Are the Links Alive? : Checking URLs in the UF Online Catalog

by Lawan V. Orser, Daniel E. Cromwell and Gerardo A. Molina

Poster Session presented at the ALA 1999 Annual Conference

Abstract

This paper outlines efforts at the University of Florida (UF) Libraries to ensure that the Internet links in its online catalog are indeed active and that they lead to the intended documents. It reports the following: how URLs have become an integral part of the UF online catalog; the "Index of /urllist" provided by the Florida Center for Library Automation (FCLA); the evaluation of commercial link checkers in the market and the selection of the LinkBot software; the application of LinkBot to the URLlist to identify broken links; the manipulation of LinkBot reports to facilitate database correction by staff in different locations on campus; and analysis of the end result these efforts have produced.

The URLlists identified 5100-5400 URLs in the online catalog between November 1998 and January 1999: 70 percent were from federal documents. While the URLlist reported all URLs in the bibliographic records, the LinkBot captured only the first occurrence, disregarding duplications among processing units, and reported 4100-4200 unique URLs.

The LinkBot Broken Link reports were converted into Excel for use in database corrections. We achieved a 63 percent reduction in reported broken links in three months: from 795 on November 9 to 482 on December 7, to 296 on January 4, 1999.