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Marty had researched the PURL service software second-generation implementation at OCLC; it's not yet clear how actively the project is being pursued. A February, 2008 blog post by David Wood () characterizes as the most significant improvement the typing of the URLs and the potential to combine PURL resolution with other services. Initially intended to allow returning a variety of status codes (301, 302, 303, 310, 404 and 410), the new PURL service could "combine strong identifiers with rich metadata, providing the building blocks for other semantic applications."

The conceptual design for the new PURL service also goes further to suggest an "active PURL" capable of returning an RDF graph describing a web service, either to provide a more nuanced response or to redirect to different service(s).

At the time of the meeting Marty had not been able to confirm whether the new PURL service is still actively under development. Since the meeting an email from ____ indicates it has been, but primarily as a re-implementation of the features of the original PURL service without new extensions.

It's not clear whether we could have access to the source code.

We discussed Pete Hoyt's local PURL implementation for use in assigning an actionable URL in the 856 field when cataloging records; it was not designed to scale so should not be considered a candidate for this project.

Harvard Name Resolution Service

We looked briefly at the Harvard Name Resolution Service Guide, notable for its description of an apparently complete set of administration tools. Bill questioned the continued use of URNs (as names without a specified location) the workvs. actionable URLs, but otherwise the group felt we should learn more about the implementation and availability of the source code – perhaps Dean has a contact from his recent visit to Harvard.