PURL

PURL is a Persistent Uniform Resource Locator service started around 1996 by OCLC and maintained by the Internet Archive since 2016.

Stats

1996-11-27: Date of the earliest Internet Archive snapshot of purl.org.^[1]
Keith Shafer, Stuart Weibel, Erik Jul, and Jon Fausey, all of OCLC, publish “Introduction to Persistent Uniform Resource Locators” as an explanation of the function of purl.org.^[2]
2016-09-27: Operation of purl.org service handed over from OCLC to Internet Archive.^[3] purl.org redirected to purl.archive.org.

2023-04-10: I became aware of PURL both as a concept (i.e. Persistent Uniform Resource Locator) and as a specific service provided by OCLC/Internet Archive.

↑ “PURL”. (1996-11-26). purl.org. Archived from the original on 1996-11-27.
↑ Shafer, Keith, Weibel, Stuart, Jul, Erik, and Fausey, Jon. (n.d.). “Introduction to Persistent Uniform Resource Locators”. Archived from the original on 1997-12-10.
↑ “OCLC and Internet Archive work together to ensure future sustainability of Persistent URLs”. (2016-09-27).OCLC. Dublin, Ohio. Accessed on 2023-04-10. Archived from the original on 2023-02-02. “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”.}}