the Web functions as a sociotechnical system, especially with regard to memory practices such as curation and preservation. I am currently working at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and am affiliated with the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. If you want to get in touch please email me at [email protected]. You can also find me on fediverse at @[email protected] and wandering Scuttlebutt as \@n2ax/dvrm+u76UhEv6aN0MzlH0Zw7o0MOd5QIHjouSw=.ed25519. Once upon a time I was on Twitter as @edsu but I don’t actively use it anymore–but you’ll see I have some bots that do. Projects This is a list of projects I’m working on at the moment. It’s not meant to be a fine grained list of tasks–I use other collaborative tools for that. It’s simply a place to write down the high level things that I’m working on, in an arbitrary order, so I can see them change over time. Webrecorder: WACZ Standardization Social Life of Web Archives (SLoWA) Documenting the Now Teaching: Data Curation, Object Oriented Programming Learning TypeScript Relearning Ruby

A bit about PURLs

Ed Summers, librarian, metadata expert, teacher, and computational expert, delivers an insighful lesson on the Persistent Uniform Resource Locator. PURLs were developed to make URLs more resilient and persistent over time. You could put a PURL into a catalog record and if the URL it pointed to needed to change you changed the redirect on the PURL server, and all the places that pointed to the PURL didn’t need to change. It was a beautifully simple idea, and has influenced other approaches like DOI and Handle. But this simplicity depends on a commitment to keeping the PURL up to date.

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Subjects: Archives, Cataloging, Digital Archives, Information Architecture, Information Management, Information Mapping, Internet Resources - Web Links, KM, Reference Resources, Search Strategies
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